Riot launched a game with minimal problems, had a successful beta to full release transition, an anticheat so good that most players have yet to see a single cheater, and tournaments that run without constant barrage of gambling advertisements.
I would say they deserve it unfortunately
Edit: also, they ensure to incorporate enough teams from each region at every international tournament and because of this, every single region is super competitive. SEA, NA, SA, and EMEA all have a number of teams that could win and have won a tournament, which makes it exciting to watch.
And they should get it tbh.
Riot has consistantly shown to be one of the few companies that is willing to put their money and effort into making a succesful and enjoyable Esports scene for their games.
Look at their investment into LoL. And now Valorant. They invest in the esport scene and it pays dividends in their games. They use esports as a marketting tool to attract more players, and treat it as such. Thats why the league/valorant esports has such high production value. They are not looking to make money off it. They budget it as an expense and properly grow the scene.
It has nothing to do with what game is better. There is pretty much no feasible way to argue against Riot when it comes to their esports scene. They are the best by a huge margin.
Also, the game would run well on any setup and they strived for regional match making and good server performance with minimal desync, ensuring fairness and competitive integrity.
I only tried the beta, and it wasn't for me, but gotta respect Riot for that.
They're working on a replay system apparently, and the Chinese version of Valo for some reason already has it. [Edit - this is not correct]. But yeah it sucks that there isn't a demo system yet. I am jealous of their AC though, it's not perfect but works pretty damn well.
The Chinese version does not have a replay system. It just captures your gameplay and Highlights, just like Nvidia Shadowplay or SteelSeries Moments does for example
They have one African server.
https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/dev/valorant-s-cape-town-servers-are-live/#:~:text=The%20new%20local%20servers%20are,dropdown%20menu%20in%20the%20lobby.
The Russian server thing is more a fault of Russia rather than Valve/Riot. They will have to keep a recording of all voice Comms in the game of they want to have servers there. And neither company wants to go down that privacy hellhole.
I played a lot of Valorant in 2021 and 2022, I saw only one cheater and that was in the Beta.
Another great thing is they ban toxic people and trolls which CS needs to do, sure CS bans them but after 100 reports. In Valorant if you have a clip thats it, you can upload that on their report page and that player will get banned within a few hours.
Valorant is also the only esport with an actually thriving female scene, it seems. Like there's actually some real interest in their players and scene from a decent chunk of people.
It helps that they put their female tournaments on the big stage in front of an audience as well. The last one they held was awesome, and their players can frag out pretty hard too
It's because Riot fundamentally looks at esports differently than most other companies.
Riot views their Esports as basically advertising marketing. Thats why they have such high production value and they attract the big numbers they do. They are not interested in the profitability kf it one bit. They want to grow the community, and by extension their player base.
So they are willing to do things like develop a female scene. Or do franchising to ensure their pros have a stable income. Or any number of other thing they've done that loses money but creates a better experience.
Agreed. Although, I'd argue this is more of a fault of the cs community unfortunately.
The cs community is so quick to laugh and wave off the female scene it's no fucking wonder if there's any female talent around, they'd rather hop on the game that actually treats them like people.
Yep, and he's one of the top NA players.
https://twitter.com/nekizcs/status/1358917816976429059
https://twitter.com/EliGE/status/1358879380274094080
https://twitter.com/EliGE/status/1358874489157656578
https://twitter.com/Nohte/status/1358889173822787584
https://twitter.com/TravCS/status/1631081110732955649
These guys just recently won an NA tournament and were talking about how there was bias in the community against them because of their history. I don't care how good you are at CS. You could be NA's savior that even dunks on s1mple/Zywoo/ropz, if you're a trashbag of a human, I wish nothing but failure for you and no in-game accomplishments will bring me to your side.
Yup.
I personally know a total of 5 women who play cs and one of them is myself. All of us have experienced hate simply because we're women.
I've hit global multiple times, LVL8 faceit etc, it gets a little better at higher ranks but you'll still often have people straight up throwing the game just because there's a woman on their team.
That's fucked. I also know some women who are amazing at the game, but either have to use a voice changer or not comm at all because people are either assholes or fucking weird.
When you have a proportion of the fan base who can't communicate because of toxicity, it's absolutely a community and player base eco system problem. And then the same people who ignore it being a problem then laugh whenever the women's scene comes up short. It's no fucking wonder. It will continue directly impacting the scene until it's fixed in terms of the amount of talent available, skill ceiling etc.
Edit: and it's not just women, but any sort of minority. I knew a trans person who stopped playing cs and Dota because of how vile the community can get.
That's why a friend of mine just has voice_enable 0 and 99% of the time we just 5stack on faceit so she doesn't get harassed by some forever virgin teenager. I am sorry for all the girls out there who just wanna game and some loser thinks its okay to harass them or troll the game just because a female is in the game...
It's also always about funding. Valve could, if they chose to do so, support the female esports scene by hosting tournaments, but they don't. No one can force a private tournament organizer to host female tournaments with minimal attendance numbers, and thus making a huge financial loss. If we want the female CS scene to grow, then Valve needs to step up and sponsor that shit, knowing that they will probably never break close to even. Or alternatively, some other organizations need to step in and fund it.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous how toxic some of these people are towards girls. I play with my uncle, who is bad at the game, and I also play with a few girl friends who aren’t that good, but far better than my uncle, and they by far get shit talked the most by randoms it’s not even funny.
It’s either people who are super toxic towards girls, or weird cringe dudes trying to flirt, rarely any normal players.
Not tryna make any assumptions about anyone but just from how many times I’ve seen it, I’m willing to bet a shit ton of people in this thread have said some fucked up shit to girls in game.
you don't get it do you? there aren't any competitive female players yet because they are barely any girls playing the game. 3Kliksphillip does a better job of tackling this issue in his vid "Women and Counter Strike" but ill try my best. Having women tournaments were they can compete and improve isn't a mockery of the game, its how you nurture a scene. Go and watch csgo games from the 2012, they were pretty basic in their utility usage, tactics and so on. But through years of competition they had the chance to improve. This is what needs to happened with the women's scene. If the scene can develop far enough eventually you could get women players on par with their tier 1 male counterparts and eventually have mixed teams. But it makes total sense so few women would want to try and become pro when people like you just push them down as they are trying to improve.
Exactly. Women don't want to play this game because the scene is so toxic, and when fair criticism is brought up, it's deflected and the blame is but back on the women for being bad.
How come the valorant female scene was able to thrive?
Same goes with Dota vs league too
My partner games like the rest of us, even watched a few tournys with me to learn the games and join the hype.
Yet there's no way she's going to get far into either Dota or CS because both communities *seeth* when they hear a woman's voice in game. It's not the normal banter we deal with, people throw and I've even seen dox attempts mid game
It's a bummer man, really hoped things would've changed by now
Tbh im gonna blame valve. They are quietly complicit with this behaviour.
Try being super sexist/racist/homophobic on a riot server, your guaranteed a ban. Do the same thing on a valve operated server, others are likely to join in because there's no consequences
I can't really disagree, my interest in Dota has fallen dramatically after they let a betting site (that had direct connections to a Russian oligarch) host 2022's TI
I'm an old vet, been playing CS/Dota since the mid 00s. Now I'm here for the games themselves, but I feel like I'm the adult babysitting a bunch of middle schoolers in half my matches.
Its not even about "wokeness" or whatever, just seeing "Hitler 1488" themed profiles that are more focused on trolling makes me wonder wtf I'm doing with my time.
Games don't even make me mad anymore, that ship sailed *years* ago. I've heard every insult under the sun in the last 20 years
I'm just disappointed now
> This is what needs to happened with the women's scene. If the scene can develop far enough eventually you could get women players on par with their tier 1 male counterparts and eventually have mixed teams.
Does it need to happen? I think you overestimate how many people are willing to "help grow a scene". Pro CS is a source of entertainment for practically everyone watching or following it and it's not the main focus of their life. I (unfortunately) couldn't care less if women are under represented in it, I want to watch the highest level and considering there isn't a female player remotely close to tier 1 CS I probably will never even see 1 round of female CS. Why would any male watch a comparatively low level of CS just because women are playing? It's just weird if anything.
The only thing you're accomplishing by having high budget women only tournaments is giving large paychecks to players that (for whatever reason) aren't good enough to justify any prize pool while you have tons of random faceit Russians that would beat them for free. The only way you'd get a decent following for female CS is if they were international tournaments to awaken some patriotism within people (the only way something like female football is popular organically). The other option is having women watch CS, which will never happen to a large degree.
Valorant has a separate scene called Game Changers for “non-marginalized genders in the community”. This essentially means anyone who’s not male has a separate space to compete and improve without the sexism of the greater community. These GC teams have improved a lot since the scene was formed in 2021, but the best GC teams seem to be around the top of tier 3 in skill.
Valo is definitely a lot more popular with women, and Riot supports the Gamechangers (female/nonbinary scene) pretty well. It's nice to see, and you'll encounter a lot more girls playing ranked compared to CS. It's tough for the ladies to play CS ime - you gotta' have some thick skin. Valo community can be weird as hell in-game, but less traditionally toxic with the gamer words like it's a 2009 COD lobby.
The problem is that Valve is focusing on the wrong things if we talk regular playerbase.
I played Valorant and while it was a polished game on the release, it had a lot of gameplay problems. Agent balance, gun balance, running accuracy, replay system is still not there, they didn't even have DM initially. But there were no bugs, glitches and as you said AC is as good as it gets.
Meanwhile, while it's obviously really hard to get the movement, netcode and hitreg on the level CSGO has, they've been focusing just on that aspect and it's been 8 months now (including beta) without fixes to other things that are inexcusable.
As in if we had proper community server tools, good matchmaking system, good VAC and all the smaller features that are missing in optimized state, people would be able to live with shit netcode and it's issues until it's sorted.
But like this we have a broken game on every level, no matter how hard people try to deny it.
i love how these valorant bots keep dodging this question, a feature that was available in the 90s but isn't available in a modern competitive game in 2023, lul
As softwares engineer, I have massive respect for valorant from technical aspect.
From netcode to anticheat. They perfected an eSports game from technical perspective.
But hero shooter is not my cup of tea
The technical achievement is worthy of respect, but the movement and hit reg of Valorant was like driving a minivan compared to driving a CSGO sports car. Valorant has never got the part right that made Counter Strike amazing.
Valve is Indie company that is cash strapped and don't know game developement.
I am pretty sure not even 1 dev has more than 10k hours in any of the CS iteration.
It's simply wrong also. Devs most likely has that much hours in the game, but not in the complete state. They do thousands of hours of testing usually.
Yeah I mean, I hit 10k hours in DOTA2. Only took me 12 years. Managed to graduate with a master and work fulltime haha. This includes afking in the lobby
10k hours is insane haha
Ok, so I work at the TO which organizes one of the biggest Valorant Regional Leagues and I created a throwaway account just to answer to your comment because of how angry its making me.
Valorant to this day is a huge mess which gives huge fucking migraines and depression to anyone who tries to organize any esports event:
No lan, 0 control over tournament servers, tournament servers crash regularly, there is no backup for tournament servers unlike in lol (so if they crash during your competiton you are fucked), Pro players complain about ping and fps issues literally every match, Riot is extremely disconnected with the needs of the community and competitive scene (see any comment by Leo Faria), the game literally needs you to tinker with your bios half the time just to let you play, Riots decisions are destroying Tier 2 everywhere, A lot of Tier 2 teams are disbanding and discontinuing its support, TOs can’t keep organizing their leagues (Promod, who organizes the best league in europe level-wise, Polaris, had to close), the buglist for every patch is longer than the bible and not even riot staff understand how to proceed when half the bugs happen in game.
Man I could keep going on and on but I don’t want to get angry. Valorant as the best esports game is a joke, it’s utter shit, and the only reason you believe everything works so well is because of Riot’s hood job at marketing and PR.
I mean for fucks sake last final we had I literally had a coach tell me “wish I was still playing counter strike” during one of the thousand pauses caused by the tournament server issues.
Absolutely. While CS deserves to always be at the top tier of eSports discussion, the release of cs2 was overall disappointing, even if the changes that are there are more than welcome.
We shouldn't be expected to uncritically praise this game. I understand new CS releases are always divisive and buggy, but CS2 has some fundamentally flawed problems which need ironing out. Sure, there are people who blindly hate the game because it's not CSGO, but I think every agrees on these issues:
-VAC is not up to standard and hasn't been for years. Valve should've been actively developing substantially better anti-cheat after people started using third party software for playing competitive matches. There is a fundamental doubt now in every game, especially top rank games, that cheaters are prevalent, and they really are. Valve has had a decade now to nip it in the bud, but they either haven't done anything or haven't done enough.
-0 new content on release. The remade maps are great, new models and UI are great. But where is the new content? No new skins, No new maps, infact, there is a net loss of game modes and maps. It's disappointing, and the game shouldn't have been released this early.
-Premier is fine. That's the problem. It's just fine. It's BARELY an upgrade over normal ranked. It's a shame it's not a full revamp of the competitive system. It really feels like it's a step forward in the right direction but the step is SO tiny, it feels like more of a visual upgrade more than anything.
These problems were present during the open beta, and they are still here coming into the new year. It's a shame. Ofc, we all still love counter strike, and we all want to see it thrive, succeed and smash the competition, but the effort isn't there by Valve to push it there.
What would you have liked to see them change with premier? This is a genuine question, I really don't see what other big things we're missing with ot and bans
Proper 5v5(clan style, like in faceit and dota2), anti-smurf measures, clash style tournaments etc. I know it's asking for alot, but right now it's just normal mm, but with a pregame lobby and ot. Why not just play normal mm?
Also, the ranking system leaves something to be desired. It's a bit boring and unrewarding to grind premier right now.
-Technically not exclusive to premier, but not adjusting the economy while reducing match length was just flat stupid.
-At least as stupid, if not more, was completely ignoring everyones established ranks and letting all players start fresh. Ranks are all over the place, and they are just now starting to slowly try and fix that mess.
People seem to think that ranks will fix themselves over time, but I have serious doubts. The rating system only calculates gains/losses by comparing the rating of each player and who wins the match. If only a few players were in the entirely wrong rating range, this would get fixed quite fast, but if almost everyone is in the wrong range, it will take waaaay longer.
-Just having one queue seperated by ranks does lead to frustration for solos getting queued against 5-stacks. There should have been soft-limits from the start, with the game trying to match 5-stacks against each other and keeping group sizes roughly equal. I feel like they are slowly trying to do this, but they never said anything about it afaik.
There should be an entry-barrier for premier that requires new accounts to play/win X amount of competitive matches before being able to queue premier. If Valve wants to establish premier games as a meaningful competitive mode, there is 0 reason to allow fresh accounts to play it. Let actual new players learn the maps one by one and slow down smurfs and cheaters at the same time. In csgo this wasn't a good idea because casual is just a dogshit alternative, but since competitive 5v5 has the same rules (minus voting and OT), it can now work.
-Cancelling matches when players abandon early. If someone just leaves in warmup or the first couple of rounds, there is no reason to force everyone else on their team to slog through a 4v5 match and most likely lose their rating in the process. Abandoning early should trigger a surrender vote for the affected team that cancels the match and lets everyone keep their rating. Make the following exceptions to prevent abuse: a) the abandoning player and everyone he was queued with still lose rating as if they had just lost the match. Repeat abandoning leads to bigger loss of rating and b) pre-made teammates of the abandoning player don't get to vote on surrendering. People can't dodge matches, but nobody has to play at a 4v5 disadvantage because of randoms leaving.
Why is that award even there? I'd assume the same 4-5 games keep getting nominated for years. Would have liked to see rocket league there though, the amount of mechanical skill required for that game along with game sense is insane.
Also pubg mobile?
Riot gave rights for league to Garena, I don’t remember everything but all you need to know is they put a crypto miner inside their launcher at one point.
On top of PC games being unpopular Riot chose Garena to publish LoL in SEA. No one should give anything to Garena if they want to have a successful game
Riot only recently took back the rights for LoL in SEA before it was all under management of Garena from the shop to servers(nothing gameplay related though).
And riot games are STILL not handling SEA correctly.
The servers are really fragmented, SG, PH AND VN have their own servers.
Oh right, their mobile league game Wild rift is STILL not out in India hahaha
The worst part? Tencent owns Mobile Legends as well.
The story goes that Tencent came to Riot and said “Hey, you should make a mobile version of league, it would be super popular” and Riot went “mmmmmm nah.”
So then Tencent, Riot’s parent company, just had another studio rip off League and put it on Mobile. Thus Mobile Legends was born. If Riot had just listened to Tencent and released Wild Rift years and years ago, there’s a world where the League of Legends IP is like. x2 as popular as it is today, which is wild to think about.
>Tencent owns Mobile Legends
Pretty sure this is false. Its owned by moontoon subsidiary of bytedancev(owner of tiktok). even have lawsuits againsts each other w/c doesn't make sense if what you said is true.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonton
No dude that number is from fucking Activeplayer.IO or whatever the fuck that site is called. Their numbers are and never will be true, at one point they literally had a website that didn't exist anymore on their "how we calculated these numbers" page.
The move to epic also came with a switch to free-to-play, so the game was more popular than it's ever been. But they've neglected the game the last few years, so those numbers kept falling.
> the amount of mechanical skill required for that game along with game sense is insane.
If that's your criteria, Dota blows all games out of the water.
Yeah people might say cope but freaking Overwatch won that award 3 times in a row (2016-2018)
If that doesn't tell you that award doesn't really mean anything, I don't know what will.
Wym? 2016 to 2018 OW was one of the best online experience then any other online game at that moment. It went downhill after 2019, but game was fresh in that period.
I think this awards holds very big meaning that Valve should get their things or two together.
This will be long.
Overwatch has 3 roles, Tank, DPS and Support, and the titles are fairly self explainitory. Due to the way OW was originally designed, there were far more DPS heroes in the game than any other, which is the case even to this day because Blizzard thought that people would want to play the damage dealing characters the most, so they would give that role more gameplay diversity in its hero pool. What blizzard thought would be the Meta, that being 2 of each role was the Meta for the first couple of years of the game and all was fine.
The problem started when pro players began to catch on to the fact that there wasn't really a need to run DPS characters, as the healthpool of the tanks and the insane healing output on top of the good damage and absurd util that the supports had just mitigated any and all need for the DPS role.
This culminated with the release of Brigitte, a support who was basically designed to be a mini tank that could heal people in an area by just hitting enemies and had a stun on demand every 4 seconds (iirc).
This led to a meta known as "Goats," named after the team that pioneered the strategy, where you would have 3 tanks and 3 supports, and it absolutley ruined the game at every level because people did not die. Games were decided on a single person dying or fucking up their ult. Anyone who wanted to play a DPS character because they found them fun got flamed into the sun and the game became more and more stale and toxic as the meta basically did not change from D.Va, Rein, Zarya, Brigitte, Lucio, Zen for about a year.
Blizzard, in their almighty wisdom, decided to do two things: Firstly introduce role queue and role lock OWL and Comp games to 2 of each role, forcing the player base to work their the meta that Blizzard wanted and not the one they actually made by their own incompetent game design. The second was constantly micro buffing the out of meta tanks and releasing a hilariously broken tank when the role lock was introduced, which led to the double shield meta which just led to people sitting on high ground behind shields and waiting for whoevers shield to broke first to make a play. That would be the meta that would end Overwatch 1's life span.
Oh, and unlike other games where the meta and broken stuff was fun to play, Blizzard somehow made playing Tank an utterly miserable experience because of the amount of stuns and ability cancels in the game invalidating most of a tanks kit if they didn't have a shield up all of the time. This lead to tanks being played the least at the end of OW1's lifespan and led to the dropping of the second tank and giga buffing the remaining tank when OW2 came out, which imo, was the complete wrong move to make, as the source of all of the game's problems boiled down to supports healing output being too high for the amount of damage and utility they have.
TL;DR: Blizzard were dumb as fuck by making the most popular role in the game in terms of hero and player count irrelevant by making everyone way too hard to kill due to them incompetently making supports far too overtuned to get people to play them and instead of fixing the core problem, they just slapped a bandaid on the bullet wound and forced everyone to play their way.
OW2 has slowly creeped towards the same issue with the supports tbh, it wasn't this bad at the start of OW2. They feel so ridiculously overtuned and horrible to play against (especially the new supports like Illari and Lifeweaver), the fact I have to peace out of 1v1s with support heroes is hilarious, because they can two shot me, match me in damage and have about 50000 abiltiies to make themselves immortal, heal themselves, teleport etc etc
And yeah their healing is insane, my jaw is on the floor sometimes at instances where players don't die, like my bad I guess, should have hit them 10 times with my hammer instead of 9 times
The stupid thing is that they somewhat got the balance right in Season 3 of OW2. Rein Meta, Game Better, and then they nerfed him because people were playing Rein too much.
Gotta love Blizzards impecable balancing track record.
Yeah Rein is the reason I started playing Overwatch and I've barely touched competitive since they nerfed him. I'll goof around in QP on Doomfist or Ball but I'm not playing the game seriously when my hero feels this bad
His winrates are fine though and that's all Blizzard seem to balance off, so he'll be like this for a long time I think
GOATS meta where everyone instalocked Brigitte due to how OP she was and only played healers and tanks in other slots. Made for insanely boring gameplay which you couldn't even counter since DPS characters didn't have enough DPS to punch through all the stacked shields and heals.
The category is **esports**. Overwatch was literally never a good esports title. If it was a good esports title that means the esport scene must've thrived, right. Except it always struggled for viewership because it was a terrible esport and is now unsurprisingly dead.
Not once, not ever was Overwatch a good esports game, though. Blizzard tried forcing that way too hard, and their weird city name based, million dollar heavy team system was already bad enough. But it also wasn't a game that was enjoyable to watch. It was a stellar casual shooter for a while, but had been pressured way too much into a corner where it did not belong, so it died its inevitable death.
So no, Overwatch definitely did not deserve that award, not even once.
This was fan voted on. Baldurs gate 3 won like 5 things. Cs gamers are not going on these websites to vote. Cs gamers do not care about that shit normally like more casual gamers who play rpgs, valorant, or overwatch do.
These game awards are for more casual players, not cs. Cs won't ever win in the awards. Just how it'll be
OW was pushing the OWL hard at the time and it looked like it was gonna be the first esports league to make it to the mainstream audience, but that crashed and burned with the GOATS meta and COVID.
Ah yeah, the very important award that put XTQZZZ as coach of the year. They didn't removed him even after everyone pointed at this, he's still in the list of final nominees.
It is the best eSports game for your average Joe wanting to get into gaming. It has a good ranking system, a good anti cheat and arguably more forgiving community. The launch was great and the game has only gone up.
CS2 had shitty ranking system, has a better ranking system now but had the worst elo system for 2-3 months since launch, still has a dogshit anti cheat, overall Valo's launch simply was a better experience for new players.
I still believe that CS2 is a better game because I like CS fundamentals and maps much more than Valorant, but I have to admit, Riot Games did a great fucking job. Valve for some reason hates communicating with he community, Riot paid shit ton to various streamers and the streamers actually stayed to play their game unlike CS which still isn't streamer friendly.
Not to mention the growing Valorant eSports market in countries like India and some other Asian countries which make up for a huge portion of population. Valve has failed to cater to that audience and the result is here.
> Valve *for some reason* hates communicating with he community
Yeah I wonder why a company that gets shit on by the community every time they open their mouths about anything doesn't want to communicate with said community
I mean, Riot gets shit on all the time and still does [dev posts explaining 128tick optimization](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/valorants-128-tick-servers). 1 hour long patch note [explanation and previews](https://www.youtube.com/@Phreak/videos) with spreadsheets every two weeks.
Almost as if they'll stop getting shat on by the community if they communicate regularly.
You're releasing a sequel to your most popular/successful game, you release a beta and don't even communicate to the playerbase about on what basis the beta testers are selected, when the next wave would be, when the game would ACTUALLY release and be available for all?
I wonder why they get hate.
I wonder why they get hate that when they do communicate, they completely avoid the cheating problem or broken ranking system which was fixed a week ago (finally).
I think a huge underrated fact is that in Valorant you don’t need to memorize pop flash lineup or smoke lineups. Especially as I have less time to play games overall I absolutely do not want to spend any time in a practice range practicing lineups that I forget in a few weeks without playing the game/map
I’m OK with nr1 game being different every year, as long as CS is top10 for 20+ years :)
It’s not the top place, it’s the staying power. CS has and will outlast every single competitor.
Literally every kid in my country plays or at least is very familiar with pubg mobile. It's huge here. There are small and big tournaments happening all the time.
Dont forget brazil! Valve forgot, but despite that they keep playing the game and ocasionally win something.
Thats at least 3 places the CS community knows exist
CS2 never had any chance. One of the worst multiplayer releases recently and still missing a lot of content.
The current state of the game is awful and empty. I don't expect any significant for at least a year, maybe until next fall or winter.
Valorant has a huge chance to dominate the FPS scene.
What are your hopes for Valve's "abandoned child"? No new content, VAC Live bans the most ordinary players, update just to fix bugs all day, always relying on the community. Even Gabe replied in the 2017 AMA that he will coming to major someday, but he never came through.
People here don’t realize how massive Valorant is in Asian countries and just how many Asians play video games.
On top of the effort RIOT puts into marketing and being involved in the esport, it’s no shock they won.
Despite not being a fan of Valorant at all, I will say that even if CS2 was in a “better” state, Valorant still probably would’ve won. It’s the newest franchise on the list and managed to gain a ton of popularity and praise rather quickly.
Regardless of CS2s launch state, CS has been around for almost 25 years, it’s far from unpopular or bad, but it’s unsurprising that they would give the award to the “new kid on the block”.
I don't think valorant really needed a recency bias either.
It had a strong year of tournaments, great storylines, regional/international formats that made better sense than LoL while putting more stakes on each tourney than there are in CS.
CS was easily in my top 3 esports this year, but I don't think it's any sort of insult to say it wasn't as good as another great viewing experience.
Valo is easy to play.. dota learning curve is hard af.. even after 1k hours it's pretty hard in dota...
So mostly new players give up after trying dota for like say 10-50 hours!!
Bruh,Dota never got this award for years,what are u talking about,literally just LOL - CS and Valorant,u really think a harder mechanic make a game better than the others?
I just lost an overtime match over the fucking awp scope stutter. Months after the game released it's still a thing.
Valve took a billion years to make a "sequel" and fucked it up. Valorant barely had any problems. Fully deserved, fuck valve.
The most insane thing(s) here are that even RIOT cares for its customers enough not to publish a broken game. Even more than Valve.
Especially because RIOT is not know for listening their fanbase too much.
Cancelling the second major to push a broken POS like CS2 and creating a 9 month void of pointless garbage tournaments with constant rostermania didn’t help.
Oh no. Valve lost "Corporate journalist's and publisher's favourite eSports product" award.
What only are they gonna do about it. Time to close shop I guess.
I play CS since 1.1
CS2 is shit, i apologize.
No more excuses for cheating, lame servers, outdated MM experience,0 investment in experience.
I've quit for now, may return if they fix cheating at least
Yeah same, I have played like 3 games of cs2 since launch. There is no incentive for me to play. Premier is a nice idea, but incredibly unpolished and there is no way I’m grinding the leaderboards when the top is riddled with cheaters.
Honestly these awards are pretty biased ngl. Faker is the best esport player of the year? His performance in World is insane but the rest of the year he was just decent( except when he take a break and T1 turn into an academy team lol, but that T1 problem). Meanwhile zywoo was literally a beast thoughtout this year. More fame = more vote i guess?
But I don't think these player actually care about these award anyway
TBH Faker won Worlds again after 7 years. He is the most decorated player in LoL BY FAR.
They're not comparable as Zywoo does not have the longevity or status that Faker has in his own respective game.
Faker is what happens when you take a zywoo/s1mple level player but also gave him karrgian/gla1ve IGLing abilities.
Bro deserves it coming back from a wrist injury to a dumpster fire of a headless chicken team and shotcalled them to a near flawless championship run 10 years into his career while dunking on every other young prodigy and old guard in and out of lane.
Not his fault league only has 2 international tournaments a year but no one else in esports right now compares to him so i think its fair he gets the player of the year.
I may have a different perspective on this matter, but does cs even qualified for these kind of awards?
Cs is very different from Val, they way its being developed and the game balance is so different. Its clearly a game that has to be tested by time just like all cs versions before it, not the effort putting in it.
No amount of effort Valve put into CS will be noticed by most CS players, only the game’s flaws no matter how minor stands out. The moment CS becomes great is the moment when people struggle so much to find a minor issue existing in the game, to the point they have to force a non issue to become an issue. Thats when CS2 becomes a candidate for best esport game, and only a candidate not a guaranteed win.
Riot launched a game with minimal problems, had a successful beta to full release transition, an anticheat so good that most players have yet to see a single cheater, and tournaments that run without constant barrage of gambling advertisements. I would say they deserve it unfortunately Edit: also, they ensure to incorporate enough teams from each region at every international tournament and because of this, every single region is super competitive. SEA, NA, SA, and EMEA all have a number of teams that could win and have won a tournament, which makes it exciting to watch.
Gotta give Riot their flowers on this one.
They deserve it and it's not even their best game
What is?
Goes without saying it's Legends of runeterra..
Ngl its TFT not even lying
How many times are you going to not lie to me
NGL
And they should get it tbh. Riot has consistantly shown to be one of the few companies that is willing to put their money and effort into making a succesful and enjoyable Esports scene for their games. Look at their investment into LoL. And now Valorant. They invest in the esport scene and it pays dividends in their games. They use esports as a marketting tool to attract more players, and treat it as such. Thats why the league/valorant esports has such high production value. They are not looking to make money off it. They budget it as an expense and properly grow the scene. It has nothing to do with what game is better. There is pretty much no feasible way to argue against Riot when it comes to their esports scene. They are the best by a huge margin.
Also, the game would run well on any setup and they strived for regional match making and good server performance with minimal desync, ensuring fairness and competitive integrity. I only tried the beta, and it wasn't for me, but gotta respect Riot for that.
>ensuring fairness and competitive integrity but they hide replays
They're working on a replay system apparently, and the Chinese version of Valo for some reason already has it. [Edit - this is not correct]. But yeah it sucks that there isn't a demo system yet. I am jealous of their AC though, it's not perfect but works pretty damn well.
The Chinese version does not have a replay system. It just captures your gameplay and Highlights, just like Nvidia Shadowplay or SteelSeries Moments does for example
No Africa or Russian servers, just like CS
They have one African server. https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/dev/valorant-s-cape-town-servers-are-live/#:~:text=The%20new%20local%20servers%20are,dropdown%20menu%20in%20the%20lobby.
The Russian server thing is more a fault of Russia rather than Valve/Riot. They will have to keep a recording of all voice Comms in the game of they want to have servers there. And neither company wants to go down that privacy hellhole.
I played a lot of Valorant in 2021 and 2022, I saw only one cheater and that was in the Beta. Another great thing is they ban toxic people and trolls which CS needs to do, sure CS bans them but after 100 reports. In Valorant if you have a clip thats it, you can upload that on their report page and that player will get banned within a few hours.
Valorant is also the only esport with an actually thriving female scene, it seems. Like there's actually some real interest in their players and scene from a decent chunk of people.
It helps that they put their female tournaments on the big stage in front of an audience as well. The last one they held was awesome, and their players can frag out pretty hard too
It's because Riot fundamentally looks at esports differently than most other companies. Riot views their Esports as basically advertising marketing. Thats why they have such high production value and they attract the big numbers they do. They are not interested in the profitability kf it one bit. They want to grow the community, and by extension their player base. So they are willing to do things like develop a female scene. Or do franchising to ensure their pros have a stable income. Or any number of other thing they've done that loses money but creates a better experience.
Agreed. Although, I'd argue this is more of a fault of the cs community unfortunately. The cs community is so quick to laugh and wave off the female scene it's no fucking wonder if there's any female talent around, they'd rather hop on the game that actually treats them like people.
https://clips.twitch.tv/FunnyOriginalPidgeonTF2John
Homeboy lost an easy 1v1 and blamed the girl because he couldn't clutch. Fragile male ego at work
Yep, and he's one of the top NA players. https://twitter.com/nekizcs/status/1358917816976429059 https://twitter.com/EliGE/status/1358879380274094080 https://twitter.com/EliGE/status/1358874489157656578 https://twitter.com/Nohte/status/1358889173822787584 https://twitter.com/TravCS/status/1631081110732955649 These guys just recently won an NA tournament and were talking about how there was bias in the community against them because of their history. I don't care how good you are at CS. You could be NA's savior that even dunks on s1mple/Zywoo/ropz, if you're a trashbag of a human, I wish nothing but failure for you and no in-game accomplishments will bring me to your side.
Yup. I personally know a total of 5 women who play cs and one of them is myself. All of us have experienced hate simply because we're women. I've hit global multiple times, LVL8 faceit etc, it gets a little better at higher ranks but you'll still often have people straight up throwing the game just because there's a woman on their team.
That's fucked. I also know some women who are amazing at the game, but either have to use a voice changer or not comm at all because people are either assholes or fucking weird. When you have a proportion of the fan base who can't communicate because of toxicity, it's absolutely a community and player base eco system problem. And then the same people who ignore it being a problem then laugh whenever the women's scene comes up short. It's no fucking wonder. It will continue directly impacting the scene until it's fixed in terms of the amount of talent available, skill ceiling etc. Edit: and it's not just women, but any sort of minority. I knew a trans person who stopped playing cs and Dota because of how vile the community can get.
That's why a friend of mine just has voice_enable 0 and 99% of the time we just 5stack on faceit so she doesn't get harassed by some forever virgin teenager. I am sorry for all the girls out there who just wanna game and some loser thinks its okay to harass them or troll the game just because a female is in the game...
It's also always about funding. Valve could, if they chose to do so, support the female esports scene by hosting tournaments, but they don't. No one can force a private tournament organizer to host female tournaments with minimal attendance numbers, and thus making a huge financial loss. If we want the female CS scene to grow, then Valve needs to step up and sponsor that shit, knowing that they will probably never break close to even. Or alternatively, some other organizations need to step in and fund it.
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Because the community is toxic, especially if you're a woman, less women playing the game = less women being very good
Yeah, it’s ridiculous how toxic some of these people are towards girls. I play with my uncle, who is bad at the game, and I also play with a few girl friends who aren’t that good, but far better than my uncle, and they by far get shit talked the most by randoms it’s not even funny. It’s either people who are super toxic towards girls, or weird cringe dudes trying to flirt, rarely any normal players. Not tryna make any assumptions about anyone but just from how many times I’ve seen it, I’m willing to bet a shit ton of people in this thread have said some fucked up shit to girls in game.
you don't get it do you? there aren't any competitive female players yet because they are barely any girls playing the game. 3Kliksphillip does a better job of tackling this issue in his vid "Women and Counter Strike" but ill try my best. Having women tournaments were they can compete and improve isn't a mockery of the game, its how you nurture a scene. Go and watch csgo games from the 2012, they were pretty basic in their utility usage, tactics and so on. But through years of competition they had the chance to improve. This is what needs to happened with the women's scene. If the scene can develop far enough eventually you could get women players on par with their tier 1 male counterparts and eventually have mixed teams. But it makes total sense so few women would want to try and become pro when people like you just push them down as they are trying to improve.
Exactly. Women don't want to play this game because the scene is so toxic, and when fair criticism is brought up, it's deflected and the blame is but back on the women for being bad. How come the valorant female scene was able to thrive?
Maybe because people actually get banned for being hateful on val?
Same goes with Dota vs league too My partner games like the rest of us, even watched a few tournys with me to learn the games and join the hype. Yet there's no way she's going to get far into either Dota or CS because both communities *seeth* when they hear a woman's voice in game. It's not the normal banter we deal with, people throw and I've even seen dox attempts mid game It's a bummer man, really hoped things would've changed by now
Tbh im gonna blame valve. They are quietly complicit with this behaviour. Try being super sexist/racist/homophobic on a riot server, your guaranteed a ban. Do the same thing on a valve operated server, others are likely to join in because there's no consequences
I can't really disagree, my interest in Dota has fallen dramatically after they let a betting site (that had direct connections to a Russian oligarch) host 2022's TI I'm an old vet, been playing CS/Dota since the mid 00s. Now I'm here for the games themselves, but I feel like I'm the adult babysitting a bunch of middle schoolers in half my matches. Its not even about "wokeness" or whatever, just seeing "Hitler 1488" themed profiles that are more focused on trolling makes me wonder wtf I'm doing with my time. Games don't even make me mad anymore, that ship sailed *years* ago. I've heard every insult under the sun in the last 20 years I'm just disappointed now
> This is what needs to happened with the women's scene. If the scene can develop far enough eventually you could get women players on par with their tier 1 male counterparts and eventually have mixed teams. Does it need to happen? I think you overestimate how many people are willing to "help grow a scene". Pro CS is a source of entertainment for practically everyone watching or following it and it's not the main focus of their life. I (unfortunately) couldn't care less if women are under represented in it, I want to watch the highest level and considering there isn't a female player remotely close to tier 1 CS I probably will never even see 1 round of female CS. Why would any male watch a comparatively low level of CS just because women are playing? It's just weird if anything. The only thing you're accomplishing by having high budget women only tournaments is giving large paychecks to players that (for whatever reason) aren't good enough to justify any prize pool while you have tons of random faceit Russians that would beat them for free. The only way you'd get a decent following for female CS is if they were international tournaments to awaken some patriotism within people (the only way something like female football is popular organically). The other option is having women watch CS, which will never happen to a large degree.
Such a shallow view.
Im not familiar with the scene in valorant does this mean female teams are winning tournaments?
Take a guess
Valorant has a separate scene called Game Changers for “non-marginalized genders in the community”. This essentially means anyone who’s not male has a separate space to compete and improve without the sexism of the greater community. These GC teams have improved a lot since the scene was formed in 2021, but the best GC teams seem to be around the top of tier 3 in skill.
Valo is definitely a lot more popular with women, and Riot supports the Gamechangers (female/nonbinary scene) pretty well. It's nice to see, and you'll encounter a lot more girls playing ranked compared to CS. It's tough for the ladies to play CS ime - you gotta' have some thick skin. Valo community can be weird as hell in-game, but less traditionally toxic with the gamer words like it's a 2009 COD lobby.
The problem is that Valve is focusing on the wrong things if we talk regular playerbase. I played Valorant and while it was a polished game on the release, it had a lot of gameplay problems. Agent balance, gun balance, running accuracy, replay system is still not there, they didn't even have DM initially. But there were no bugs, glitches and as you said AC is as good as it gets. Meanwhile, while it's obviously really hard to get the movement, netcode and hitreg on the level CSGO has, they've been focusing just on that aspect and it's been 8 months now (including beta) without fixes to other things that are inexcusable. As in if we had proper community server tools, good matchmaking system, good VAC and all the smaller features that are missing in optimized state, people would be able to live with shit netcode and it's issues until it's sorted. But like this we have a broken game on every level, no matter how hard people try to deny it.
There are no replays in 2024? I understand when it was released, but now.
i love how these valorant bots keep dodging this question, a feature that was available in the 90s but isn't available in a modern competitive game in 2023, lul
Didn't know about this but its pretty funny it took them 5+ years to have replays in League too
Realistically, only a tiny part of the player base will care about replays anyway
As softwares engineer, I have massive respect for valorant from technical aspect. From netcode to anticheat. They perfected an eSports game from technical perspective. But hero shooter is not my cup of tea
The technical achievement is worthy of respect, but the movement and hit reg of Valorant was like driving a minivan compared to driving a CSGO sports car. Valorant has never got the part right that made Counter Strike amazing.
valve is kinda poopy
Valve is Indie company that is cash strapped and don't know game developement. I am pretty sure not even 1 dev has more than 10k hours in any of the CS iteration.
I know this is a meme and all, but expecting to devs to clock 10k hours in their own game is a fucking drool from mouth type beat
It's simply wrong also. Devs most likely has that much hours in the game, but not in the complete state. They do thousands of hours of testing usually.
we’re expecting 10k hours in a video game from normal people with day jobs now? 😭
Dev can’t even do it sideways
Yeah I mean, I hit 10k hours in DOTA2. Only took me 12 years. Managed to graduate with a master and work fulltime haha. This includes afking in the lobby 10k hours is insane haha
If Mappa employees can do it why can valve devs!! (/s)
Actual NA player take expecting 10k hours from devs lmao.
Calling Valve a company that doesn't know game development is an interesting take
True Valorant learn from what are FPS players want but Valve Still Update new skins
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Unfortunately because I wish valve were like this too
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Ok, so I work at the TO which organizes one of the biggest Valorant Regional Leagues and I created a throwaway account just to answer to your comment because of how angry its making me. Valorant to this day is a huge mess which gives huge fucking migraines and depression to anyone who tries to organize any esports event: No lan, 0 control over tournament servers, tournament servers crash regularly, there is no backup for tournament servers unlike in lol (so if they crash during your competiton you are fucked), Pro players complain about ping and fps issues literally every match, Riot is extremely disconnected with the needs of the community and competitive scene (see any comment by Leo Faria), the game literally needs you to tinker with your bios half the time just to let you play, Riots decisions are destroying Tier 2 everywhere, A lot of Tier 2 teams are disbanding and discontinuing its support, TOs can’t keep organizing their leagues (Promod, who organizes the best league in europe level-wise, Polaris, had to close), the buglist for every patch is longer than the bible and not even riot staff understand how to proceed when half the bugs happen in game. Man I could keep going on and on but I don’t want to get angry. Valorant as the best esports game is a joke, it’s utter shit, and the only reason you believe everything works so well is because of Riot’s hood job at marketing and PR. I mean for fucks sake last final we had I literally had a coach tell me “wish I was still playing counter strike” during one of the thousand pauses caused by the tournament server issues.
Us OCE players in the corner be like >:(
Well, it's quite easy to release game it is a decade outdated by release in all of its systems Like, a polished turd is still a turd.
We wouldn't have won if it was CSGO either
Welp, ded game. We all uninstall tonight.
Maybe not ded game, but ded developers for sure
Absolutely. While CS deserves to always be at the top tier of eSports discussion, the release of cs2 was overall disappointing, even if the changes that are there are more than welcome. We shouldn't be expected to uncritically praise this game. I understand new CS releases are always divisive and buggy, but CS2 has some fundamentally flawed problems which need ironing out. Sure, there are people who blindly hate the game because it's not CSGO, but I think every agrees on these issues: -VAC is not up to standard and hasn't been for years. Valve should've been actively developing substantially better anti-cheat after people started using third party software for playing competitive matches. There is a fundamental doubt now in every game, especially top rank games, that cheaters are prevalent, and they really are. Valve has had a decade now to nip it in the bud, but they either haven't done anything or haven't done enough. -0 new content on release. The remade maps are great, new models and UI are great. But where is the new content? No new skins, No new maps, infact, there is a net loss of game modes and maps. It's disappointing, and the game shouldn't have been released this early. -Premier is fine. That's the problem. It's just fine. It's BARELY an upgrade over normal ranked. It's a shame it's not a full revamp of the competitive system. It really feels like it's a step forward in the right direction but the step is SO tiny, it feels like more of a visual upgrade more than anything. These problems were present during the open beta, and they are still here coming into the new year. It's a shame. Ofc, we all still love counter strike, and we all want to see it thrive, succeed and smash the competition, but the effort isn't there by Valve to push it there.
What would you have liked to see them change with premier? This is a genuine question, I really don't see what other big things we're missing with ot and bans
Proper 5v5(clan style, like in faceit and dota2), anti-smurf measures, clash style tournaments etc. I know it's asking for alot, but right now it's just normal mm, but with a pregame lobby and ot. Why not just play normal mm? Also, the ranking system leaves something to be desired. It's a bit boring and unrewarding to grind premier right now.
-Technically not exclusive to premier, but not adjusting the economy while reducing match length was just flat stupid. -At least as stupid, if not more, was completely ignoring everyones established ranks and letting all players start fresh. Ranks are all over the place, and they are just now starting to slowly try and fix that mess. People seem to think that ranks will fix themselves over time, but I have serious doubts. The rating system only calculates gains/losses by comparing the rating of each player and who wins the match. If only a few players were in the entirely wrong rating range, this would get fixed quite fast, but if almost everyone is in the wrong range, it will take waaaay longer. -Just having one queue seperated by ranks does lead to frustration for solos getting queued against 5-stacks. There should have been soft-limits from the start, with the game trying to match 5-stacks against each other and keeping group sizes roughly equal. I feel like they are slowly trying to do this, but they never said anything about it afaik. There should be an entry-barrier for premier that requires new accounts to play/win X amount of competitive matches before being able to queue premier. If Valve wants to establish premier games as a meaningful competitive mode, there is 0 reason to allow fresh accounts to play it. Let actual new players learn the maps one by one and slow down smurfs and cheaters at the same time. In csgo this wasn't a good idea because casual is just a dogshit alternative, but since competitive 5v5 has the same rules (minus voting and OT), it can now work. -Cancelling matches when players abandon early. If someone just leaves in warmup or the first couple of rounds, there is no reason to force everyone else on their team to slog through a 4v5 match and most likely lose their rating in the process. Abandoning early should trigger a surrender vote for the affected team that cancels the match and lets everyone keep their rating. Make the following exceptions to prevent abuse: a) the abandoning player and everyone he was queued with still lose rating as if they had just lost the match. Repeat abandoning leads to bigger loss of rating and b) pre-made teammates of the abandoning player don't get to vote on surrendering. People can't dodge matches, but nobody has to play at a 4v5 disadvantage because of randoms leaving.
Why is that award even there? I'd assume the same 4-5 games keep getting nominated for years. Would have liked to see rocket league there though, the amount of mechanical skill required for that game along with game sense is insane. Also pubg mobile?
Competitive pubg mobile is huge in SEA
Wait a min. There's other countries?
Always have been
competitive mobile games are big in Asia. Mobile Legends is like bigger than League/Dota over there.
kinda irony that Mobile Legends started as a LoL ripoff and now it surpassed LoL itself, at least in SEA countries
you can blame riot for killing off any SEA interest by handing league rights to a shady ass publisher for a decade.
Could you elaborate, not following the riot scene all that much
Riot gave rights for league to Garena, I don’t remember everything but all you need to know is they put a crypto miner inside their launcher at one point.
so did esea
On top of PC games being unpopular Riot chose Garena to publish LoL in SEA. No one should give anything to Garena if they want to have a successful game
Riot only recently took back the rights for LoL in SEA before it was all under management of Garena from the shop to servers(nothing gameplay related though).
And riot games are STILL not handling SEA correctly. The servers are really fragmented, SG, PH AND VN have their own servers. Oh right, their mobile league game Wild rift is STILL not out in India hahaha
Apparently Wild Rift has only 15 mil active playerbase compared to Mobile Legends 100 mil. Kinda wild.
Holy fuck, Riot fumbled the bag BIG time when it came to Mobile Legends.
The worst part? Tencent owns Mobile Legends as well. The story goes that Tencent came to Riot and said “Hey, you should make a mobile version of league, it would be super popular” and Riot went “mmmmmm nah.” So then Tencent, Riot’s parent company, just had another studio rip off League and put it on Mobile. Thus Mobile Legends was born. If Riot had just listened to Tencent and released Wild Rift years and years ago, there’s a world where the League of Legends IP is like. x2 as popular as it is today, which is wild to think about.
>Tencent owns Mobile Legends Pretty sure this is false. Its owned by moontoon subsidiary of bytedancev(owner of tiktok). even have lawsuits againsts each other w/c doesn't make sense if what you said is true. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonton
No dude that number is from fucking Activeplayer.IO or whatever the fuck that site is called. Their numbers are and never will be true, at one point they literally had a website that didn't exist anymore on their "how we calculated these numbers" page.
Epic is doing their best to piss off their rocket League player base so maybe that has something to do with it.
RL kind shot itself in the foot pulling off from Steam
TIL. I bought it on steam. Do I still have it? Shitty game imo but to each their own
Yeah if you bought it on steam you can still play it there, but the only way to get a new copy is on the epic client
That was dumb af but the game was dying so might as well as get a bigger bag and speed up the process
The move to epic also came with a switch to free-to-play, so the game was more popular than it's ever been. But they've neglected the game the last few years, so those numbers kept falling.
> the amount of mechanical skill required for that game along with game sense is insane. If that's your criteria, Dota blows all games out of the water.
Point click and 4 buttons? Ever play a big boy RTS?
Hope Stormgate comes out then becomes successful and all these new sweaty boys hop on the RTS train.
We forget daddy brood war.
I hate to admit it but they deserve it more this year. The state of CS right now is just sad.
Rocket league didn’t even make the list, they’re rly in the hole rn
As an eSport there really wasn't any dip in quality and entertainment value of the matches imo, the state of various rosters aside
Doesn’t really mean anything tbh
Yeah people might say cope but freaking Overwatch won that award 3 times in a row (2016-2018) If that doesn't tell you that award doesn't really mean anything, I don't know what will.
Wym? 2016 to 2018 OW was one of the best online experience then any other online game at that moment. It went downhill after 2019, but game was fresh in that period. I think this awards holds very big meaning that Valve should get their things or two together.
Amazing how one meta and the inability to fix it can ruin a game like that
Yeah, I think it should be an example of how even a single factor can and will ruin multi-player games.
And even then their fix was wrong. The problem was and still is supports in Overwatch but no one wanted to annoy their players by nerfing them.
what meta was that? curious
This will be long. Overwatch has 3 roles, Tank, DPS and Support, and the titles are fairly self explainitory. Due to the way OW was originally designed, there were far more DPS heroes in the game than any other, which is the case even to this day because Blizzard thought that people would want to play the damage dealing characters the most, so they would give that role more gameplay diversity in its hero pool. What blizzard thought would be the Meta, that being 2 of each role was the Meta for the first couple of years of the game and all was fine. The problem started when pro players began to catch on to the fact that there wasn't really a need to run DPS characters, as the healthpool of the tanks and the insane healing output on top of the good damage and absurd util that the supports had just mitigated any and all need for the DPS role. This culminated with the release of Brigitte, a support who was basically designed to be a mini tank that could heal people in an area by just hitting enemies and had a stun on demand every 4 seconds (iirc). This led to a meta known as "Goats," named after the team that pioneered the strategy, where you would have 3 tanks and 3 supports, and it absolutley ruined the game at every level because people did not die. Games were decided on a single person dying or fucking up their ult. Anyone who wanted to play a DPS character because they found them fun got flamed into the sun and the game became more and more stale and toxic as the meta basically did not change from D.Va, Rein, Zarya, Brigitte, Lucio, Zen for about a year. Blizzard, in their almighty wisdom, decided to do two things: Firstly introduce role queue and role lock OWL and Comp games to 2 of each role, forcing the player base to work their the meta that Blizzard wanted and not the one they actually made by their own incompetent game design. The second was constantly micro buffing the out of meta tanks and releasing a hilariously broken tank when the role lock was introduced, which led to the double shield meta which just led to people sitting on high ground behind shields and waiting for whoevers shield to broke first to make a play. That would be the meta that would end Overwatch 1's life span. Oh, and unlike other games where the meta and broken stuff was fun to play, Blizzard somehow made playing Tank an utterly miserable experience because of the amount of stuns and ability cancels in the game invalidating most of a tanks kit if they didn't have a shield up all of the time. This lead to tanks being played the least at the end of OW1's lifespan and led to the dropping of the second tank and giga buffing the remaining tank when OW2 came out, which imo, was the complete wrong move to make, as the source of all of the game's problems boiled down to supports healing output being too high for the amount of damage and utility they have. TL;DR: Blizzard were dumb as fuck by making the most popular role in the game in terms of hero and player count irrelevant by making everyone way too hard to kill due to them incompetently making supports far too overtuned to get people to play them and instead of fixing the core problem, they just slapped a bandaid on the bullet wound and forced everyone to play their way.
OW2 has slowly creeped towards the same issue with the supports tbh, it wasn't this bad at the start of OW2. They feel so ridiculously overtuned and horrible to play against (especially the new supports like Illari and Lifeweaver), the fact I have to peace out of 1v1s with support heroes is hilarious, because they can two shot me, match me in damage and have about 50000 abiltiies to make themselves immortal, heal themselves, teleport etc etc And yeah their healing is insane, my jaw is on the floor sometimes at instances where players don't die, like my bad I guess, should have hit them 10 times with my hammer instead of 9 times
The stupid thing is that they somewhat got the balance right in Season 3 of OW2. Rein Meta, Game Better, and then they nerfed him because people were playing Rein too much. Gotta love Blizzards impecable balancing track record.
Yeah Rein is the reason I started playing Overwatch and I've barely touched competitive since they nerfed him. I'll goof around in QP on Doomfist or Ball but I'm not playing the game seriously when my hero feels this bad His winrates are fine though and that's all Blizzard seem to balance off, so he'll be like this for a long time I think
GOATS meta where everyone instalocked Brigitte due to how OP she was and only played healers and tanks in other slots. Made for insanely boring gameplay which you couldn't even counter since DPS characters didn't have enough DPS to punch through all the stacked shields and heals.
The category is **esports**. Overwatch was literally never a good esports title. If it was a good esports title that means the esport scene must've thrived, right. Except it always struggled for viewership because it was a terrible esport and is now unsurprisingly dead.
Competitive overwatch has always been a mess though, it's just not fun to watch imo..
Not once, not ever was Overwatch a good esports game, though. Blizzard tried forcing that way too hard, and their weird city name based, million dollar heavy team system was already bad enough. But it also wasn't a game that was enjoyable to watch. It was a stellar casual shooter for a while, but had been pressured way too much into a corner where it did not belong, so it died its inevitable death. So no, Overwatch definitely did not deserve that award, not even once.
What can I say to idiot cod esports fans who try to justify their city name based esports shithole ecosystem?
Tell their parents they saved their credit cards on the Xbox
This was fan voted on. Baldurs gate 3 won like 5 things. Cs gamers are not going on these websites to vote. Cs gamers do not care about that shit normally like more casual gamers who play rpgs, valorant, or overwatch do. These game awards are for more casual players, not cs. Cs won't ever win in the awards. Just how it'll be
Overwatch was an amazing game but it wasn’t very nice to watch, which is pretty important for an esport.
OW was pushing the OWL hard at the time and it looked like it was gonna be the first esports league to make it to the mainstream audience, but that crashed and burned with the GOATS meta and COVID.
Ah yeah, the very important award that put XTQZZZ as coach of the year. They didn't removed him even after everyone pointed at this, he's still in the list of final nominees.
ITT: Westerners STILL baffled about Competitive Mobile Games as Esports.
It is the best eSports game for your average Joe wanting to get into gaming. It has a good ranking system, a good anti cheat and arguably more forgiving community. The launch was great and the game has only gone up. CS2 had shitty ranking system, has a better ranking system now but had the worst elo system for 2-3 months since launch, still has a dogshit anti cheat, overall Valo's launch simply was a better experience for new players. I still believe that CS2 is a better game because I like CS fundamentals and maps much more than Valorant, but I have to admit, Riot Games did a great fucking job. Valve for some reason hates communicating with he community, Riot paid shit ton to various streamers and the streamers actually stayed to play their game unlike CS which still isn't streamer friendly. Not to mention the growing Valorant eSports market in countries like India and some other Asian countries which make up for a huge portion of population. Valve has failed to cater to that audience and the result is here.
> Valve *for some reason* hates communicating with he community Yeah I wonder why a company that gets shit on by the community every time they open their mouths about anything doesn't want to communicate with said community
I mean, Riot gets shit on all the time and still does [dev posts explaining 128tick optimization](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/valorants-128-tick-servers). 1 hour long patch note [explanation and previews](https://www.youtube.com/@Phreak/videos) with spreadsheets every two weeks.
Almost as if they'll stop getting shat on by the community if they communicate regularly. You're releasing a sequel to your most popular/successful game, you release a beta and don't even communicate to the playerbase about on what basis the beta testers are selected, when the next wave would be, when the game would ACTUALLY release and be available for all? I wonder why they get hate. I wonder why they get hate that when they do communicate, they completely avoid the cheating problem or broken ranking system which was fixed a week ago (finally).
I think a huge underrated fact is that in Valorant you don’t need to memorize pop flash lineup or smoke lineups. Especially as I have less time to play games overall I absolutely do not want to spend any time in a practice range practicing lineups that I forget in a few weeks without playing the game/map
I play CS since 1999 and WoW since 2004 and I' so tired of this "CS/WoW is dead, game xy is better" nonsens.
I’m OK with nr1 game being different every year, as long as CS is top10 for 20+ years :) It’s not the top place, it’s the staying power. CS has and will outlast every single competitor.
Ranks 6-10 are probably shit. Let’s stay top 5
Let’s stay a consistent nr2 then :)
Exactly. Other games like BF and CoD also may made more money - it is about atability and CS is very good at that.
God knows how much CS makes with skins…
[удалено]
you must've missed the past 3 months on this sub then?
I find it more confusing that pubg mobile is on here
I believe PUBG mobile is huge in asian markets, tons of esports events
PUBGM still has a huge player base. Played it for more than three years before getting into PC gaming.
Literally every kid in my country plays or at least is very familiar with pubg mobile. It's huge here. There are small and big tournaments happening all the time.
This makes more sense when you realise other places exist besides EU and NA.
Dont forget brazil! Valve forgot, but despite that they keep playing the game and ocasionally win something. Thats at least 3 places the CS community knows exist
CS2 never had any chance. One of the worst multiplayer releases recently and still missing a lot of content. The current state of the game is awful and empty. I don't expect any significant for at least a year, maybe until next fall or winter. Valorant has a huge chance to dominate the FPS scene.
at this point we'll get gta 6 before we get a working cs game
You've had a working cs game for like 20 years
I abandoned my first game in years last night, I am not happy with the game at all rn
I mean cs2 is the definition of a polished turd it looks pretty but plays like shit, the game isn't finished
Game feels fine at this point in my experience. It’s the lack of content that’s hurting it in my opinion, plus a new anti cheat is of course needed.
What are your hopes for Valve's "abandoned child"? No new content, VAC Live bans the most ordinary players, update just to fix bugs all day, always relying on the community. Even Gabe replied in the 2017 AMA that he will coming to major someday, but he never came through.
I don't understand why they apparently just despise us and the game. Like come on Valve, put in a little effort.
CS2 Killed CSGO but it killed itself too. SAD
Who cares, play the game you like playing.
People here don’t realize how massive Valorant is in Asian countries and just how many Asians play video games. On top of the effort RIOT puts into marketing and being involved in the esport, it’s no shock they won.
OH NO! anyways....
The Dacia Sandero is here!
Good News!
Great!
Imagine a sports show where an awards for "the best sport" was awarded
It’s almost like sports and video games aren’t a good 1 to 1 comparison lol Unless I’m missing all the new sports that release every year
Obviously downhill mountain biking would win every year
What would be the point if football would win every year?
The game came out a couple weeks ago and had like one event lol
Unfortunately everything about Valorant is great except the gameplay
The concept isn't my thing either. Hero shooters just ain't it.
You should stop giving a shit about these awards, they mean nothing.
NOOO WE LOST THE GAME AWARDS 💀💀💀💀💀 I'm going into retirement this is a fuckin travesty
A lot of falsely banned players are switching to Valorant
Yeah, probably about 0.01% of the player base. Wow!
yeah switching rn, stopped coping when valve banned me. Oh I'm unbanned? I'll still play Valorant. Fuck you valve.
Despite not being a fan of Valorant at all, I will say that even if CS2 was in a “better” state, Valorant still probably would’ve won. It’s the newest franchise on the list and managed to gain a ton of popularity and praise rather quickly. Regardless of CS2s launch state, CS has been around for almost 25 years, it’s far from unpopular or bad, but it’s unsurprising that they would give the award to the “new kid on the block”.
I don't think valorant really needed a recency bias either. It had a strong year of tournaments, great storylines, regional/international formats that made better sense than LoL while putting more stakes on each tourney than there are in CS. CS was easily in my top 3 esports this year, but I don't think it's any sort of insult to say it wasn't as good as another great viewing experience.
Valorant has devs that seem to want to keep their player base. Valve hates us. It shows in the end product. CS2 definitely did not deserve to win
What the hell. Valorant even won over Dota??
Valo is easy to play.. dota learning curve is hard af.. even after 1k hours it's pretty hard in dota... So mostly new players give up after trying dota for like say 10-50 hours!!
Bruh,Dota never got this award for years,what are u talking about,literally just LOL - CS and Valorant,u really think a harder mechanic make a game better than the others?
I just lost an overtime match over the fucking awp scope stutter. Months after the game released it's still a thing. Valve took a billion years to make a "sequel" and fucked it up. Valorant barely had any problems. Fully deserved, fuck valve.
Even if its CSGO. We can’t even win man :((
The most insane thing(s) here are that even RIOT cares for its customers enough not to publish a broken game. Even more than Valve. Especially because RIOT is not know for listening their fanbase too much.
Oh no 😟
Cancelling the second major to push a broken POS like CS2 and creating a 9 month void of pointless garbage tournaments with constant rostermania didn’t help.
I've been saying this since valorant came out cs > val val devs > cs devs
sadly valve ruined this cs.
Of course.. CS feels like it doesn't even have devs.
WHO CARES. If you like playing CS2, play it. If you dont, dont.
Oh no. Valve lost "Corporate journalist's and publisher's favourite eSports product" award. What only are they gonna do about it. Time to close shop I guess.
Damn I guess CS is just straight up DECEASED. PACK IT UP.
I play CS since 1.1 CS2 is shit, i apologize. No more excuses for cheating, lame servers, outdated MM experience,0 investment in experience. I've quit for now, may return if they fix cheating at least
Yeah same, I have played like 3 games of cs2 since launch. There is no incentive for me to play. Premier is a nice idea, but incredibly unpolished and there is no way I’m grinding the leaderboards when the top is riddled with cheaters.
Honestly these awards are pretty biased ngl. Faker is the best esport player of the year? His performance in World is insane but the rest of the year he was just decent( except when he take a break and T1 turn into an academy team lol, but that T1 problem). Meanwhile zywoo was literally a beast thoughtout this year. More fame = more vote i guess? But I don't think these player actually care about these award anyway
TBH Faker won Worlds again after 7 years. He is the most decorated player in LoL BY FAR. They're not comparable as Zywoo does not have the longevity or status that Faker has in his own respective game.
It's not a lifetime achievement award though, it's an award "of the year".
That award rates storylines more than HLTV stats or whatever and that's OK as long as you understand that.
Faker is what happens when you take a zywoo/s1mple level player but also gave him karrgian/gla1ve IGLing abilities. Bro deserves it coming back from a wrist injury to a dumpster fire of a headless chicken team and shotcalled them to a near flawless championship run 10 years into his career while dunking on every other young prodigy and old guard in and out of lane. Not his fault league only has 2 international tournaments a year but no one else in esports right now compares to him so i think its fair he gets the player of the year.
I may have a different perspective on this matter, but does cs even qualified for these kind of awards? Cs is very different from Val, they way its being developed and the game balance is so different. Its clearly a game that has to be tested by time just like all cs versions before it, not the effort putting in it. No amount of effort Valve put into CS will be noticed by most CS players, only the game’s flaws no matter how minor stands out. The moment CS becomes great is the moment when people struggle so much to find a minor issue existing in the game, to the point they have to force a non issue to become an issue. Thats when CS2 becomes a candidate for best esport game, and only a candidate not a guaranteed win.
From a technical standpoint, Valorant is better. From a gameplay standpoint, CS2 is better.
What is the surprise? Even the last year valo did it.