This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/globaloffensive by /u/BraydenTheNoob on 2024-11-12 18:21:34+00:00.

This post is from HLTV by Gabiola. Original source

Traditional long Gabiola post incoming, no TLDR provided. Reader’s discretion is advised.

The Rainbow 6 Montreal Major is currently taking place. Since I live here, I decided to grab some tickets. I know very little about Rinbow 6 Siege in general, so I decided to start watching the swiss stage. After 20 hours of watching pro Siege for the last couple of days, I can say with the utmost certainty that I have no idea what is happening at anytime, ever.

Now I’ve worked in the eSports industry as a caster for the last half decade, and a trend among the games I’ve cast over these last 5 years, is that they are easy to understand for everyone, even for new viewers who had never played the game before. Rocket League especially, is just high intensity car soccer. A toddler will understand the rules of the game after watching a single 5 minute game. Anyone can watch pro Rocket League, and understand what is going on after just 1 game. Perfect for eSports.

Trackmania, Formula 1, and most other racing games with a professional scene. Racing itself is very intuitive, and while rules change from game to game, the car thats ahead is always first. Any new viewer can come in, open the stream, and understand the main goal within minutes.

What about CS then? Counter-Strike and Valorant is very complex compared to Rocket League or Trackmania, there’s more moving parts, there’s multiple objectives and a new viewer won’t understand the game immediately. CS and Valo are a lot like ice hockey in this sense, where the objective itself isn’t complicated, but the rules and nuaces are. Ts want to Plant the bomb and make it explode, or kill all the CTs before time runs out, while the CTs want to defuse the bomb before it explodes or kill all the Ts before they have the chance to plant the bomb, first to 13 wins. The objectives are easy to understand and a new viewer will intuitively understand what the goal of the game is after watching a single game. It takes more than 5 minutes to understand the main goals of CS and Valo, unlike Rocket League and Trackmania, but just like those games, just 1 match is all you need to understand the main objective. Counter Strike especially, doesn’t require 1000 hours in the game to understand how the game works. After watching 3-4 matches, you know what every piece of utility does, that there is an economy and teams need to be careful about, that each point of interest on the map has a name, and that big rifle guns have a better chance of winning against pistols. By the end of your 3rd or 4th game of pro CS, you know what some of the terminology also means, and why it is done, such as saving. Valorant we’ll come back to later, after we finish talking about Hero Shooters.

Before looking at the problem children of eSports, let’s look at the last intuitive game type you’ll find in eSports, that being the battle royale games. PubG, and Fortnite are the biggest games in this category, and is intuative, similar to CS at the pro level. After 1 game, you understand the objective is for the solo player or for the entire team is to be the last survivers. The premise is like free for all dodgeball, and everyone knows how to play dodgeball. There’s some house rules depending on the game, but you’ll learn them as you watch, but even when not fully understanding the rules, similarly to CS, you know what is going on for the most part.

Lets take a look at every other big esport from the perspective of someone who has never watched them before. I’m talking about the MOBAs, and Hero Shooter games, League of Legends, Dota 2, Rainbow 6 Siege, Apex Legends, and Overwatch. All 5 of these games have multiple complex objectives that are unintuitive to anyone that hasnt seen these games before. Let’s start with the MOBAs first. It took me a few hours of watching Dota 2 and LoL to know that a midlaner is the player that stays in the center line, offlaners are the players on the outer lines, and the junglers play in between these “lanes”. Beyond this very basic premise, I have no idea what their individual objectives are, other than to eventually converge with their teammates and destroy the enemy base. In a straight gun fight, even in a game like Siege, Valorant, or CS, I know whats going on for the most part. However, as I don’t have 1000 hours in either Dota, or LoL, I have no idea what is going on in any fight, ever. I never understand what caused one team to win or lose a fight. Nothing about MOBAs is intuitive to the average person, and often times, even players with 1000 hours fail to understand something that happened within the game. Both games are beyond complex and require the equivalent of a PhD to understand what is going on completely.

We have finally arrived to the Hero Shooters. Taking a very basic premise and objective, and giving it a MOBA amount of complexity. If Counter-Strike is ice hockey, Valorant is also ice hockey, but every player is wearing a different coloured jersey, while handling a unique stick that does something different to the puck when hit, and then to top all that off, every player plays by different rules. To anyone that knows anything about ice hockey, imagine if Player A is allowed to punch everyone in the face without getting a penalty, but no one else could do this. Now give each of the other 9 players a similar rule breaking thing that no one else can do. After doing all this, you’ve finally created Ice Hockey Hero Shooter. Ok so I’ve explained how Valorant works, simple premise with a bonkers amount of complexity, but at least the game is somewhat intuitive to new viewers. After watching 3-4 matches, you understand the basic premise, and also understand that the game goes very deep in its complex rules, and thus you’ll require 1000 more matches before you fully understand the game. Some people like this, some don’t and that’s fine.

Then you have the final 3 games I named earlier. Not only do these games have an incredibly bloated amount of complexity, but the premise of these games makes no intuitive sense. Apex Legends is easy to explain, it’s the Valorant version of Fortnite, you now know the basic premise of Apex Legends. Have fun thinking you understand what’s going on and never actually understanding anything ever.

Rainbow 6 is even harder to explain, because there is no comparable basic concept. As a new viewer, nothing makes any sense until gun fights start to happen, and even then, how or when the gun fight took place is beyond comprehension, you only understand that a gun fight took place. Rainbow 6 is basically the movie Inception played at 1.5x speed. That is legitimately the best description I can give. I have watched over 20 hours and still understand basically nothing.

Overwatch is going to be the last topic of today, and Overwatch might be the most complex of them all. Not only do you retain the Hero system, but the game itself has multiple different objectives with multiple different ways of playing them. Sometimes you push a payload, sometimes you capture a point of interest on the map, sometimes its something else. In total there are 6 different competitive game modes you can partake in a professional Overwatch game. 6 different objectives that changes after every few minutes. As a new viewer, the best way to describe pro Overwatch is a Valorant version of a team based decathlon. However because there’s 6 different events, it should technically be called a sexathlon…god I love the English language. Overwatch, basically, as an eSport, is 6 different events, back to back, played as a team, where every player on said team plays by wildly different rules.

So what makes CS one of the best eSports then? It’s more complex than other games such as Rocket League and Trackmania, while also not having the deep complexity that comes with the MOBA or the Hero Shooter genre. As a viewer, after watching your first few games, you understand the basic concepts, and the why’s and how’s a team wins or loses a game. It also leaves you with the knowledge that you dont know everything and that the game has a lot more nuaces to offer. If you decide to dive headfirst into CS, you will find hidden complexity everywhere, from jumpthrow lineups to prefire angles. It’s perfect for casuals to watch, as the basic premise is easy to understand, while also letting viewers understand that the game is full of small complexities they can learn along the way as well. Games like CS, Rocket League, and Trackmania make for great eSports. It’s such a shame that both Rocket League and Trackmania are being killed by their own parent companies, and in that regard, it’s why CS is doing so well as an eSport. A game anyone can watch and understand, while not being killed by its own creator.