Recent reviews by tensen

lovely game for lovers <3

its needed when csgo servers are down xD

scary than your mom

:3

obo da bobo

kek

I'd like to start this review by stating the following: CSGO isn't inherently a bad game, let alone a bad franchise. That being said, I believe it's fine to move on to talk about the actual game and its state in 2019.

As a matter of fact, the game-play is better than it's ever been for CS as a whole; playing 1.6 and Source on Lan used to be the only times I engaged with the experience provided by it before GO came around, and when I finally got my hands on it I also had good internet to finally engage in the competitive experience of CSGO, which remains to this day, its best aspect. Not only that, we wouldn't be brushed off to unofficial servers, CS would finally have a competitive system with its own ranking system and MMR values to allow us to go up in a ladder. The ranking system was also improved on over time, but to the extent we can say something good about CSGO, that might be it.

Hackers run amok this game. It's been this way even before GO, but it's only been getting worse over the years, especially because Valve seems unable to properly answer cheaters, who have modernized themselves to more than a community that just codes a simple script and runs a dirty injector. That is not to say Valve doesn't have better techniques to combat them as well, but Valve only implements a few and keeps itself seemingly ignorant of other ways it could combat cheaters. Trust Factor, VACNET, Prime, all terms valve created for some of their workarounds, though, there are things they could be doing to aid those features and allow players to have therefore a better experience.

Because of that, people have had to run to other competitive servers and relent themselves to more toxicity (because on those servers people want to win even more than in regular MM), a lessened pool of players from which you can match against (further dividing a player-base that already only had its own small elo pool to match with on the higher ranks), longer queue times and need to pay for third party services because what was offered within the game simply wasn't up to the task. If this is the way Valve wants to do matchmaking from now on, I believe they should just close their servers and tell all players who want to play competitive to go play faceit, albeit even if all players joined those services, it wouldn't solve the division between the multiple different services offered.

The only good thing to come out of such services is most likely the fact its shown exactly just how bad Valve servers are: outside major countries and Europe, places like South America and Oceania face terrible servers, with high ping to boot with their already low tick-rates. Valve's servers haven't been made better over time, they just remained in the same quantity and quality over the years, unless of course, we are talking about the only country Valve seemingly caters to, like any other corporate entity in the 21st century, its newfound toy, China. Now, I live in South America. You'd think that after years of showing just how dedicated our entire continent is to CS as a whole that we'd get better servers; maybe when LG, SK, Immortals or MiBR won major competitions in the competitive scene, that we'd get more focus. Well, to this day, ever since CSGO came out, Brazil only has servers in São Paulo. And they aren't even good; players living far away (thousands of miles away by the way) from São Paulo might get bad ping on valve servers but good ones on Faceit servers, a service which also only has servers in São Paulo. And of course, the low tickrate. This also happens in other places, like Russia, but I digress. Maybe it's Perfectworld Entertainment making all the investment for the CSGO servers, but honestly, I could see valve offering them more support. It's a company after all.

Last, but not least, is the stagnant community. I don't mean to say that it's dying or anything, but instead that the most of the content the community immerses itself in is pro player plays/drama. Check r/csgo for yourself, and granted that reddit shouldn't be a metric to ANYTHING for a reasonable person, but take a look at what's posted there. Rarely if ever, someone does anything productive, and for the most part, good content gets buried by useless pro player threads. Moreover, commenting on any of the issues CSGO currently faces will earn you a ban/warning/fanboy brigade, all in all just a wasteful experience for anyone trying to engage them. Even when Valve tries to do something good, like the 20 year anniversary workshop competition, they allow themselves to show the world how incompetent they are in terms of managing CS, by allowing scam or downvote bots to completely ruin it all into a fiasco. Just go to the workshop for a quick demo of what I mean; it's laid bare there for anyone to see. Any criticism is shoved, even when reasonable, and do believe me when I say that most engaged CSGO fans are reasonable, with nothing of value being produced ever.

In conclusion, I could go on and on about many other things like how the market is used as a pseudo crypto currency, about how gambling runs rampant and is encouraged by Valve's own MTX model, about how they introduce new modes on top of the competitive one which end up with the same problems as the original except tuned to 1000%, you name it, but ultimately, it's just the sad but all too familiar sight of a company that once used to be good developing games, that then stuck to management, got bad at it, and is now stuck with diamonds it can't possibly know how to process. Don't take me wrong, they are only bad at managing games; Steam is an awesome store and it seems to want to remain the same for the foreseeable future. But to pretend Valve still understands how to develop and manage games, is all but complete folly.

I don't recommend CSGO to any of you. It's a good game but it's a game that is unfortunately past its prime, because its roots were acquainted to an online model that doesn't work when done incorrectly for too long as it has so far. Your frustration will only grow if you take part in this game, mainly because of how good the game is, yet how awful all that's been built around it has been for the past few years.

I might change this review if anything comes up to make me go back on it, but take it as my final my opinion for now.