When asking yourself whether or not you would like to pay to play in CAL, you must ask yourself in a strict and objective manner. Do not question yourself in a poll such as, "Do you think it is right to pay to play in CAL?” The correct manner of asking yourself is, "Would I give up and quit CAL if they implemented a payment system, or would I 'break the bank' and throw in a couple dollars in order to improve my beloved profession and hobby?" When asking yourself in this manner, you are faced with the reality of what you would do if CAL did in fact implement this system. If you do opt to “break the bank” and stay in CAL, registration for a single season of CAL should be about $10. If that seems a bit steep, even $5 would go a long way. If you're already shaking your head in disagreement about how much money you'd be wasting on playing in CAL and paying for Counter-Strike, think about some other factors. Have you ever spent money on a mouse pad? How about a mouse? Maybe even a keyboard? How about new monitor? What about more RAM? A faster video card or processor? Maybe you just bought an entire computer? Maybe a broadband Internet connection? What about your own personal gaming server? Plane ticket to a LAN tourney? CPL? BYOC ticket? Not to mention all the food money, hotel costs, and other miscellaneous costs that it takes just to be able to travel anywhere. When you get down to it, we all have spent an enormous amount of money JUST to play Counter-Strike. Well, paying for CAL is the difference in cost between choosing 2nd day air and UPS ground for something as simple as any one of the items you've bought to play Counter-Strike. CAL isn't a money-grabbing, greedy, huge corporation that designs million dollar campaigns and slogans just to open our wallets and feed their hunger; this is CAL, who at this point NEEDS our support in order to provide PURPOSE in their work. With purpose and dedication, our purpose and reason to continue to play competitively would improve.

Now, let’s look at the economic figures. Each player paying just this small amount would bring in between $100,000 and $200,000 each season for the Counter-Strike division alone. Hypothetically, if every CAL participant paid to play in CAL (which are about 300,000 registered people), this would bring in about $3,000,000 in total revenue. This is an absolutely astounding number. Imagine what CAL could do with such a large sum of money. Instead of having servers provided by incompetent server companies, they could purchase their own servers so we could actually play on excellent league servers. CAL could pay each admin even $1000 dollars or more each season to give them motivation, purpose, and time requirements that would force them to answer and take care of complaints. After all, it would be their job. If you are worried about the rampant cheating that would take place, think again with all the money CAL could disperse. CAL could pay an entire crew of admins for the sole purpose of trying to catch cheaters. This system would have its own informal checks and balances. Because CAL would grow and be covered immensely, the individual teams would become much more important. With more eyes on the teams, there are more eyes on the players, and inevitably, more eyes open to cheaters. A team making its way through a division easily would have many more people trying to decipher whether or not the team is cheating. After all, if you were playing for thousands of dollars and were speculating on the fact the opposition was using an unfair advantage, I'm sure you would investigate, too. With the stakes raised, there are also more checks and balances. For the people that would enjoy cheating, they would also be taking a risk with their CAL subscription. If they broke the rules and were suspended or expelled, their seasonal subscription would also be lost and wasted. This falls across the board for rule breakers or people that want to join multiple teams on multiple accounts. Each account would cost additional funds, and you would take a rather large risk of getting caught and having all of your accounts banned. A team would also be much more likely to stick together, as a financial bond is always a strong one in the real world. Last but not least, CAL bringing in so much revenue could in fact help to develop better anti-cheat software. In all aspects, problems could be worked out and conditions could be improved. There would not be any dead ends.

Most importantly, though, CAL would have the opportunity to give out huge prizes for top placing teams. With $200,000 dollars in the bank, and spending of only about $50,000 each season, there would be as much as $150,000 left up for prizes—and that’s just for the Counter-Strike division. Based on the ratio of what division and game brought in the most revenue, CAL could potentially spend almost a million dollars on Counter-Strike alone and still have a couple million left over for the league and the other games. Instead of $150,000 left over for prizes, we could be talking about $800,000. CAL could be 8 times larger than the CPL. Brand new top of the line computers would only cost CAL about $10,000 to give to an entire team, and buying them in bulk would give even lower prices. Imagine how much CAL could give back to the winning teams in ALL divisions. The top five placing teams in each division could win new computers or huge cash prizes, the next top two could win brand new video cards, and the next two could win brand new processors and motherboards. The combinations are absolutely endless. Imagine for how much more we would be competing in CAL. CAL itself would become a business much like the CPL is. They could even have about four seasons a year. You would have four excellent opportunities to win top-of-the-line products, which are worth real money, for only 5 or 10 bucks a season. You would be receiving much better support, better servers, and CAL could even pay league writers to cover the divisions much more thoroughly. If the staff were getting paid, the structure of the league would improve instantly, along with the gamers. GotFrag and CAL could even team up. Perhaps if you pay for a season of CAL, you would get a free trial Prime membership or other features. I'm just speculating on all the things that could be done, but it would indefinitely help out the community. It would give purpose to playing online and practicing more than just for the biannual CPL events. There could potentially be CPL tournaments every month, along with chances to win large amounts of cash by playing online, along with huge sponsors that are riding the good teams because of so much opportunity. The entire community and scene would literally explode. This would be the future of making Counter-Strike a real eSport—a professional community that can earn real livings. It has to start by fixing these problems. CAL has the ability and the potential to do it; CPL has the ability and potential to do it. They merely need our help and support.