The Appropriately Mediocre Send Off For CS:GO

The major in Paris was fine, which is about where the bar is set for esports these days.

The Paris CS:GO Major is over and with it came the usual inundation of fairweather fans sharing their observations about the tournament. “This was the best major ever” said those who were watching their second. “It had the best crowd ever” “with the best broadcast” “yes, CS:GO really is the best especially when it’s at its best like this,” “what a send-off…” This is the typical euphoria that dominates “community” sentiment for about 48 hours at which point they will promptly go back to recreational outrage about ten year old tweets or whatever else they usually fill the time with. What a send-off indeed…

First, right out the gate let me say I don’t even buy the angle of it being some kind of farewell to CS:GO. No, that was just a lazy marketing angle because, if we’re honest, the competitive scene is so stagnant we are running out of interesting things to say. The fact that everyone seemed to be falling over themselves to give gushing eulogies to the game when we’re a week away from IEM Dallas is in keeping with the type of stupidity that has become frighteningly routine in this business. I don’t know what people’s expectations are for when the GO switch is eventually turned off and the 2 button activated but in reality initially very little will change. What we will get is a modest game patch with future-proof branding and unless we can get ourselves some dev whisperers in our ranks most of the same problems will be carried over. The awful in-game economy that has turned one of the most exciting esports into the equivalent of test cricket. The map pool that has stripped away classics like de_train in favour of de_vertigo, a map so dull and formulaic in practice it should be renamed to de_javu. The same teams, burned out from the endless low stakes matches in their pseudo-franchise leagues, will be in attendance serving up mistake-heavy, clumsy Counter-Strike that wouldn’t have passed muster at the game’s peak. So yeah, when you look at it like that, it’s almost a shame that it isn’t a real farewell.

Anyway, I watched the BLAST’s contribution to the game’s rich history these past few weeks and was left feeling not much at all. Their regular tournament series is known for having some of the best and most innovative production in the space that is only hampered by a dreadful format. That high production bar was still here for the most part, a few minor technical issues aside but gone was the innovation. No, most of that energy had been placed into BLAST.tv, their propriety media player with integrated UI. It’s good. The player worked, the numbers come up when you click on things and if you sign up you get additional content. It is what it is and it’s clear that BLAST recognise the wisdom in becoming not just a tournament operator but also a media hub. Still, I would have liked to see something NEW at the major. It can’t just be enough that everything worked.

I sensed what we were in for before a single virtual shot had even been fired. The build up to this major had been especially insufferable with everyone trying to synthesize some heightened sense of significance for the event. The qualifiers had seen a number of pretty underwhelming teams make it to Paris, which would be fine if it wasn’t the result of an absolutely dreadful format that we’ve slowly tweaked to get worse over time. Then came the whining over the delay for the viewer pass and all the usual attention seekers trying to get free engagement by pretending they had insight into when they’d arrive. The CEO of NiP even joked “there will be no stickers for the upcoming major” before walking it back once he’d got the attention he definitely didn’t want.

On an unrelated note the “Pickems” themselves have become a good thing spoiled. Conceived as a way to share predictions and raise some stakes for the games without encouraging gambling they ended up becoming a much too talked about feature. “These are MY pickems” the idiot types as he posts a screenshot of the same choices almost everyone else made. Popular forums become mostly unusable, flooded with this meaningless garbage… Those who work in Counter-Strike reap the rewards of free traffic by posting videos but of course it comes with the downside of if you cannot accurately predict the future you will forever be branded a “Bronze Coiner” and any expertise you offer will be dismissed. I’m not joking when I say I’ve seen these cretins suggest that members of the analysis desk shouldn’t be hired if they achieve any less than diamond. Well, after Paris it turns out only 0.3% of pickem players achieved diamond so that makes you all clueless idiots. Now so you can shut the fuck up. Thanks.

Then the player stickers arrived. Gone were the classy and elegant autographs of days gone by and instead they have been replaced by overly stylised, meme-heavy “signatures” that aren’t even created by the players. Players referenced their favourite anime or entirely lifted other people’s intellectual property. Others worked in the word “sex” (hehe) or drew a pair of breasts. All of this in the pursuit of having the most popular sticker in the game, despite there being absolutely no financial incentive for that. Naturally the new wave of esports fans lapped it up and sore they were the best stickers ever even though it comes at the cost at making the average competitor look like an undersocialised teenager. What was all the more perplexing was Valve had specifically stated to organisations that tney would be enforcing stricter rules around team logo submissions and rejecting designs that were not the logo used in all other branding. 

hehe

I can only speculate as to why Valve, who had objected to such juvenile approaches to signature submissions in the past, acquiesced this time but there’s only two plausible explanations. The first is that Valve have never really been fond of esports organisations to begin with, bafflingly believing that players would get out of bed to grind the game for two chances at sticker money a year. As such, fuck you to the orgs but hey you players can submit a snake with a bell-end for a head and six hairy tits on its back just so much as it includes a single recognisable letter from the alphabet. The second and most plausible option is they were simply inundated with too many fucking stupid designs and with time running out they just do what we all have to do when it comes to the whims of players and shrug our shoulders and say “fuck it, OK I guess.”

Now the sticker stuff is a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. What kills almost any chance you have of a major being a legitimate world championships is the format. I’ve ranted into the void about this and the void has simply whispered back “just win your games lol” so here’s a very brief summary. The qualifier seeding is utterly fucked because we cannot use a conventional ranking system due to the fact that 90% of the calendar is closed off to teams who didn’t have the millions in the bank when ESL and BLAST created their new look circuits. In short a team like Bad News Eagles will always be limited in how high they can climb and a team like Evil Geniuses can only drop so far because they are afforded regular opportunities to embarrass themselves on the biggest stage because they paid for that humiliation. So the compromise is that we take the seeding from the previous major, which typically happened six months ago. In esports that’s an eternity so the seeding isn’t ever going to be a current reflection of the lay of the land.

Add to that to save time we play the first two rounds as a single map meaning that you end up fighting for your tournament life in a single best of three, which in CS is the optimal way to measure which team is better. So you can be the best team in the world now but because you weren’t six months ago you get a very unfavourable bo1, which then becomes another unfavourable bo1 if you lose and now you have to win 3 best of threes to stay in the tournament and get another unfavourable seeding in the next round. It’s chaos and it starts at the qualifiers before happening again at the major proper so it lends itself to bigger teams dropping out. Given that the principle purpose of a seeding and a format is to reward the better teams so they meet later in the tournament as a reward for sustained excellence prior to the tournament, the CS Major format is an unmitigated disaster.

Look at these examples and tell me honestly that something isn’t wrong. I will list some teams and the world ranking of the opposition they beat to get to the Major. Apeks (31^st) won bo3s against Sprout (44^th) B8 (42^nd). They got to go to the Challengers stage. Into The Breach (52^nd) won a single bo3 against B8 (42^nd) and due to their bo1 victories got to go straight to the Legends stage. FaZe (2^nd), who had just won an Intel Grand Slam, won both their bo1s and then lost to Na’Vi (4^th), Bad News Eagles (20^th) and Mouz (10^th) throwing them into the last chance qualifier where they played and beat Aurora (34^th) and Cloud9 (5^th). For that they get to the same stage of the tournament as Apeks. Faze then got the world’s number one team, Heroic, in a bo1 to kick off their major campaign.

If this doesn’t convince you something is wrong then let’s look at the final run of the tournament winners Vitality. It’s hard not to be embarrassed for them because sure, you won a major and that’s great and all but you did it by beating Monte, Into The Breach, Apeks and GamerLegion all of whom were outside of the top 30 teams in the world when the qualifier cycle kicked off. I’m more than aware that we did bo1s at the great majors of days gone by but that at least was in a much more robust system that meant you couldn’t swerve real competition. When Luminosity won in 2016 they still had to go through Virtus Pro, Team Liquid and Na’Vi all of whom were potential winners and were ranked in a very competitive top 15.

Now none of this is to say that these supposed bigger teams are covering themselves in glory. They certainly aren’t. The main tournament circuit has become little more than an endless stream of contractual obligations for partner teams to meet. Winning is great but less important when there’s another near identical competition next week. The only thing that even ties together the scene right now, because the majors certainly don’t, is the Intel Extreme Grand Masters and you have to wonder how much longer they’ll want to pump millions into a scene where competitions rarely live up to their billing. If we overcome the visa problems – remember when these were meant to be a thing of the past because esports has MADE IT – players now seem to come and go as they please and tournaments now take place with so many stand-ins as to render the results meaningless. I’m glad that we now live in a time where players can actually get time off to spend with their families or work on mental health but the argument you cannot make is that it’s good for competition.

Jubilant scenes as Vitality topple the powerhouse of GamerLegion

And that’s not the only thing making these teams soft. They play in a complete consequence vacuum where the only difference between winning and losing matches is the check at the end, hardly a strong motivator for a player on between $20k and $50k a month. This has created an environment where many of the top teams lack hunger but are also simultaneously burned out and we saw that at this major, no matter what anyone else tries to claim. The sheer number of elementary mistakes top level professionals were making was an embarrassment and it’s clear that in terms of game quality we’ve gone backwards since the Covid fuelled “online era.” Naturally the fans don’t want to hear it but the reality is this – the higher ranked team didn’t go out because these underdogs have suddenly cracked the CS code. The underdogs won by doing the basics better than the teams who have been lulled into laziness by the partnered leagues that have killed the cutthroat competitive environment CS used to thrive on.

BLAST of course can’t be blamed for the teams being small or the games being bad. There I have some sympathy. These things are beyond any tournament operators control. What isn’t is the broadcast and as previously stated it was fine, more boiled chicken breast than tomahawk ribeye, and it was functionally indistinguishable from any other tournament on the calendar. I’m not sure when we accepted the majors becoming so bland but most of the ones I worked on had so much effort put into content pieces and the run of show was one that never stood still. You’d be at the desk, then out in the crowd, on to the stage, then behind the stage, back to the desk and then here’s a 10 minute featurette about one of the players you’re about to see. The manic energy helped sell the excitement. There hasn’t been anything like that for some time. The features we do get are just glorified interviews done with the player days before the tournament starts and then hastily cobbled together in time to fill some otherwise dead air.

Exit interviews are an art-form unto themselves and this broadcast proved that beyond doubt. Throwing a commentator in at the deep end for the first to do the most scrutinised type of interview we have was both insane and unfair. Still, he wasn’t even the worst offender with a supposedly seasoned interviewer bumbling through and telling freshly eliminated competitors to have a “great, great day.” As gaffes go it’s a few down from asking the recently bereaved if they are OK, but it’s still up there.

Show concepts too were hit and miss. While something like the Mahone Zone is an evolution of the type of analysis segment that really should be a standard part of any broadcast, the decision to have Jake Lucky do the “Overtime Show” is even more mind boggling after having seen it. The hiring of a man whose claim to fame in CS:GO is falsely accusing a player of having an affair on his wife after a Twitter argument would always raise eyebrows but having seen the work… Well, he’s still got all those Twitter followers I guess. On the first day he was dug out of a hole by the consummate professional Jason “moses” O’Toole who stopped Lucky from asking one of the best players in the world the same question three times. The next day saw him introduce somebody incorrectly and then devolve into talking about how everyone should know he hates bananas or something. He even got to close the whole broadcast, which about sums it all up really.

It’d be remiss of me if I didn’t mention the trophy. Ye fucking gods it’s the worst I’ve seen in two decades working in this circus but what makes it worse is the fact they even used some of their limited time and budget to make a documentary explaining to us why it was genius. It looked cheap and tacky, like something you could bang out on a 3D printer and it was about the same size as a mildly adventurous butt-plug. The general public picked the Nickelodeon colour scheme, in keeping with the average mental age of the esports fan, but seeing a team in jubilation hold up something so comically bad is so jarring it actually looks like it was photoshopped in.

Sad to see the grandest of esports in such a state but it’s the sign of the times. The online era of esports proved beyond doubt that you can serve up fast food esports to the masses so that’s what you’ll get from those who don’t sell out to the oil barons and probably from those who do as well. C'est la vie