It’s quite hard to relive history on reddit. I wanted to write a piece about “2015 CS esports”, and one of the best ways to do so would be to view a “top of 2015” for a /r/GlobalOffensive. Sadly, I couldn’t find anything for this (at least not via a quick Google search). The closest I can find is rereddit, which is a platform feature to find the top posts for the entire website for a particular year or month, which is at least something.

Cheating is an increasingly endemic problem to multiplayer video games on PCs, and as a response, we’ve seen the “Cambrian explosion” of anti-cheats designed to combat this situation. However, a vast majority of these products are choosing to run with the highest privileges possible on your system: the kernel-level. This choice has caused a lot of scrutiny from customers over the possible ramifications of this decision on their usage of their computer: particularly, over the privacy, security and stability of their PCs.

Recently, CS professionals STYKO and EliGE have shared the fact that they have employed the services of aim coaches. Such moves are relatively new to Counter-Strike: while aiming is considered an important aspect to Counter-Strike, professionals usually improve their skill in this venture with deathmatching, or training with Counter-Strike maps such as “aim_botz”, or full bespoke suites such as Refrag (EliGE partly owns Refrag, after acquiring it from ESEA). CS, as is typical, is late to the party.

Simple Mobile Tools are a set of open-source “shareware” apps. Examples of applications included in the suite include “Simple Gallery”, “Simple Calendar” and “Simple Contacts”. While the applications are open-source, the developer made money through proprietary app stores versions. From the Play Store, the Gallery is only free for 14 days, before you are required to buy a license. F-Droid and GitHub were options for acquiring fully-free binaries, but not often used by regular users.

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.

North American Counter-Strike is dead, or in the middle of dying. Team Liquid, the prototypical NA team, now fields a primarily European roster, while Cloud9’s roster is Russian. The remaining stalwarts in Complexity and EG are not competitive internationally. This isn’t unique to North America. This death of the national team is framed as a problem endemic to North America. But one only needs to look in Europe to see that the concept as a whole, is withering away.

CS:GO Majors are supposed to be a raucous celebration of the game. The place where the best teams duke it out, in a desperate bid to establish themselves as the apex predator. There is no such as a free round within this theatre. Yet Boston 2018 was the last CS:GO major final to ever reach 3 maps. 7 consecutive major finals, where the loser could not muster one map. What is going on?

Counter-Strike events seem to have less energy than ever. There are no concrete statistics to back this up, but the symphonies of Counter-Strike sound more like a small chorale. The crowds have gone from ecstasy, to gentle applause. If this is the case, pointing to a single cause is difficult. To list a few changes: The makeup of teams has changed, with fan favourites such as NiP, SK and fnatic having all disappeared from the high levels of the scene.

Originally written on 2021-04-15, re-written in 2023. Special thanks to Loughborough University’s excellent public record of emails. While they are now gone, they were instrumental in writing this piece. February At this point, the news reporting had started to become common place, but was still just a mild curiosity to most of us. The 2009-2010 Swine flu epidemic, and Ebola reporting, had impacted the way I perceived media around disease outbreaks.