At the end of this month in Katowice is the next CS:GO major, where the greatest teams
battle it out in the biggest tournament of the game to see who’s the BEST. With the
game going free to play a few months ago, this will be the first large tournament that
many fans will see. Watching the tournament is free. But if you
want to get more involved, there is plenty of stuff to do… provided you buy the ‘viewer
pass’. In previous years, simply owning the game
was enough to give you access to most of the stuff that comes with a major. But with it
now being free to play, to prevent people from launching hundreds of free accounts to
farm drops, you now have to buy a viewer pass to participate. This costs £8, 8.75 euros,
or 10 dollars, depending on where you live. As CSGO’s blogpost says, this will give
you an upgradable Katowice 2019 Event Coin, exclusive access to Katowice 2019 Souvenir
Packages, full access to all teams in the Katowice Pick’Em Challenge, unlimited Team
Graffiti for the duration of the event, and an all-new Steam.tv team flair.
What is all this stuff? The event coin is an exclusive item that sits
in your inventory and can be displayed on your profile to proudly show the world how
much of a fan you are. This coin starts off as bronze, but can be upgraded to silver,
gold and ultimately, diamond, by completing challenges.
These challenges are all based around the matches played at Katowice. Half of them are
for correctly predicting the winning teams, and the other half are from watching the matches
as they are being played live. As long as you get at least one of the pick’em prediction
challenges right, provided you watch one match from each of the stages your coin will reach
gold status, but you’ll need a good knowledge of the teams (and a bit of luck) to stand
a chance of obtaining the diamond coin. Every upgrade your coin gets also gives you
a souvenir package- getting your coin to silver will give you 1, gold, another 1… and those
who max out the coin to diamond level will get another. That’s 3 in total. There’s
no rush to redeem these. You have until March 31st. During the major, simply focus on beating
as many of the challenges as you can! This approach to souvenir drops is a BIG change
from past majors. You used to randomly get souvenir drops simply by watching the matches
being played. This could be done in-game, or from linking your account to your twitch
profile and from watching it there. This likely led to people running several computers at
once to farm as many drops as they could. So now money has to be spent to obtain the
Katowice pass on each account, there has been speculation that this could result in fewer
viewers for this upcoming major… since there won’t be so many bot viewers, there simply
to farm drops. This change, to me, doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
What are these souvenirs? These are weapon skins plastered in stickers, all specific
to a match from the tournament. The weapon skin will be chosen from the collection for
the map played (because there’s a collection for every official map in the game). And the
stickers will be based on the teams and players involved in the match. If this sounds overwhelming,
it kind of is. I have a video showcasing each and every collection of weapon skins. And
I will be showing examples of the stickers at the end of this video. All you need to
know is that these souvenir cases are rare, since they’re only dropped for this major.
Get one of these and you’ll own a piece of Counter-Strike history!
I’ve already touched upon the pick’em challenge. It’s kind of like you’re gambling
on who’s going to win… only this time you don’t have to buy stickers to use this
feature- it’s all included in the viewer pass. Why would you want to pick’em? Maybe
you like to feel there’s more at stake than simply your favourite teams winning. Or maybe
you really want that diamond grade of coin. If you want to do this, remember you have
to make your predictions before the stages begin. This means the Challengers before February
13th, Legends before February 20th and the Champions before February 28th.
For the first 2 of these you need to get 5 of your 9 predictions correct. The Champions
is more difficult- it looks like you have to make your predictions for the quarters,
semis AND final before ANY of these games start! Which means, if you choose the wrong
teams for the quarter-finals, you’ll likely get your semis and grand final wrong as well.
If I was to do the pick ‘ems, I’d choose the strongest teams. But when I’m watching
a match, I like to cheer for the underdog… which makes this whole thing difficult for
me! I won’t give you any advice on how to pick’em in this video.
If you’re interested, a good starting point is to listen to Thorin.
This man- this legend- this godlike being is a living fountain of knowledge, gushing
his wisdom and profound insights wherever he treads. He has accumulated a vast wealth
of knowledge on Counter-Strike’s competitive scene, crunching through the data and posting
predictions that are eerily accurate!
Sometimes.
But if you want to get up to date on who the strongest teams in CS:GO currently are, I
suggest checking out his latest top 10 list. I’ll link to it in this video’s description.
You can watch the tournament live on a number of platforms. You can see them being played
from inside CS:GO itself. You can use ESL’s Twitch stream, link in the video’s description…
or you can use steam.tv, Valve’s own twitch-style platform. People who buy the Viewer Pass will
get team flairs so they can show who their favourite team is next to their name.
The graffiti option in Counter-Strike has changed quite a lot over the years. In older
versions of the game you could spray whatever image you wanted wherever you liked. It wasn’t
uncommon for players to spray pictures of enemies on walls to distract players. That
and NSFW pictures everywhere. For CS:GO, Valve has taken control of it a bit more. There
was no graffiti option at all for a number of years, and then when it was added, you
could only select from a handful of Valve-chosen designs, you had to pay for them, and they’d
run out after 50 sprays. This has changed for the major! Provided you
have the Katowice pass, you can spray UNLIMITED team graffiti’s for the duration of the
event. Here is what they look like for each and every team. If you wonder why there are
25 sprays here and only 24 teams in this event, that’s because one of these sprays is for
INTEL EXTREME MASTERS, who are a major sponsor for this event… but aren’t a team.
Although unlimited, your selected spray is still restricted to once every 45 seconds.
By buying the Viewer Pass for the major, not only will you be supporting your teams in
spirit, but some of your money will also go towards funding the event. 50% of the price
of the Katowice pass will be given to the teams and organizations taking part in the
major, as will 50% of any sticker or team capsules bought.
I’ll cover these now. Altogether there are 24 teams. You can get stickers for all of
these, and of all of the players involved. That’s a lot of stickers. Rather than featuring
them all in 1 sticker capsule, they’ve been split into 6: 3 for the team logos, and 3
for the player autographs. The 3 categories for each are the LEGENDS,
RETURNING and MINOR. LEGENDS are stickers for the top 8 teams from
the previous major. RETURNING are the teams that came 9th-14th
in the previous major… meaning this capsule only contains 6 different teams… so there’s
more chance of getting the one you want, if you want a particular one from this capsule.
The last 10 teams are in a 3rd capsule, called the ‘Minor Challengers Capsule’. To earn
a place in this major, they had to come top in one of 4 minor tournaments leading up to
the major. In this category are 2 American teams, 2 European, 3 Asian and 3 from the
Russian Commonwealth. There’s absolutely no way I’m showing
every sticker here. You can find them in the csgostash link in this video’s description.
But here’s an example of the 3 grades of sticker, using the Astralis team’s logo
as an example. From left to right: Standard, Holo and Foil grade. If you buy a sticker
capsule, you are guaranteed to get one of either holo or foil quality.
And the player capsules come in 3 grades. I’ll use Dick Stacey’s final (and finally
safe for work) design for reference. From left to right: paper, foil and gold.
Let’s hope it’s a good major.
If you’re looking for something to do until then, Kinsi has a challenge for you. Matchmaking
is 64 tick, meaning everything updates 64 times a second. Some people want 128 tick,
claiming it feels better to play and makes them better at the game. BUT DOES IT??? Hop
on Kinsi’s servers (Link in the description) to find out. You’ll play for a single round
and then must vote for what you think it is. The server then restarts and you can choose
to play again if you like. You won’t be told at the time if the server
you’re playing on is 64 or 128 tick, but the results will be posted afterwards and
you’ll be able to see if you successfully chose the right tickrate.