counter-strike at this point is pretty much it’s very own thing, if you change the game to much it won’t be counter-strike and a lot of people don’t play counter-strike to play a multiplayer shooter, they play it because its counter-strike, this makes it a pretty much ideal candidate to “just sell mtx with” and change the map pool a bit to keep the casual crowd happy.
cs itself evolved for a long time without any input by valve at all, the same way chess or modern soccer evolved without drastic changes.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
You aren’t understanding my point, I specifically said I understand there being a competitive core that remains essentially unchanged.
What I am saying that is not nearly enough, it is lazy, you don’t have to change the core game to add more aspects to it, more modes and more content that compliments the competitive core.
Yeah and I played a bunch of chess when I was younger and got bored because it was the only good board game anyone would play with me. I stopped playing board games period for a decade or so and it took modern board games including modern abstracts to get me into board games again. Does that mean I saw absolutely everything there was to chess and that it needs to be updated now? No, but I am very much in the majority of people in feeling that chess is kind of boring after awhile, and if it was the only option to play with chess pieces and a chess board I just wouldn’t own a chess set which is why I don’t own a chess set…
I own Agricola, Concordia, Dominion, Spirit Island, Bonfire, 51st State and other complex modern strategy board games and enjoy them 1000x more than I ever would chess unless I was matched with someone precisely at my skill level.
Also… people do use soccer balls for all kinds of silly stuff? Soccer is surrounded by a vibrant culture of games, interaction and play, just because the core sport is a rigid form doesn’t mean the entirety of the scene is rigid like that…
Dunstabzugshaubitze@feddit.org 2 days ago
i understand your point, i just don’t agree with it. I don’t need Counter-Strike to change the sameway i don’t need a specific boardgame to change. the fact that counter-strike is pretty much unchaged for over 20 years is what allowed it to develop the depth it has as a competitive game, that’s what makes solid tactics and individual skill important because i can’t abuse a new poorly understood mechanic, that only exists for a month. CS core is so solid that we could even play the same unchaged maps for another 20 years and would gradually play them differently year over year. i know this, because we did.
change for the sake of change is the biggest issue of live service games, if you ignore the stupid monetization schemes, sooner or later they all devolve into a barely recognizable mess.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Yeah, good for you and the narrow things you want out of the game! That sounds soul-crushingly boring to me given all of the fun new FPS games that have come out over that period that have been way more rewarding, dynamic and interesting to experience.
I am not saying your experience is invalid, I am saying it is boring in most people’s opinion. Competitive focused players who enjoy playing the same thing over and over and over again don’t understand they aren’t the entire playerbase or that they also aren’t enough to really sustain a game either.
A good counterpoint to this is Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress 2 has competitive elements but it is also just a fun game, it has lots of fun different modes and lots of different content. There isn’t just the core competitive game and some casino crap strapped on, TF2 is so much more than that and frankly CS2 isn’t.
Dunstabzugshaubitze@feddit.org 2 days ago
CS has a healthy playerbase, dont know if it has it because or despite it’s slow changing nature but the game is still doing well in every sense of the word. what i dont get is: why does a specific game has to change if there are shiny new ones released everyday? CS existing does not take away your ability to try the new hotness, but changing CS into something new would take the ability away to enjoy CS as it was.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 days ago
I think you have no idea what you’re talking about. They’ve tried that multiple times. They made gun game when CSGO released and nobody cares about gungame. They made some other game mode as well, which I don’t even remember what it was called because nobody cared about that either. They made a 2 man competitive mode called wingman and that at least got some attention because that was competitive, but largely people stuck with the 5v5. They added danger zone, a CS take on battle royales, and nobody cares about that either. They even tried gradually bringing new maps into the competitive map pool by adding them to the casual playlist and nobody played them. Even now the last regular update (which was literally today) added the retakes gamemode back and I doubt the core audience cares.
The reason you don’t see any other kind of content in CS is because the core audience doesn’t care about any other content. For the majority of the playerbase only the gamemode that exists is competitive and everything else is irrelevant. In fact the core audience is so anal about competitive game mode they start bitching when new maps get added. You’re complaining about something that isn’t even true because Valve does try different things, but you only hear about competitive, skins, boxes and other cosmetics because that’s all the core audience cares about.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 days ago
Now you’ve completely pivoted away from your original point of Valve being lazy and not doing anything to whatever the fuck this is.
I gave you examples of Valve trying different things from the start of CSGO, before the e-sports and competitive scene had fully cemented themselves as the central piece. These fictional players who supposedly left were never there to begin with or they were such an insignificant amount, compared to the people who enjoyed the competitive playlist, that they died out all on their own. And there’s no self-fulfilling game design that caused this, unless you want to walk back you understanding of keeping the competitive core as is.
Yes. Chess is so dead. Smash Bros Melee, a game that is completely abandoned by the devs and hasn’t received an update in 20 years is completely dead (spoiler, the melee competitive scene is very much alive despite the game receiving no updates and Nintendo being hostile towards the scene). What is happening to CS isn’t that it’s narrowing itself into some sort of a dead end, it’s the opposite. It’s found what makes it great and that has become the framework in which the game operates. The game doesn’t have to appease the player, the player will learn how to play the game because the game is fun.
Maybe you don’t know how Steam charts work but CS active player over the course of years is only trending upwards. We’ve gone from an average of 300k players in 2015 to an average of 1mil players in 2025. Real world data literally proves you wrong.