The mundanity of seeing online CS during the pandemic has electrified a transition that was already happening - the end of tier 1 online events. The leagues were the last victims, with FLASHPOINT’s last event setting the framework for future online events.
But the pandemic also unearthed a deeper scar tissue within the scene - the economics stopped making sense a long time ago. The industry has tried to paper over this with agreements such as the Louvre Agreement - tournament organisers would sell a fixed number of slots, which would guarantee you access to tier 1 offline events. If your team falls off, no need to worry - you will still be appearing at these events.
But that in itself has lowered the competitive level of the entire high level CS - T2 teams can no longer breach the boundary, other than at Majors, where they frequently upset.
With Valve coming to crackdown on closed ecosystems, and macroeconomic factors impacting spending, the question keeps popping up - how do we make this make sense?
What if we’ve been overlooking something obvious?
Bring back tier 1 online events.
There are a number of costs involved with costing an offline event. From the arena to the equipment, there is a lot of responsibility.
Online events require monumentally fewer resources. A server, 5 players, a solid anti-cheat client (with human moderation)1, and two casters to join a TeamSpeak. If you really want to be cheap, you could make the casters themselves stream the event 2.
The DDoS scourge that afflicted online play was vanquished long ago, once the industry abandoned Skype. Internet connections and more optimal routing tech have caused pings to plummet.
Illegal gambling is a genuine concern, but it is already a problem. Adding tier 1 teams into that circuit won’t dramatically change the nature of the problem.
I’m not saying to move all events online, but to have more of them. The Leagues would be a great start.
Esports has the unique luxury of being possible from our homes. Why are we not utilizing it?
Lower stakes
Not every week in the Premier League is a big week, and not every big week is a big week for all the teams.
Online tournaments (again, mainly leagues) provide low stakes action. A appetizer for high stakes, high octane LAN games. Without a crowd, players will play differently, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
By reducing the stress placed upon players, you’d also be able get more games without inducing the burn out that we’ve become accustomed to.
Lower stakes gives more opportunities for smaller teams to dip their toes against top teams, compared to the difficulty of making it to a top tier LAN, and playing against an audience.
We can include more teams
Adding a new team to a LAN event requires more hotels, flights, food and a longer event to accommodate them.
Online? Those costs are near nothing. You would require extra games, sure, but these games are far cheaper to run. The offline ESL Pro League has 24 teams, where we used to have 32 across EU and NA, with another 16 in Asia and Oceania.
When ESL Pro League Season 13 started, Heroic were the #13th best team in the world, and not an ESL partner. They would go on to top their group, and win in dramatic fashion against the world #4 in Gambit (who themselves rose to prominence online).
A hope for regional scenes
Counter-Strike has become European centric. The North and South American scenes have withered. There is very little regional competition, and the top teams abandon ship to move to Europe.
By making it possible for teams to stay at home, while participating in competition, you might have top level teams going back and enriching their scenes more.
(or maybe not: (NA CS is dead, but maybe it was always going to be)
Conclusion
LAN events are the bread and butter of the Counter-Strike world - but how about we leave them as just the butter?
Online events are a unique aspect to esports, that allow us to emulate the better parts of league sports - a oscillation in the intensity of matches, an opportunity for more teams to participate, all while doing so at a fraction of the budget.
-
Yes, we did have the coach cheating scandal, something which could have only happened online. While it was a wide reaching scandal, the impact on tier 1 competition (our main target here) would be far more minimal. ↩︎
-
I don’t mean that as a far-fetched example - this was how it was done back in the day. This is a clip of Semmler casting an insane moment by rain in the qualifiers for ESL One Cologne 2014 at 720p, with his settings clearly configured wrong. This was because Anders, who was meant to be doing the main stream (and did so on the first map), was DDoSed. This was for a MAJOR. How far we’ve come. ↩︎