Now that my new site is done I can get back to looking back at ten years of Counter Strike. In case you’re just seeing these for the first time I’ll quickly summarize where we’re at so far in the list.

Triumphs:
#5 The max round game type and format standardization
#4 The Pre-World Tour CPL

Failures:
#5 Counter Strike Source
#4 The Post World Tour CPL

You can find the articles talking about these here:
Part Two (#4’s)
Part One (#5’s)

Now that that is out of the way, on to number three!

Triumph #3
Player / Developer interaction (at least in the early days)

One of the biggest factors in Counter Strike being the big success it is was the developers listening to the community in the nascent stages of its development. Several of the features added to Counter Strike were found in other games but their usability was significantly increased. Four such fixes in my opinion were crucial in the game’s development.

The first was the addition of fade to black in version 1.1 . While this fix did not kill ghosting (XeqtR typing on bomb train to his teammates comes to mind), it did go a long way to make tournament play that much more fair and professional. This made it so the best team wasn’t the best ghosters but the best players. I remember hearing stories from CK3’s Big_V about tournaments where ghosting was legal in which teams would have a player suicide and call out the other team’s positions. While this is extreme, it shows the extent to which fadetoblack put a big kibosh on this kind of exploitation.

The second was the addition of HLTV. It turned just a game into a spectator sport. Instead of a frantic scramble for POV demos to at least see the matches from a tournament … thousands could connect to HLTV proxies and watch their online heroes frag in real time. Valve did not just stop there, they improved the functionality of HLTV to the point that it now behaves like you are actually spectating the match from the server. While HLTV isn’t an original idea, GTV for quake came first; it is the best implementation of game TV yet created. It destroys its big brother Source TV in almost every aspect.

The third is the “removal” of bunny hopping. At the time I detested this change, but now looking back the impact this change made to the game is unmistakable. It took the game’s emphasis from quick Action Quake style deathmatch to a slower more tactical pace. Before this change save rounds would be won by teams jumping as much as possible with accurate deagles, now it takes a much more deliberate strategy. Granted the deathmatch component thankfully hasn’t been fully removed from the game, lessened its grip and by slowing the game down led to a strategic renaissance.

The final change was fixing the money system. Griffin “Shaguar” Benger wrote an editorial after the winter CPL event in 2003 about how the current money system was broken for the de_ maps. To make a long story short, he explained that the Terrorists should not gain the money advantage for letting the CT’s win by time. He, in particular, used the ultra close match between SK-Gaming and rdw from winter CPL ‘03 as evidence of how flawed the system was (You can check out that article HERE or the SK rdw demo HERE). A month later in the next patch Valve added the following changes:

The round timer is now disabled when the bomb is planted
The winning defensive team now gets the same amount of money whether they win by round timeout or not ($3250 instead of $2000)
Players on the offensive team who survive the round due to a round timeout no longer receive money the next round
The Terrorists get an additional $800 per player if they plant the bomb but lose the round

Part of this was due to Cliffe’s involvement in the community and the large popularity competitive Counter Strike had/has. Yet, after June 2004 the substantive bug fixes to Counter Strike stopped. This left the community with such problems as flashbugs and the silent walking bug which only recently have been addressed.

These changes to the game turned CS from just another game into a truly viable competition platform despite Valve’s slow response to the game’s current problems.

Failure #3
Prize Money

The failure to pay out prize money is a systemic failure to all of eSports, but this problem disproportionately affected Counter Strike teams. Why? Well a big part of the CPL’s downfall was their inability or failure to pay out prizes.

Now I know there are several explanations behind why this has taken place. Over the years we’ve heard that the reasons were slow or no response from the players, the money being transferred late by the sponsors, it wasn’t our tournament don’t look at us, and various other unsatisfactory responses. The problem with all of these explanations is that they all are bullshit.

Last time I checked it doesn’t matter what the underlying reason is just that people get what is owed to them. In 2007, when the CPL was on its deathbed, several big teams boycotted the Winter event because they couldn’t be sure that the CPL would pay the prizes. This last chapter in the CPL’s history had already been written at this point and was just playing itself out. In fact, Vo0 and Fatal1ty didn’t receive all of their money for the 2005 World Tour until sometime in 2007.

Add to this GGL’s repeated Digital Life fiascos and a myriad of tournaments reneging on their obligations and you can start to see what a drag this issue has been on eSports. Not only does a team have to worry about getting stiffed by their management, but also by tournaments they actually won something from. How is that a stable platform for a professional sport?