Holy Roster moves batman

Yesterday I was having a good day, farming reddit karma, watching ESPN and after a good day of CSGO I go to sleep. Everything was fine: New update in a few weeks, teams are stable, it looks like some organizations are growing in interest to sponsoring a CSGO team.

Then today happened. AND EVERYTHING EXPLODED.

It all started Virtus.pro, a team which hasn't really had a great CS team since 2007, releasing their extremely competitive CSGO team. The apparent reason was the fact that it looked like they had a new team all lined up and VP was not part of it. Not really big news, eastern European teams change lineups a lot and teams decided to stop sponsoring games all time. Not a big deal right?

But then I checked my facebook and saw that Poland's golden five - a team which won 2 ESWC, 2 IEM and 2 WCG championships - was disbanding. Given their lackluster results recently you could probably think, rightfully, that they were just retiring. However it appears that only Loord whose skills have been declining steadily for at least 3 years, was retiring. This means that NEO, the second best player of all time, Taz, one of the greatest tacticians in CS history, kuben, a steady rifle who is a super star in his own right, and pasza, one of the up and coming talents out of Poland, are all on the market now.

That should be enough for one day? Wrong. HLTV.org then reported that Markeloff, the superstar awp of Ukrainian Na'Vi, was leaving the team with one waiting for him to join. The team that swept 2010 and won back2back IEM championships are now left with 4 players after switching to CSGO and having mediocre results.

"What team is waiting for Markeloff to join" you ask. The former VP lineup. The only players not represented in this new team are Kucher, who has been the best Ukrainian not on Na'vi, and Guardian, the Slovenian player who was recruited to add an awp to the lineup.

However that roster move isn't quite done yet as Virtus.Pro states that they still have the team they just released under contract and the reason for the team's shutdown was due to the players not fulfilling contractual obligations.  That means that 6 of the best players in CSGO can't even play until at least the end of the year, unless they come to an agreement with VP on what to do. Furthermore Fox have denied all the claims made against him and his team by the VP organization and retorted that VP did not do all of the things that they promised as well.

Here are the tentative rosters:

Golden five:
Kuben
Neo
pasza
taz

Ex-Virtus.Pro:
Markeloff
Ange1
Dosia
Fox
Adren

Na'Vi:
Ceh9
Zeus
Starix
Edward

FA:
Kucher
Guardian

Fantasy land/might happen rosters:

Na'VI:
Cheh9
Zeus
Starix
Edward
Guardian

ESC/Whatever their sponsor is:
Kuben
Neo
Pasza
taz
Kucher

The Na'vi Lineup seems more reasonable - replacing one elite level awper with another. Won't be the same though, but it makes sense and addresses their need. Plus they must share the language since Na'Vi speaks Russian as well as ukrainian and Guardian just played for a Russian team.

The ESC/Whatever lineup is to nice and tidy. I think they'll probably disband permanently. I think taz, pasza and neo will probably continue playing and Kuben will retire leaving Kucher still on the market. So that "golden trio" will make an international team as they just had great success with on recently and still have the talent to play at the top level of CS.

Hopeful future

It's not everyday that I get to be pretty positive about eSports, and counter-strike in particular. In the last year the whole CS scene basically collapsed - with only 2 real tournaments in the whole year so far. To put it in perspective, we had roughly 6 by this time last year. And we had an equal number coming up in the second half. Plus the online leagues and smaller tournaments around the world. However with CSGO coming out it seems that things have actually gone better than i ever expected them to - i had made relatively arrogant comments on twitter to pus, thorin and lurppis about how half of the 1.6 community would switch and all the tournaments would too etc etc etc. But damn even more than have seemed to.

So lets recap what's happened in the last month and a half:

• Almost every single professional north american team's players are playing CSGO in ESEA and it looks like the interest is there at both the midlevel and the lower level of competition
• ESWC's NA tournament is HUGE, featuring over 700 teams
• ESL's Go4CSGO cup has a pretty solid attendance of 30+ teams ever week with several thousand(even 10-15K on one of the finals that I watched) watching the stream
• EPS germany(the premier tournament in germany AND the flagship of ESL's online leagues) has switched to CSGO
• NiP, with heaton at the helm, is back featuring 3 1.6ers(including 2 of the best ever, f0rest and get_right) and 2 source kids.
• It looks like the golden 5 are going all in with CSGO
• Fnatic appears to be switching as cArn as stated that they will be "playing multiple CS titles"
• Two CoD teams have switched, holdmouse1 in NA and kola eSports in EU
• Natu is switching with a finnish team
• Dignitas, EG and coL have all shown various levels of interest in CSGO - with dignitas being the most interested in picking up a team
• Almost every source team is switching or will be switching in the near future
• It appears that most of the 1.6 community seems receptive to CSGO and have seen the changes in recent patches as major steps in the right direction in terms of competition
• Dreamhack will feature a CSGO tournament
• Numerous top level pros are streaming
• Numerous top level pros are tweeting
• HLTV's news feed is mostly CSGO related
• r/global offensive is gaining thousands of subs - going from 4 thousand last week to over 7 thousand this week.
• CSGO's recent patches have made the game better than ever
• CSGO is the most popular version of CS on steam
• Volcano's de_nuke_ve shows how fast the community can create better versions of the map than valve can

However i can't feel like some minor slights and problems with CSGO

• When asked about FPS games both sundance of MLG and david ting of IPL have shown more interests or outright confirmed little to no interest in CSGO
• IEM have shown no interest in CSGO
• Matchmaking still sucks in CSGO
• not a lot of people are really watching CSGO streams despite the fact that more people are streaming CS than ever before
• The clan matches which were supposed to be in CSGO appear not to be occuring
• The spectating tools have not been implemented, although the CSGO developers have stated that they  were waiting on DoTA2's spectating client to base thiers off of
• The major content providers in the beta, corey dunn, whisenhunt and ESEAnews have slowed significantly - essentially slowing the growth of CSGO's personality/content creation growth.
• the game still doesn't have a silencer(LOOK AND ME AND MY NITPICKINESS)
• Matchmaking doesn't make use of the _se versions of the map and volcano's _ve version of nuke

It looks like a major mixed bag. Mostly good, yes, but without one of the two major tournament circuits in north america(IPL or MLG) or the many houses that CS built(IEM, WCG) picking up the game,  I seriously doubt that CSGO will get the coverage or the respect that it should in the higher echelons of eSports. No matter how good a game is(as seen in quake live), if people don't watch it it won't last. Furthermore it looks like some of the problems of CS's past might come back stronger than ever now if we dont' fix them immediately, but that's a topic for another time. 

Sandwich patch notes

Years after the sequel to the original delicious sandwich the next installment of the franchise that has sold over 25 billion copies receives it's 3rd installment; CHEESESTEAK SANDWICH.

Cheesesteak sandwich v1:
-meat is shit
-the spread is vomit
-the cheese is snot
-the bread is old and moldy

cheeseteak sanwich v1.01:
-shit is changed to 3 month old meat
-vomit is toned downed
-snot cheese is toned down
-Changed bread value from old and moldy to stale

cheesesteak sandwich v1.02
-meat changed to month old meat
-vomit changed to mayonnaise in the back of refrigrator
-snot cheese toned down

Cheesesteak sandwich v1.03
-meat changed to 3 week old meat
-Mayonnaise changed to old mayonnaise
-snot changed to hard american cheese
-stale bread changed to 3 day old bread

cheesesteak sandwich v1.04
-Bread changed to day old bread
-meat changed to week old meat
-american cheese made relatively fresh
-mayonnaise changed to right before expiration date mayonnaise

GOAL:
-Fresh sandwich roll
-nice spread
-delicious carmelized onions
-diced steak
-american cheese perfectly melted

Hopefully it'll get there...but right now it's not looking great.

Map balance part 3

So here's the thing I've wanted to talk about for a while but I haven't mainly because it's really hard to explain. 

 So when you're looking at DE nuke there is only a few areas you need to look at. The "ramp room" which leads to the lower bombsite and there is the "outside" area at the very bottom of the screen which leads to the upper bombsite. The middle area of the map is the lobby and it leads to ramp and to the upper bombsite through a "hut" or a "squeaky" door and through a "radio" room. The CT's lead tot he same places, only their have an upper view of the hut which is directly in front of their spawn and a big garage which looks at outside and squeaky.

Only that's not it. There's also a second entry point for the lower bombsite. It's behind the big garage. now i couldn't find a real overview which properly displays this but the overview below shows it relatively effectively in their bottom lefhand corner. It isn't to scale but it does the job.

This is the biggest change from CS1.6 and CS:S to CSGO. They completely drop that route. Now the argument for it was that that pathway wasn't used so why even have it in the game?

They removed the stairs and they removed to "green mile", the fake bombsite and the second tunnel on lower. They still have the control room which allows for a bit of diversity on bonmbsite coverage for the T's or CT's to hold.

That being said the unforeseen consequence for us CS players, something that valve probably didn't really think about. By taking away that pathway and the second doorway on lower it makes the lower bombsite  infinitely harder to play AND makes it infinitely hard to take. Instead of 2 or 3 viable ways to get to that bombsite there is only one: ramp. This makes radio room AND lobby a death trap because the CT's can just run up on the T's. and the outside can only funnel into the minigarage connector to A. So it's all rushes and all  death for the T's instead of them being able to control the pace and abuse the multitude of pathways that the T's have to take outside.

Basically they made a map which was already NOTORIOUSLY CT sided EVEN MORE CT SIDED.

map balance part 2

So now i'm going to touch on two maps which have not been touched much from their layouts and map designs outside of cosmetics and some minor changes in between the games - dust2 and inferno.( I haven't forgotten about de_Nuke but that'll be touched on in the near future). 

INFERNO:

 de_inferno is considered one of the most balanced maps in the history of counter-strike mainly due to the equal times it would take from A bombsite and the B bombsite for BOTH teams. Where de_train had fast times of rotation from outer to inner for the counter-terrorists than it would with the terrorists,  the times of rotations for the CT, specifically from apartments to B-bombsites and vice versa, can be relatively long but overall it's a pretty fast rotate for the players of archway on both sites. The terrorist path of rotation from alt mid or apartments to banana and vice versa, are equally long. Furthermore 2 areas of the map, mid and banana, are easy paths to cut off for either side if they attempt to abuse that path of rotation.

On CSGO little has changed outside of a few minor changes - most notably the constricted pathways for apartments and banana - the map's layout has not changed much. This is GOOD. By not really changing much of the map the balance of the map should not have swayed too much. While i could make a big stink over the placing of the fountain in the B bombsite, having a construction site where L-halls was or the fast rotation path from CT archways to B from my play through these things have not really changed much from one version of CS to another. This allows for the metagame to change very little and the strategies and tactics should be applicable from one game to the other

DUST2:

dust2 is THE iconic map of counter-strike. Where most people who have played halo will know wizard or warlock, quake will know DM6 and starcraft will have played a game on lost temple CS is the cs communities map. IT goes without saying that this map will not be changed much, if at all.

That does not mean this is a perfectly balanced map as, with the exception of long A, every single pathway on the map is easily accessible by the terrorists, and not for the counter-terrorists. The map has a middle area which is connected to every since pathway and there are more entry point for the terrorist side to this area than there are for the counter-terrorists. However the benefits of this are marginal as a strong CT side could be dominate their half and win it outright. However for the most part this goes in the way of the terrorists however slightly(IE 9-6, 8-7, 10-5 for the T's).

Similar thing to inferno, while there have been some minor changes(the big box in middle is slightly shorter and makes it able to be jumped on it and then ton cat walk, the boxes on lower can be jumped onto etc) for the most part the overall format and layout remains unchanged. This allow, like inferno, for the same strategies, the same tactics, the same metagame to transfer over and from the recent CSGO tournament in Copenhagen it appears that the T sided nature has been toned down a bit, but that could be more the player than the map. 

Overall these 2 maps display the old saying "if it aint broke, don't fix it." Most people, outside of the hardcore gamers who play this game for a decade like myself, will not notice these changes and most people will not even care - and for the most part these changes do not really hurt the game as a whole.