Every event brings out one trend or another; it was only a few CPL’s ago that round saves became a popular trend, even on gun rounds. Now it’s time to fully understand what new trends are developing in Counter-Strike. Before the CPL, we looked at a few of the growing trends: round running and gun saving. Both techniques provided good entries into the trends within the game, and I highly suggest that you read the article before getting into this one. Still, let’s jump into one of the most important, but disappointing, trends CS has seen in a long while.

With everything currently taking place within Counter-Strike, it’s important to know first what changes the game has seen. Everyone knows of the money system change, which was the removal of a bug that limited the amount of money a winning team would receive if the round ended due to a time limit. The problem we have seen as a result is a development towards a lack of strategy. Teams have become so scared or lazy that they simple do not want to expend the effort it takes to be successful. This leaves a limited gap between the known teams and the unknown teams.

Your strats, for all to see

Every team loves to complain about each demo that’s released surrounding their team, and honestly, they have some justification for this. Look at the CPL winner, EYEballers. While they were obviously one of the best teams in the world even before the event, the 8th place ranking on GotFrag’s World Rankings went largely unnoticed. EYE was even as high as 3rd earlier this year, yet became largely unrecognized by the Swedish Counter-Strike community after a terrible ESWC showing.

Without the ESWC Finals demos and roster changes, EYE was able to keep its positions and strategies largely a secret, preventing teams from arriving at CPL with pre-conceived plans to take advantage of their strategies. Still, this is all an excuse. An excuse teams use because they simply don’t want to take the game as professionally as it has become. Teams like NoA, SK.swe and even 3D get paid regular salaries to play this game, but recently haven’t developed the strategies they need to continue that level of success. When I say develop, I don’t mean brand new either (new stacks or random boosts); I mean perfectly-executed successful strategies.

Later this month Bootman and I will go into great detail about this issue and even go so far as to give teams a plan to improve upon the problem. For now though, let’s look at one match: SK.swe vs Rival. Anyone who watched that match can see how poorly SK.swe mixed up their strategies. Every sewer rush to the far squeaky door should simply have been yelled to Rival across the room by one of the members of SK.swe so that Rival could get it over with. Rival would often stack three or four guys in the upper bombsite because they knew SK.swe was looking to go there.

Bootman and I sat behind SK.swe during the match. Bootman commented, “Rival might as well shoot through the door.” He’s right. SK.swe’s inability to develop anything remotely creative or to even mix up their strategy gave Rival a chance to send that match into overtime, let alone triple overtime. The #1 team in the World should come prepared with multiple strategies for both pistol and gun rounds on both sides, instead of taking lengthy breaks in order to decide on what to do next. Teams should be so prepared that instead of calling where to go by physical landmarks or locations on the map, they should be debating in code like NFL football players do, “Green white blast on two, ready, set, go!”