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Marc "Singlecoil" Turner takes a look at the CS picks in the 2008 CGS Region 1 Draft and explores how those picks could have widespread effects on the North American competitive Counter Strike community as a whole.  The 2008 CGS Region 1 Combine and Draft came to an end Sunday with the Draft Ceremony. The draft may be over but the far reaching impact to the North American Counter Strike competitive gaming community has only begun to be explored. Not only will the draft have an impact on the CS:Source community, it could also affect Counter Strike 1.6 in the U.S. on a significant level. 3D raids Pandemic Not only will this alter forever the face of Team 3D by adding “pure” CS:S players to the team, it also effectively ends the era of the “old” Source teams for CS:S as well. No longer will we see the Verge versus PowersGaming rivalry that basically continued with this past season of CEVO Pro by way of Pandemic and Optx. Out with the Old, in with the Old  Dallas Venom also got in on the Pandemic raid by acquiring Kyle “mustang” Cummings. The Venom took a piece of Devastation as well by acquiring Carson "classified" Holt. Dallas donated a couple of players back to the free agent, former 1.6 player's pool by way of moving Derek "exodus" Heidinger to the Venom taxi squad and leaving Corey "kaM" Hanes unprotected to settle for a taxi position on the Carolina Core.  Chimera did their share of sending former 1.6 players back to free agency as well. One of the most well known names in Counter Strike, Griffin “shaguar” Benger was left unprotected and was not drafted by any other team for a starter or taxi player. The Chimera also opted not to go with season one fill in player and well known CS 1.6 name, Justin “sunman” Summy, who was picked up by his former 1.6 team Complexity as a taxi player. Chicago did enlist a well known replacement from the CS 1.6 competitive community in Eric "Da Bears" Stromberg, and in doing so took another player from a non-CGS, CEVO Pro CS:S team, Eximius. The Carolina Core opted to go with a veteran CS 1.6 player in Cyrus "org" Habibi and returned Adam “elusive” Messner to free agency. Complexity chose to go back to the tried and true, tested lineup from last season, leaving Matt “Warden” Dickens protected for one round and picking him back up. Page:
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Wednesday November 25 2009 | |||||
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User Comments
Wow I didnt think of it that way. Yikes
good read
Theres no promotion/relegation like in ESL. At least in other events your team can try qualify & compete if your good enough your in.
The esports scene is too big even in NA to encapsulate it all in 6 teams. Outside CGS theres no big motivation to play source atm- thats alot of thumb twidling between now & the next draft
With no way to harness that, CGS will slowly fade with their talent pool. They've essentially cut off their lifelines.
And that's completely devoid of the other glaring problems the CGS has failed to address.
General Managers in the CGS are noticing the importance of other games and thus not putting their CS:S lineups in the front of their minds. This is going to inevitably break up good rosters and prevent solid CS:S teams from forming and STAYING together.
The shuffling of talent may be good INSIDE the experiment of the CGS, but for the large scale success for CS:S, internationally or nationally, talent and chemistry needs time to form and without the CGS pulling players from rosters, more solid teams SHOULD form.
Essentially all professional sports, at least in the US, have contracts that run on a year-to-year basis (signing a one-year or three-year contract etc...).
Free agency, waivers, and such are all attributed through league agreements with players unions and franchise owners. Not to mention trades, and other deals associated with drafts and salary issues.
The CGS has no such thought in place at the moment. All players (outside of protected ones) are thrown back into the pot just to be dispersed once again. This creates many problems. For one, team-based games are going to run into problems with chemistry if pieces of their team keep getting moved around.
If there are no provisions worked into the CGS outlining the aspects of the above for next season, you can be assured they will fail. That doesn't even begin to touch the problems of their broadcasting and game choices.
refreshing
Take baseball for instance, to use your pro sports analogy. Before the onset of free agency and rampant trading, if you signed with a team (say, Detroit), you were pretty much locked in for life. If you were good, they kept resigning you. If you were bad, you went to the minor leagues and never saw the light of day again. Nowadays, you can do the two-year thing, and then jump ship if you think you can get more playing for another team.
Whether it is truly effective or not, CGS, by having a Combine and Draft every year, is at least encouraging players to keep improving. We gamers, as a breed, are easily bored, and if it's the same with the same players, even if it's teams we know and love....well, you get the idea.
CGS is in a weird position, because it didn't reach so far as to have 12 or 15 Region 1 Teams (which would have been dumb), but it isn't big enough or established enough to have long-term contracts and all those extraneous things that are a characteristic of major sports (which is financially prudent, given the sheer novelty of a league in this particular form). Hopefully things keep getting better. I think a good model to shoot for, in terms of what sport to emulate, is baseball, by creating a structured system where players and teams can move up through the organization
Great point. The legacy of some known teams and historic chemistry may be reaching their finals days, however this may very well produce an increase in raw tallent. It will be interesting to see how the CGS handles CS:S and more interesting to see how the CS:S players handle the CGS' handling of CS:S (lol mouthfull).
Look at 3D and their changes thay have had since inception. Teams make changes to benefit there weakness, then they work on cohesiveness during scrims and matches. This is a base of team games in general. Look at baseball, each offseason teams that have won the title will make changes to help imporve their weaknesses. They pull from farm teams or other unrestricted players from other teams, and try and build a cohesive squad for the upcoming year. They work thru Spring training and build a true team feel. The CGS is no different. The teams pulled players from taxi teams or from unrestricted/ franchise players to build a team that fixes what is perceived as their weakness.
Now is the time for the CGS teams to work during spring training on their skills and build a true team atmosphere. Meanwhile the other players will play in the minor (taxi-CAL-Cevo) leagues and work on their individual skill all the while helping their team win. With professional sports most players work to make themselves better, all the while hoping to be productive to allow their team to succeed. We have to remember this is now a business not just a bunch of guys playing in amatuer leagues with a few sparse lans, but a business.
Gotfrag is very dedicated to CS and sometimes CSS, but eSports is much larger than this small segment. We have to look at the whole sum and not the individual parts. What the managers did was to better their team (except Lake), and that is what they are supposed to be doing.
CGS will definitely have to add more franchises for it to succeed....
Sorta scary that they instead held fast at 6 NA franchises and lowered the salaries.....which is usually not a good sign....hope I'm wrong though and in the 2009 season they double the amount of teams.
http://www.gotfrag.com/cs/story/40867/
So now it's back to "rumor" stage again?
for the many undrafted, this is a time of moving on from their gaming career. and for the drafted, redrafted, and protected, this is a time of hoping CGS is going to go big and hoping they will do well to be redrafted if not protected.
Drafting belle. Drafting Warden's brother as css taxi. Keeping 9/10 players from a second to last team. Other people's picks didn't influence him, he said these were all 10 of the players he wanted before the draft.
just a thought
#34, not a bad idea, a 20k tournament each quarter would definitely give some incentive to teams not under contract.
You are correct!
The NFL and NBA have college teams (that don't get paid) to scout and when the combine comes around the playing field is narrowed to the individuals that stood out during the season.
CEVO is nice but its still on-line and not lan (and I think everyone knows some teams look super on-line and flop at lans).
Hopefully the CGS gets back to full taxi sqauds and has them play each other also....AKA Minor League (they could represent more cities with a small salary)
Oh well I'm sure they are taking baby steps right now for a reason.....
CEVO needs to start holding LANs, as the CPL is dead, and if we really want our Source community to come to life as it once was, there needs to be something to play for instead of the CGS.
If CEVO were to have a 20k LAN every year, combined with LANs like Newegg and Digital Life, not to mention smaller ones, like the G3GC LAN, Nor'easter, or maybe some web2zone LANs, the LAN part of the Source scene may return.
For now though, I'll sit back, play in online competitions, and watch the pros play in CGS, onLAN.
Maybe they will try to see if they can expand into NA...that would be interesting
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