Current status of CS: GO online: deadlock but where is the problem

CSGO and esports in general are shaped by offline LAN events. They claim to be the world pinnacle of the professional arena and attract the vast majority of the community. A grandstand filled with screaming fans enhances the watching experience by so many levels, and this is why teams compete and train hard.

Meanwhile, online is considered a foreign child in the field of competition and it is gradually falling behind and inferior to LAN. CS:GO online is currently at an impasse, with many factors affecting the game. Let’s start to find out why.

Monopoly

Bringing this up isn’t because I’m on the side of Reddit – the antitrust people simply don’t like Facebook. Overall, this is an extra source of income for companies looking to push events on a weekly basis. Therefore, exclusivity is something that viewers have to endure in order to get free entertainment as well as grow that esports. But it would be remiss if we didn’t point out the weakness of the exclusive contract between ESL and Facebook, not to mention how ECS and YouTube previously strangled CS online.

On January 18, ESL announced that ESL One events and their online tournament – ​​the ESL Pro League – would be streamed exclusively in English and Portuguese on Facebook. The fan reaction to the announcement was fury, with hateful posts flooding the CS:GO and Dota reddit forums. They criticized the decision and called for a return to Twitch as it has been seen as the home of esports and events for so many years.

Since then, ESL Pro League viewership has dropped dramatically. Despite a lot of efforts to improve the streaming experience on Facebook, like adding the right to remove the emoji that appear on the screen and improve the quality, the platform has not attracted anyone. You don’t need a Facebook account to watch the stream; ESL even embeds the stream on its website so people don’t need to log into Facebook. Still, viewers would rather follow Twitch streams in other languages ​​than use Facebook streams.

With ESL Pro League – CS: GO’s biggest online tournament – now considered a symbol of ESL greed in the hearts of fans, this game has lost its appeal. More importantly, the tournament is no longer on Twitch every day to increase CS:GO viewership – this was once seen as a way for new fans to learn more about the game and the pro arena.

Some people even boycott the Facebook stream. Part of the community pointed out that the Facebook contract kicked off Pro League viewers, and in the worst cases, they no longer follow CS:GO in general.

So what does this have to do with CS online? This is one reason why people no longer follow the exciting online matches in this subject. A lot of fans want CS to revolve around Twitch, but with YouTube and Facebook signings, they’ve taken over CS:GO’s most prestigious tournaments. When people go their separate ways and do what they want, especially on the Facebook platform that no one uses, this is clearly the reason why CS:GO Online died prematurely.

Entertainment value

The most important thing that any tournament is about is to bring entertainment value to those who watch. With CS:GO offline events, they constantly come up with new ideas, interesting things in the production stage. Meanwhile, for online events, we have to wait “long neck” between matches. ECS added a lot of content to the Season 5 Finals tournament over the weekend of June 8, including DJs between games, footage pre-recorded by DBLTAP and ECS: very funny and informative, Even in the live segment, they also ask questions to the audience or mingle with the audience.

Counter-Strike Online is subject to change. Streaming multiple days a week for weeks in a row gives them more than enough time to add interesting content to keep viewers engaged and avoid boredom. More importantly, offline events allow the organizers to access the players, the atmosphere in the tournament, for filming and interviews. Obviously this is a way to add more entertainment to the game.

The relevant point is that offline events are now of incredibly high quality, something that online matches don’t have.

CS:GO Online cannot match the entertainment quality of offline events. We have a feeling that LAN tournaments are so good, it accidentally kills online. If you’ve watched a few ESL Pro League matches, chances are you’ll be less enthusiastic than watching a few matches at an offline event. The enthusiasm of the crowd, the thoughtful preparation of the teams in the LAN and what the organizers have prepared during the break between matches, makes offline “superior” all the way. And when we have two or three international events in a month, a lot of fans can quench their CS:GO thirst and no longer care about online matches.

Losing faith in the results of the competition

CS:GO Online is struggling as a team has a 17-1 record in the pro season and still needs to prove to the community that they can do it on LAN. NRG has this impressive online record at ECS Season 5, but when it comes to ECS Season 5 Finals, no one appreciates them. However, NRG has reached the final round.

CS:GO Online results are not as valuable as what players get in offline events. Obviously, the fact that NRG has a respectable record at ECS like on top of a 17-5 record in the Pro league and underappreciated at StarSeries shows that people have lost faith in the current online results.

And if the above results are not to be believed, then online tournaments don’t really add any value to CS:GO in general. Online results are treated with suspicion, but this is clearly the truth.

Also, fans don’t want to watch games that don’t make any sense. If watching an online match and the ‘explosion phase’ happens, the vast majority of viewers will use the excuse that this is online. With this approach, it makes the match less exciting because you believe the result is affected because it is online, or hope the top team will win. Meanwhile at LAN, we can’t predict anything.

Online matches are not valid

Another problem that appears when the player’s schedule is increasingly dense is that at the end of the online season, for some teams, the matches are no longer meaningful, it reduces the quality of the game. The reason lies in the fact that the team that performed well at the beginning of the season could have qualified for the LAN finals a few weeks before the final game. In this situation, there’s no reason for them to try to win more than the professional demeanor of a player. We can prevent teams from putting out more than 50% of their energy in some online matches if they don’t make any sense, more specifically, when the important international event the team attends will take place over the weekend.

However, this problem also has a solution. Former player and analyst Chad “SPUNJ” Burchill has come up with a solution to this problem.

You want to give online leagues more validity? Make the online portion actually count for something. You win the league? you deserve the highest seed or some form of advantages going into the tournament. Make teams actually play for that top spot, make them want to win every game

— Bad Churchill (@SPUNJ) June 10, 2018

His idea is to reduce meaningless games at the end of the season. He said, the tournament should reward the high-ranked teams with more than just a place in the offline finals.

Take ESL Pro League Season 7 as an example. The top 7 teams in Europe and the top 6 in North America are eligible for the Dallas finals. The obvious problem is that if you’re at the top of the European rankings, you’re no different from the 7th place team. So why should a team strive hard to climb to the top in this system? To give more motivation to the players as well as the attractiveness of the matches. The organizer should apply the system that SPUNJ is aiming for – seeding the high-ranked teams in the tournament.

If this system were adopted instead of the current one, the end-of-season games would certainly be the most appealing. Teams try to get the best seed to their advantage. This is considered a commendable move to apply to online CS: GO in the current state.

This problem is now more obvious and makes online CS:GO lose its appeal compared to a few years ago. Teams now have more things to take care of than before. This makes online matches lose their purpose, as players are only interested in upcoming offline events. In order to stimulate professional matches, the organizers should consider additional benefits so that each match is more dramatic and full of enthusiasm.

According to cybersport