[HN Gopher] When Is a Counter-Strike Player Good?
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       When Is a Counter-Strike Player Good?
        
       Author : kqr
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2024-05-10 11:09 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (two-wrongs.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (two-wrongs.com)
        
       | incomingpain wrote:
       | Counterstrike is identical to chess, there's tiers of players. I
       | never made it to CAL-I but I was the tier below. When playing
       | against CAL-I tier people, we'd get stomped on.
       | 
       | Flipside, if I went to a pub, it's quite likely that I would
       | stomp on everyone else. I still can do this in TF2 and
       | tryharding.
       | 
       | You can't go by KD ratio. Your opponents matter.
        
         | rowanG077 wrote:
         | This. I used to play pretty high level cs more then a decade
         | ago. I can still join deathmatch games once every blue moon and
         | usually come out on top.
        
         | _the_inflator wrote:
         | Ladder or ranking is the best overall performance indicator
         | (given ideal conditions, no cheating).
         | 
         | It is a system of averages. I was a top 80 player in Age of
         | Empires: AoK and easily beat the crap out of everything from
         | below the top 100.
         | 
         | Above me, I could compete with most players on some maps on
         | some days, top 50 would beat me in a best of five, but top 20
         | usually eat me under competitive conditions.
         | 
         | Most of them were already pro gamers back then and trained hard
         | to maintain their ranking.
         | 
         | It piles up. Micro management especially. Being constantly a
         | couple of milliseconds faster in organizing stuff and decision
         | making is like a formula 1 driver who is 0,5 faster per lap.
         | Worlds apart with 60 rounds to take.
        
         | StableAlkyne wrote:
         | The other difference is that chess is a 1v1 game: the only
         | person you can blame if you lose is yourself.
         | 
         | Counterstrike is a team game, where (if the matchmaker was
         | competetently designed) on average you shouldn't be able to
         | carry your team. I think this contributes to a lot of toxicity,
         | because it's very easy to find a cause for the loss that isn't
         | your own skill.
         | 
         | Imagine a team match of chess where everyone controls a couple
         | pieces. At low brackets, you could know "tech" like en passant
         | or underpromotion. You might have vague ideas like "control the
         | center" and might know a few lines of theory. You might be
         | screaming at the screen when a teammate castles into mate-in-3
         | and blame them for your loss - even though you were the one who
         | moved a pawn to h3 on turn 1.
        
           | cinntaile wrote:
           | [delayed]
        
       | Rodeoclash wrote:
       | After the mention of the Leetify website in the article, I'm
       | going to shamelessly spruik my free open source eSports video
       | analysis tool
       | 
       | https://www.vodon.gg/
       | 
       | It's not strictly for counterstrike but works with any captured
       | video from games.
        
       | asdfman123 wrote:
       | I tried to get good at fpses back in the day but never did.
       | 
       | I was however making decent progress at learning an instrument at
       | the time (the French horn, if you must know) and thought there
       | should be some sort of tool to learn the fundamentals of first-
       | person video game shooting using time honored music practice
       | techniques.
       | 
       | The key to getting really killer music technique is to go _as
       | smoothly and calmly as possible_ , over and over again, even if
       | that means going at a fraction of the target speed.
       | 
       | I would have liked to see an fps trainer that lets you practice
       | shots at anywhere from 1/5th to 1x game speed, so you could
       | master it at very slow speeds and gradually up the "tempo".
       | 
       | (There are some very good trainer programs now in AD 2024, but
       | none that I know of that let you manipulate speed like that.)
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
        
         | ghosty141 wrote:
         | I'd say I'm very proficient with FPS games. I also got to
         | Global Elite in CS:GO. My take is that you mainly need two
         | things, map awareness and aim. The first can only be acquired
         | by playing A LOT. The latter too but the time it takes by
         | playing gamemodes line Free For All Deathmatch where you get to
         | practice the shooting aspect very frequently.
         | 
         | If taken seriously I'm confident a player can get proficient
         | within 500-800 hours of playtime. That sounds like a lot but
         | with daily practice/playing ofr 1-2 hours its not that big of a
         | deal.
        
           | rowanG077 wrote:
           | And talent. CS is one of the first times in my life I saw
           | people try very hard at getting better. But it just didn't
           | work. Like some people put in a fourth of their effort and
           | they would still run circles around them.
        
             | bloqs wrote:
             | it's actually trait openness/ cognitive flexibility: https:
             | //www.researchgate.net/publication/366388355_Cognitive....
        
         | Rodeoclash wrote:
         | This is available in some of the current FPS trainers, they
         | often have a time scaling feature which will slow the target
         | down.
        
           | beretguy wrote:
           | Wow, never knew about it! Can you please give a few examples?
        
       | hhh wrote:
       | when their mmr is above 80% of all other players
        
       | abcde777666 wrote:
       | The standards have gone up a lot over time. Your average player
       | now knows who the tops teams are and watches them play. Vastly
       | different from the early 2000s when just knowing to aim at heads
       | set you apart.
       | 
       | Even to be a top 10% player these days you need to either be a
       | veteran or to practice for long hours.
       | 
       | Must be hell for anyone new who wants to try the game!
        
       | lwansbrough wrote:
       | I'd like to think I have some domain knowledge here[0]. So here's
       | my two cents: there is no performance-based stat that will tell
       | you if you're good. Rank is the only thing that matters.
       | 
       | There are however a lot stats that can tell you if you're good
       | _amongst your peers in your current rank._
       | 
       | The idea is that once your rank converges with your skill, your
       | stats will trend towards the median.
       | 
       | But the good news is, most players are interested in exactly
       | that. They want to know how they're performing compared to
       | players of a similar rank.
       | 
       | This was the basis for our[1] Tracker Score performance rating,
       | which grades player performance relative to players at their
       | level (so both an Iron and a Radiant player can have similar
       | ratings.)
       | 
       | [0] https://tracker.gg [1] https://tracker.gg/articles/tracker-
       | score-our-new-performanc...
        
       | tflol wrote:
       | according to all the opponents and team mates I had, everyone
       | pretty good but me :)
        
       | tuetuopay wrote:
       | This is sad that the article goes on to explaining the crucial
       | importance of smokes, flashbangs, etc while not focusing on them
       | for analyzing games. In my own experience (nowhere near a great
       | player), people that were the most valuable to a team where those
       | knowing when not to shoot: peek to take info, throw some stuff to
       | mess with the enemy, etc.
       | 
       | With some friends we used another CS match analysis tool,
       | scope.gg, and it took many of those things in action. It knew how
       | to estimate your grenade/smoke/flash/molotov throws on how
       | effective they were, your risk-taking (e.g. peek at a common
       | place to get insta-headshotted), even your footsteps being heard
       | by the opponent in stealth parts.
       | 
       | Really, this tool was much more accurate than anything based on
       | the metrics presented here. And it showed, because it
       | consistently nominated one friend as the best one, which matched
       | our experience, and myself as the worst one of the team, which
       | also matched our experience :D
       | 
       | Cool article nonetheless, and really show the issue with current
       | counterstrike (and why I don't play it much anymore): the skill
       | level is so high that you basically need tools to tell you your
       | mistakes. Otherwise you're in for a truckload of frustration as a
       | new player.
        
       | szundi wrote:
       | Back then I got the intellimouse explorer from microsoft, a nice
       | precise mouse. Shot everyone in the head and kicked from all
       | servers. Even Valve sent me a message that one more ban from a
       | server and my account is frozen. End of CS for me that day.
       | Thanks God
        
       | crsv wrote:
       | As someone who played professional CS in the 1.6-Source era this
       | write up gave me a hearty chuckle. It must be what it feels like
       | when a pro footballer reads a really intense parents write up on
       | u12 tactics.
        
       | thom wrote:
       | Surprised at the small size of the dataset here. Surely it's
       | possible to record thousands if not millions of results... has
       | someone been able to do this? Seems like the simplest thing to do
       | here would just be to develop some sort of plus/minus system and
       | not try to overthink things. I work in sports analytics, and
       | mostly in low scoring sports so we don't get to do that very
       | often.
        
       | haunter wrote:
       | I'd rather read about why are russians bad. Or more like why are
       | they are playing the way it is. When you need to eco > they rush
       | B. When you need to save the round > they go back 1v3. But that
       | not just in CS, they do the same in Dota too. They just play and
       | see these games differently.
        
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