Competitive Counter-Strike is currently the healthiest it has ever been. This week's Zechs Files reflects on an esport in its prime.
It’s a great time to be a Counter-Strike fan. Faze fans might not think so right now but it’s true. While other games continue to be dominated by Koreans, CS has teams from around the world who can each beat one another on a given day. Just think about FaZe for a moment: a championship winning team - narrowly beaten in overtime by the current number one team in the world - comprising of five players from five different countries.
This kind of international representation, almost without borders, is what the internet – not just esports – is all about. As somebody pointed out on Reddit recently, even American teams have been stepping up lately. Maybe they can’t win tournaments yet, but they are able to compete.
Coming from a 1.6 background, it’s refreshing to see a professional scene that isn’t just dominated by Swedes, Eastern Europeans and a handful of Poles.
But as much as I love the liberalist internet utopia that Counter-Strike has turned into (though not its spectating community), there is a more specific, more important point here: healthy competition. I talk about international representation because it’s nice, but really, what matters is that there is a bunch of teams competing to be the best in the world. It’s cool for fans that they can attach themselves to a somewhat local team, but it is better that we can all tune into a tournament without knowing who is going to win before it starts.
Look at League of Legends. Commentators and fans in that community are obsessed with The Gap - the void between Korea and the West. It is so unavoidable that I have even written about it in previous columns. It is the driving narrative in international League competition: can we catch up with the Koreans? But as one commentator pointed out a while ago, that’s only part of the problem. There is a second gap between SK Telecom and the rest of Korea.
The World Championship for League of Legends is still several months away but it would be the shock of a lifetime if a Korean team didn’t win it. It would come as a fairly big surprise if that team wasn’t SKT, though Samsung Galaxy have beaten them already this season.
But if SK Gaming don’t win the next major? It is not even too unlikely. As the number one ranked team in the world they must be favourites, but would you be shocked if Faze got revenge? Would you be surprised if G2 or Astralis emerged victorious? Maybe you’d a little taken aback if Gambit snuck through or if Virtus Pro finally found their form, but nearly every team at that event has some chance of success.
This is a golden age for competitive Counter-Strike. Last year, the same team won both majors and in 2015, Fnatic won two out of three. Astralis might make it two wins out of two in Krakow but it is far from a sure thing. They aren’t even favourites. Any one from a relatively large group of teams could take home the prize and that is awesome. Competition is healthy. It’s the reason we watch sports in the first place – it’s a real life soap opera in which every storyline is believable because it is really happening. The stakes are real, and, like any soap opera, it gets boring when you know what is going to happen. Counter-Strike is anything but predictable right now and it is far from boring.
If you don’t follow any other esports, maybe you don’t know how lucky you are. The CS community – like most online communities – is great at pointing out a game’s flaws: why don’t Valve fix this, why don’t ESL do that? There are valid concerns, of course, but sometimes it’s important to celebrate the good as well as pointing out the bad. The ECS finals had its issues, but the quality of the grand final match made up for all of them. The tournament was stacked and we saw some incredible matches; the final was the perfect cherry on top of a delicious cake. The fact that it could only be resolved in overtime on the third map perfectly exemplifies everything I’m trying to get across today.
I have to admit, when I finished the first draft of this week’s column I thought it was a bit twee. I thought it lacked punch and wasn’t really saying anything controversial or interesting. But sometimes it’s good to take a step back and appreciate what you have, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s good to look around and just enjoy the finer things in life. ECS gave us the perfect opportunity to do just that: to stop complaining and remember why Counter-Strike is such a great game in the first place.
Image courtesy of SK Gaming's Twitter.
