What CS:GO Really Needs
The new game has dropped to a mixed reception. From an esports perspective it needs the following improvements
CS:GO. It’s not perfect. Not yet anyway but what ever is? It seems everyone has their own idea on what would help get it closer to that ideal. Unfortunately, for the most part, it’s utter bollocks. I mean, seriously, wall after wall of text, the non-stop virtual whining about the bounce on the molotovs, or the M4 not having a silencer anymore and why oh why can’t you just make the recoil patterns the same as <insert version of personal preference here>? People seem so hung up on fixing non-issues so they can have a closer gaming experience to previous iterations of the game that the bigger picture is obscured by a blur of shit.
Right now competitive FPS games are in the toilet because for so long stubborn communities have failed to show the same amount of flex that other groups of competitive gamers have. In most other genres sequels are welcomed and embraced before being tweaked and enhanced. Out with the old and in with the new is the general mindset. Whether it’s something inherent to the FPS genre, the skills required to excel in the game, but change is never welcomed. Counter-Strike hates Call of Duty and vice versa, while Quake laughs at both of them. Each update to each game is roundly criticised, even to the point where Source players romanticise the days pre-Orange box where 50% of bullets would simply disappear in a spray down and headshots wouldn’t count depending on the angle it occurred.
The notion that if you iron all the bugs out of the game that it’ll somehow become a phenomenon has absolutely no supporting evidence. Counter-Strike 1.6 was riddled with bugs but in the absence of “development by committee”, that seems to be expected from everything Valve produce these days, they were simply accepted as features. So much so, their absence in later versions of Counter-Strike were lamented even though they were clear flaws in the game mechanics. If the rewards are there for playing the game then people will do so and if there is a clear skill hierarchy in the game then people will want to watch the better players to improve their own game or simply to be entertained.
Updates to bigger and better competitive games, like Starcraft 2 and League of Legends, change the meta-game from tournament to tournament. Competitive Counter-Strike players by and large don’t want different nades, different maps or a different economy, even if it was then to be accepted as the norm from now until the end of time. Ban this item, nerf this gun and yawn fucking yawn. Then when the game invariably stagnates they blame the developers…
This isn’t a tirade about how all the FPS communities should unite either. In all honesty I’m not so sure we should entirely. There seems to be something fundamentally unfair and wrong about a group of people who made lots of money from an ancient game, in e-sports terms, openly rejecting every new version, deriding anyone else who plays any other game as being inferior, then retracting those statements and taking a sizeable slice of the pie when they finally admit defeat. The people that support that and somehow think it’s “great” are idiots. The same kind of idiots that point to Steam stats and say “look how the numbers are failing” when the exact same situation happened with CS:S. Nor do they acknowledge the simple fact that there will be some countries who will never play anything new en masse for obvious economic reasons.
Simply put this is a list of the things that CS:GO actually needs, sooner rather than later, if the game is to be a major e-sports title and rescue the FPS genre from a fate of its own creation. All that stuff you think is important, for the most part, can wait.
1) Access To Optimisation Console Commands
I hate console commands. I personally think a good competitive game shouldn’t have them. I have heard all the arguments about customisation and so forth but ultimately I’m of the opinion that everyone’s game should look the same, feel the same, respond the same. Unfortunately, given that the average PC is a Frankenstein’s monster of bits and pieces, different hardware responding differently to different games, and performance issues at almost every turn, on PC the need for such commands is a necessary evil.
At the moment getting 100 frames per second or more Is a real ballache on PCs that are a couple of years old, which given the game is based on an engine older than that seems odd indeed. Now, you might be in the school of “if you can’t afford a new PC, then don’t play games” but look at the other competitive titles out there and look at how they’ve done everything they possibly could to ensure they are played on shitty rigs. Most of us will have played a game of LoL with someone who took eight minutes just to connect to the server and then types “lagg” in the first teamfight as their aging PC pumps out a whopping 6 FPS… Point is though, for the most part, the game is playable. The same is true of DotA 2, which can look as good or as bad as is necessary.
With in-game ability being directly linked to frames per second and PC performance – someone playing on 100 FPS has a significant advantage over someone playing on 60 – the sooner these commands come out, the better it’s going to be for a lot of players. And while we all know there’s die-hard 1.6ers out there who will never touch it, endlessly spamming “`1.6 4 LYF” even though they themselves have played the game for two years, we also know a lot would convert if their machines would be able to handle the demand of the new game.
How many players are waiting to jump into the game as soon as they can achieve a minimum level of performance is anyone’s guess. The perception that the numbers are dwindling and the game has already “failed” is being allowed to flourish because we simply don’t know how many people have tried the game, seen their PC struggle, then continued to play whatever previous iteration they preferred. It could be a comparative handful, or it could be thousands. For those who doubt this is possible, the same happened with Counter-Strike: Source when it first came out in 2004/2005, so there’s no reason to doubt history could be repeating itself.
2) A “client” That Informs And Educates Users About The Competitive Scene
It’s all well and good ranting and raving about the need for CS:GO TV – and indeed I’ll come to that shortly – but what is the point in having a good TV client if the only people watching it will be those already aware of the competitive scene?
While we saw promising spectator numbers at DreamHack Valencia, which was a small eight team event that only two teams could potentially win, the reality is those numbers were made up of the two-three thousand who spectate CS:S, maybe a thousand people new to the whole thing and the vast majority was curious 1.6ers who wanted to see if their former heroes could still win in the new game, fuelling more delusional gibberish and 1.6 > CS:S arguments that no-one with half a brain gives a shit about any more. The question I put forward is “what happens when that novelty wears off?”
We all know that the vast majority of people who play Counter-Strike games are content to WASDA about on a public server where they paid money for a skin, camping in corridors with an AWP as they desperately try to boost their HLStats. If they know there’s a competitive scene, they don’t care about it. The two world’s don’t even co-exist… All we know is that everyone who went on to be a top competitive gamer started out as a pub scrub. What makes them change hasn’t been measured.
A large part of it, I think, is down to awareness. Back in 2005 I remember some friends telling me all about CPL and the American scene and I stayed up to watch teams like Powers Gaming compete. It was eye opening and I wanted to learn more but it was still pure chance that it happened. If I didn’t cross paths with someone already interested then I’d have had no clue it was going on and wouldn’t have known where to look.
Now we see game clients that actually direct the casual gamer to competition. Whether it’s Battlenet that effectively makes all Starcraft 2 players part of the competitive scene due to the ranking system, whether it’s RIOT’s League of Legends client telling you all about upcoming events on their tour or linking to pro player videos and interviews, or whether it’s Valve selling spectator “tickets” for big events and giving players access to an archive of top game replays in DotA 2, it undeniably makes a difference to the numbers.
Counter-Strike enthusiasts have always had an over-inflated opinion of the game’s prominence within e-sports and the reality is, while it was the premier team-based FPS game, that made it worthy of inclusion but never the top dog. History shows us that it didn’t quite hit the same heights as other games, some that aren’t even with us now, and a rich history of the game has been mostly forgotten about and barely chronicled.
If CS:GO is ever going to beat the numbers of bigger games, or even match the numbers 1.6 did, then it’s going to have to increase awareness of what events are going on, how people can watch them and maybe even, in the same way they have for DotA, Valve could help provide a secondary revenue stream for event organisers and streams to ensure higher quality in future. Until this happens, the game isn’t going to be a premier e-sports title.
3) Integrated MatchMaking System
While the recent update is some tentative towards this, it is far from what many had hoped for. Ultimately the game has to render the requirement for third party websites and software that offer mixing, pug or “pick-up game” services redundant. If that sounds harsh to the people who offer such services, again, let’s all think of the bigger picture. Would LoL be as big as it is if you had to sign up to a website or idle an IRC channel to get nine other players together for a game? No, it wouldn’t.
The reason for this is quite simple – in the age when most games now offer a MMO experience, to the point where the single player campaign is just an eight hour tutorial that prepares you for playing online, hooking up with and playing against other humans has never been easier. In the realms of competitive e-sports titles most have moved forward with this, yet Counter-Strike remains an anachronistic throwback to the first days of online gaming. This is a real turn off to a lot of gamers who know the grass is greener on the other side and, frankly, is confusing to a younger generation of gamers who don’t want to have to use three different programs just to play a match.
The Elo system is not ideal for any 5v5 game, no matter what anyone says, but in the absence of something better it’ll have to do. Once you add a genuine sense of achievement to the competitive playing experience, integrate statistics so people can identify areas of improvement and separate themselves from their fellow competitors, perhaps even have in-game awards for those who play well… All of a sudden you have a team-based FPS that actually falls in line with what every other game offers players.
And indeed, if people are exposed to a truly competitive environment – by this I mean 5v5, defuse maps, mr15, something at stake for the winners and losers – they are going to make that transition to competitive play a hell of a lot easier because they can see the players at the top doing the same thing they are, only better.
4) Unlockable Content And Customisation
This will no doubt be a reviled entry but it’s absolutely true and statistical data will prove that to be the case. Given the resistance to the inclusion of Steam Achievements in the game (like, really? You complain about that?) the idea of unlocking skins, maybe even guns, will no doubt send every Counter-Striker into an apoplexy of rage.
However, think about it… Even in the games that are recognised as being truly competitive e-sports titles by the purists there is unlockable content. DotA 2 has cosmetic alterations to heroes among other things. League of Legends allows you to unlock runes and new heroes to play. Call of Duty and Battlefield… Well, you pretty much had to unlock everything. The result? People playing hours and hours to receive new content, honing their skills in the process, and a guarantee that the game remains fresh and interesting.
Even if the content is purely cosmetic that has to be welcome. After all, whether people want to admit it or not, the idea of being “identifiable” as better than everybody else clearly appeals to the insecure gaming masses. League of Legends charge for skins and, despite the fact anyone can buy one, the perception is if you have one, you must be a good player, at least with the hero you’ve picked. People are willing to pay money for something that has no direct impact on the gameplay of the game itself.
Much in the same way that League of Legends award special skins for the players who have competed at and won their events, something similar in CS:GO would generate a sense of pride among the few players who have them and would generate questions from those who saw them. “How did you get those?” the answer to which again feeds back into raising awareness about the competitive scene, and would also play a part in eliminating all that fakenick bullshit.
More importantly than any of this though is it makes the game worth pumping all that time in to. I remember talking to an old friend and veteran competitor who said the biggest problem with Counter-Strike, the reason we were all such grumpy bastards, was that because when we won there was no reward, just a sense of relief that we’d not looked shit and weren’t going to get abused by our peers, then on to the next game. Rinse and repeat. We play to avoid losing, to be better than the next guy, nothing more, nothing less. You change that, you change the mindset of the scene and open up the game to people who actually find that aspect of it more repulsive than anything else.
5) CS:GO TV
Again, it has to happen and it has to be done right. I might have talked a lot about League of Legends a lot in this but even if you discount the other examples, they are the benchmark for spectator software right now. Their viewing tools make their client a combination of TiVo, with the ability to rewind live plays, but also condense all the information you need into a fairly straight forward GUI.
HLTV and Source TV were good for their time but are now horribly dated and the idea of basing the CS:GO TV plug-in on them sends chills down my spine. Good news then that it will be based on the TV they have in DotA 2 but still, as it stands, we’re going to see repeats of the old problems, ones that have to be overcome with our improvisation rather than good design. How many games will we watch where the manual director misses the action? Or how many times will we have to manually chop and change between two players to get the full narrative of what is actually happening?
I think in a lot of ways you judge the success of an e-sport not by how many people play it but by how many people watch it. For those numbers to be healthy you have to make it easy for the individual and you have to make it so the need for streamers isn’t required. Equally it should be the case that the person watching can understand what is happening in-game without it necessarily happening to them. For example I shouldn’t miss a five man because someone threw a flashbang – an icon on screen saying that the effects of a flash was present would more than suffice.
There’s lots to be done to make it work for sure and while this isn’t priority number one it certainly is in the top five. There’s no point in tweaking things like recoil to appease existing players – new players will take it at face value anyway. There’s no point in having endless debates over the merits of a silencer. There’s no point in spending ages comparing and contrasting it to the older versions of Counter-Strike… What we need to compare it to are the e-sports games that are succeeding right now, that are popular right now. Applying pressure to Valve and Hidden Path to make these mostly pointless changes is only going to hinder the games development long term.
You see, for all the moaning there is when a new SC2 patch comes out, or a new LoL champion comes out, for the most part the competitors get on with it. They don’t say “fuck it, I’m going back to Brood War” or “that’s me done with RIOT games until they nerf Rengar”. They carry on playing, they take it as read that changes happen and if something is imbalanced it’ll be changed back. Mostly though they support the game and the developers behind it. Perhaps the biggest change that CS:GO needs is for you all to do the same.