The Most Irritating Fanboys of 2024
This one really shouldn't be a surprise...
Past Winners
🥇 2010: The French
🥇 2011: The French
🥇 2012: 1.6 Enthusiasts
🥇 2013: Dota 2 fans
🥇 2014: Team SoloMid fans
🥇 2015: League of Legends Community
🥇 2016: Brazilian CS fans
🥇 2023: Dota 2 fans
And The Winner Is…
🥇2024: The CS2 “community”
Taking the award by a landslide this year are CS2 “fans.” Except as I see it the game simply has no actual fans, nor an actual community… Instead all that has been left is a crowd of mewling brats who have spent the first full year of the games development whining about the fact that CS2 isn’t CS:GO.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve criticized Valve for their handling of the CS2 release on multiple occasions.
Thanks Valve But Also Kinda Fuck You Too
So CS:GO is being “replaced” by Counter-Strike 2, the game whose existence I announced to the world in March. While this is simply the same type of engine update that Dota 2 went through and is one that will put the game in a better position long term, the personalities and players that were prominent in the “Global Offensive” years are feeling collecti…
They even won a Gonzo Award for it last year.
I’ve stated that they essentially released a beta without calling it that. I’ve said it was poor form to revoke access to CS:GO just because that was the easiest way to stop the skincels from complaining about their precious inventories. I’ve also pointed out that the traditional lack of communication about the game’s development doesn’t work in an era where even shitty low budget games come with a PR team and a roadmap with timescales of where the game will end up. Despite saying all those things, I am still labelled a “Valve shill” because I choose to base my complaints in reality.
The fucked up delusional world that the average CS2 player exists in is like when an acid trip goes sideways… Intense paranoia, conspiracy theories and a sense that everything around you is a threat. Nothing is real and there is nothing out there that cares enough to infuse your existence with concepts such as karma or fairness. Oh, and that creeping sense of dread? Yeah, it’s never going to stop. Ever. Not even if you strip naked and stare at yourself in a mirror for eight hours like the demons told you.
That’s where we’re at now when it comes to discourse around this game. 2024 has seen every major community hub for CS2 sharing the same provably false beliefs. “The game has been abandoned” they’ll say weeks before a massive update. “Valve don’t care” they’ll say even as Valve hires new staff to create things for CS2 so it’s not just an engine update of CS:GO. “The game is dead” others will say, ignoring the fact that CS2 remains the most played game on Steam by nearly double the peak of its nearest counterpart. “They’re all bots though… A person LARPing as a cheat coder on social media said 40% of players are bot accounts.” Do you fucking hear yourselves? Every day post after post after post of this ill-informed garbage. Dumbest of all are the “Valve don’t need to update CS2 because they make so much money from skins” spouters, an opinion so fucking dumb it doesn’t hold up to even the most basic of inquiry. Like, do you think maybe Valve would want the money-printing skins game to have a robust future so it could remain the money-printing skins game? Do you think if they don’t update the game people will do what they do in every other game since the dawn of time and get bored and go play something else?
The existence of CS2 has also led to players, many of whom clearly have less than four years of experience in the franchise, retconning how good CS:GO actually was. “It was da perfect game… Your bullets always landed.” Yeah, yeah, yeah… I used to hear that fucking nonsense about 1.6 and it wasn’t true then, but do you know a game it definitely isn’t true about. Global Fucking Offensive, a game that historically has had so many issues with bullet reg that its very name is synonymous with the game bullshitting you out of a kill. How can the term “you got CS:GO’d” exist and the game be perfect you fucking idiots? “It was perfect in its last year” is just a lie to obfuscate the reality that you don’t want to adapt to the new game which is something us oldheads have had to do with every beloved franchise from our gaming childhoods.
Also to those in the “feel like shit just want CS:GO back camp” you’re some of the most entitled, pathetic fucking children in all of gaming. Valve could have and should have made it easier for you to play that game (you still can by the way) but they’re not obligated to run servers for a game they no longer want to support. No games company does that. Not to mention some of the shit you’ve pretended to try and sell your narrative is shameful. “No left-handed model give me big bad headache waaaah” was a genuine myth being pushed by cunts who seem unaware of the fact that we know that’s not how eyes work. “I really miss Dangerzone” posts from people who never fucking played it besides on the day it launched. “My favourite skin isn’t as shiny on this engine” from the biggest losers roaming the Earth.
The mad part is you’re going to get all of that stuff back eventually and Valve have consistently updated the game at a rate that is comparable to or even exceeds CS:GO. That’s the abandoned game they don’t care about right there. Do you really think Valve aren’t going to put stuff back? Do you really think it’s as easy as copy paste on an entirely new fucking engine that has staff learning the intricacies of said new engine as they’re going along?
In the past I’ve also gone into exhausting the discourse around cheating in this particular game has become. Does CS2 have cheaters in it? Yes, by virtue of being a competitive online game that will certainly always be the case. Is it by far the worst example? Absolutely not in a world where games like PUBG and Escape From Tarkov exist. The truth is that because of how the game is experienced subjectively and how intuition-based skills like prefire play into being good at the game you are going to see things your brain can’t process as human on your screen. CS players haven’t been able to grasp this for as long as I’ve been playing it. It’s far easier to just believe that someone is always cheating… If you need to explain why they’re bad for the next ten rounds you just say, “they’re toggling it on and off as needed” or “they’re legit hacking.” CS players can never accept being owned. Everyone is better than they actually are and if someone beats you they’re probably a hacker. It’s just the CS code. What this has led to in the CS2 era is a world where players are convinced that there’s a high-level saturation of cheaters at lower ranks even though that doesn’t make any logical sense whatsoever. It remains true that there aren’t cheaters in every game you play, unless you’re maybe in the tiny fraction of players in the top of Premier. It remains true that competitors like Valorant have not solved the cheating issue. Their greatest trick was simply denying players the tools to spot cheaters. It remains true that if you get absolutely wrecked by another player in the game the chances are they’re just better. And no, they don’t even have to be a smurf… MMR works by better players climbing through lower ranks. The odds are that is what is happening.
If you ever need a go to example of why the CS2 fans got the award this year let me tell you the tale of the Deadlock Frog. For a time the go-to dumb thing to say for CS players was “Valve have abandoned CS2 to develop Deadlock” because it’s not like Valve famously do multiple projects at once or anything. Anyway, one of their experiments with their newest game was if a player was detected cheating the other players were given the option to either ban them immediately or to turn the player into a giant frog with no abilities and get clowned on for the rest of the match. This is the type of dumb story that goes viral, so it was posted on every major games website. Naturally the CS2 subreddit noticed and we got this thread that stated, “CS really is the child they resent.”
Why is this statement totally fucking moronic? Well, it’s not that they made some super effective anti-cheat for Deadlock they’re denying CS2. It’s just a different form of implementing punishments. The cheats still have to be detected and there’s no statistical data to suggest that the anti-cheat in Deadlock detects more efficiently than VAC in CS2. In other words, it’s the equivalent of keeping VAC as is but instead of banning players in CS2 you can vote to turn them into a chicken first. That’s it. Oh, but the gnashing and crying because CS fans have universally become idiots that don’t even want to play the game and instead would rather complain about how the game isn’t worth playing. If you need any proof if it’s a total scrub opinion here’s The Score Esports repeating it in a video… The exact quote is “Valve gave the game they haven’t even announced yet a working anti-cheat the day before their skin addicted child CS2’s first birthday, something that players have been begging, and I mean begging, for since it came out.”
The current crop of enthusiasts the game has are everything that is wrong with gaming communities at large… The bulk of the CS2 fanbase is an entitled, uninformed cheapskate, utterly convinced that they deserve more than they’re getting and that Valve are the worst of all the major games developers. They wouldn’t have lasted back in the days when we had to fix the game ourselves by creating plug-ins and configs and dozens of other workarounds to make the game what we wanted it to be. We didn’t spend all day crying on forums about Valve. We just built shit and focused on what was good.
A final point. Of course, any community can criticize the creators of the thing they built their community around. Valve are not a flawless entity. However, if there’s one thing that will drive away any desire to engage with you or indeed any desire to continue to work on the game, it is an endless slew of unjustified harassment and false claims aimed at the people trying to make the very thing you claim to care about. Personally, after the shit I read in 2024 I’d forgive Valve for abandoning the game entirely. Hopefully in 2025 the critique can be more proportionate.
People who bitch about Valve relentlessly have no sense of reality. They could be like an EA and not give a solitary shit. Shows that if you give an inch plebs will take a mile
The concept of peekers advantage is lost on so many CS2 players.