New maps face greater challenges than ever before.
It’s hard enough for them to rise above the spam and manipulation on the workshop.
It’s even more unlikely that they get officially chosen by Valve to be included in operations.
But perhaps the most difficult challenge of them all is to be accepted by the players.
To show this, just look at the current Competitive mappool.
Of these 11 maps, only 4 of them are younger than 13 years old.
And only 2 of these are community-made.
This is kind of weird, isn’t it.
Think of another game where you’d rather replay the same map than you would a new one.
We pay good money for sequels and expansions that give us new maps to explore!
If we were content with the same old maps over and over again then Valve wouldn’t
even have to make Half Life 3!
But clearly, things are different with Counter Strike.
I think, one of the reasons at least, is how competitive it is.
As much as it should all be about enjoying the game and so on, a lot of the fun comes
from WINNING.
And you can only get so far by mastering the weapons and economy.
The rest comes down to perfecting the maps.
And it makes a big difference!
If you want proof of this then simply boot up a match on Office, Assault or Vertigo (Oh
wait it’s gone).
Those of you who have tried this know what to expect and will never, ever want to do
it again.
For the rest of you, let me tell you what to expect.
You’ll be put up against players of a far lower skill than yourself, but they’ll put
up a worthy fight simply because they know which corners to hide in and which walls to
shoot through.
It makes a huge difference.
You may even say it’s unfair, before realising that you could learn a lot from these guys
and have the best of both worlds.
But even on the popular maps we all know and love, the benefits of mastery can be massive.
Watch as pro players pull off elaborate attacks on bombsites.
As smokes rain down and block vision from key locations, and as molotovs force players
out into the open.
It’s a sight to behold.
The beautiful culmination of thousands of hours of practice, condensed into just a few
key seconds.
When the stakes are so high, it’s no surprise that the top teams would rather perfect a
paltry map-pool than to botch a bigger one.
They go as far as to veto some of the classics from an already limited mappool, just so they
can invest more time into the others!
But the rest of us don’t play on such a high level.
What’s our excuse for booting up Dust2 for the 1000th time?
For me, it’s familiarity.
I know the contact points.
The risks in different places.
Cheap kills are unlikely to catch me out.
Sure, I’ll still have bad games from time to time on it.
But I know what to expect.
At least with a map I know, it’s fair-game.
But a new map?
The BEST case would be if nobody else knows the map as well.
At least then it’s kind of fair.
But the chances are, some of the other players DO know the map already, and I’ll be at
an unfair, un…fun disadvantage.
When you look at it this way, is it any wonder that most of the maps we play have been in
the game since 1.6?
I’d argue they’re still here BECAUSE of this, rather than despite it.
The maps back then weren’t made by pros.
In fact, I think it’s safe to say that they were made by people who at the time had a
limited knowledge of the game- far more basic than what most of us have these days.
The layouts of Dust2, Inferno, Train and Nuke probably aren’t the best that Counter Strike
is capable of.
They were just the best of the early ones.
And they were good enough that players would rather return to them than deal with the hassle
of searching for better ones.
I’m not saying these maps are unworthy.
They still had to beat out the competition and have had tweaks and adjustments ever since
to keep them relevant.
There’s no better example of this than Cbble, which has changed so much since the original
that it’s hardly the same map any more.
And others that used to be popular have fallen out of favour- cases where progress has perhaps
triumphed over nostalgia.
And despite what I said earlier, I do think that Dust2 is the product of divine inspiration.
But I think it’s safe to say that our map preferences aren’t unbiased.
We are heavily influenced by familiarity and risk missing out on new and exciting experiences
because of it.
We simply don’t care enough to change things.
But Valve?
OOH, this is where it gets interesting.
Before CS:GO, we had the old serverlist.
Most of these servers would host old favourites alongside new potentials that over time the
playerbase would grow familiar with.
But Valve’s approach with CS:GO has changed all of this.
Unless you go to the hassle of loading up the serverlist, the options available will
drop you into Valve-hosted servers that are running maplists of their choosing.
I’m not saying this approach is better or worse.
It’s simply different.
And it is actually worse for new maps, which will no longer have the chance to be played.
But Valve have been aware of this for a long time and have done some pretty major things
to try and fix it.
Most notably, the Operations, where the best of the workshop is bundled together and then
thrown in everybody’s face for a number of months to help give the maps some exposure.
This was rather successful at the beginning.
I still remember the first few operations and their maps well.
Over time I’ve paid less and less attention to these, seeing these new maps as a hassle
to learn rather than something to get excited about, mostly because I know that when I do
choose to play them, I’ll be up against people who have played them a lot more than
I have.
Which like I said earlier, isn’t as fun.
It’s a shame because a lot of these have potential to be as good, if not better than
the ones already featured in the game!
It’s just getting over that first stage of learning them in the first place.
To show I’m open-minded I’ll pick one or two of these when searching for a game…
but I’ll also tick the old favourites, knowing full-well that the chances of Canals being
picked will be super low and I always breathe a sigh of relief when Cache is selected instead.
I feel terrible for admitting this!
As a large Youtuber I’m supposed to be the one leading the charge into these new maps.
But I just can’t be bothered.
You may remember the Pulse Servers hosting that I did for over a year, where numerous
new maps and gamemodes were tested.
I got the feeling that this quickly became a chore for a lot of you, who would rather
be watching instead of playing, even if you did enjoy the experience if you bothered to
join!
As much as I love CS:CO and other imaginative gamemodes, I feel they’re up against the
same sort of resistance from the community.
Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the way that things are.
CS:GO is CS:GO, and if people would rather watch 2 elite players duelling each other
around a familiar corner, why not?
But what if we wanted a change?
You know, like to see if it makes the game better in the long-run?
Let’s have a look at the new maps that have already made it.
What did these do right?
Overpass is a Valve-made map.
That’s what it did right, it was made by Valve, who immediately blessed it with a premium
place within the game, where it was then forced upon the playerbase and professionals.
We didn’t like it.
It went through numerous changes, no doubt aided by the amount of analysis that Valve
could do with it and the extensive playtesting it received.
And now we do like it!
Can you believe that it’s almost 4 years old?
Overpass is proof that new maps CAN work and that we can grow to love and appreciate them
if they’re shoved down our throats for long enough.
But honestly, with the changes it’s gone through I genuinely think it’s now one of
the strongest maps in the game.
It’s littered with original ideas, cool grenade throws and… boost spots.
Then there’s Cache and now Agency, both community-made maps that were first featured
in the second Operation of all time: Operation Bravo.
These are the purest of the new maps, that were made by, and then accepted, by the people!
Well done to you guys for being so open-minded.
They now have what’s as close to a permanent place in the game as they can get.
I can’t imagine CS:GO without Cache now.
And lastly there’s Canals, which is Valve’s malicious attempt to sabotage the game and
everything we love about it.
Or maybe it’s just like Overpass, a map that they update and refine until we DO love
it.
It’s more complicated than the maps that we’re used to.
I believe that this is intentional, an experiment by Valve to see if an elaborate layout can
result in a higher skill ceiling and more imaginative strats.
Okay, so for a new map to be accepted into the game permanently, it seems a map either
needs to be made by Valve, or has to win the affections of the community from the Operations,
of which only 2 maps have managed so far!
Which doesn’t seem too hopeful for new maps, does it.
Part of me would love to see what would happen if, for the next Operation, Valve were to
remove every other map from the game to force people to learn and to love some new ones.
At the end of this we may be left with 2-3 that are worthy of official inclusion into
the game permanently- which would be great!
Of course, Valve wouldn’t risk something this drastic since in the meantime the community
would hate CS:GO and it would cause irreversible damage to the player numbers.
But since the end of the last Operation, they’ve been doing something similar, if less dramatic.
Not that I’m trying to shoe-horn redwoods into every video I now make, but did you know
these FANTASTIC trees rely on forest fires to survive?
Fires kill off everything else, but the redwood’s thick bark allows for them to remain standing
and to then sow seeds in the now-cleared space around them.
In a way… a very vague way (you’ll have to use your imagination), CS:GO’s maplist
is a bit like a redwood forest.
The good maps are like redwoods and the rest are just clutter, stopping new redwoods from
growing.
After the latest operation ended, Valve effectively set fire to the maplist forest, killing rubbishly
little tree maps like Vertigo, Aztec, Dust and Militia in the process.
That’s right.
They’re no longer in the game.
Shed a tear for them.
But where they used to stand are now spaces.
Gaps for new, bigger and better maps to sprout from!
Operations, it seems, aren’t enough.
Getting players to try out new maps actually involves complete removal of the excess, and
by giving new potential maps the same status in the game as the likes of Cache and Dust2.
That’s where Agency now sits, and I expect more to follow.
One of the reasons for me not bothering with operation maps was because I knew that once
the operation was over, the maps would be removed from the game again, never to return.
Why waste time learning these when the time spent on, say, Inferno would remain relevant
for far longer?
Time on CS:GO isn’t just for short-term payoff.
It’s an INVESTMENT into our future ability!
Valve needs to reward the time we invest on new maps in some long-term way if it’s to
persuade us to take a rest from our old favourites.
Making new maps more permanent is one such way in which this can be done.
But at the same time, I don’t expect a ‘permanent place’ to actually be a ‘permanent place’
any more.
From now on, expect the official map list to be fluid, with maps coming and going over
time.
By concentrating the player base into a smaller number of maps, hopefully the newer maps will
get more playtime.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, I think Valve are more likely to remove a map if it gets
played a lot and if our dislike is still vocal at the end!
The important thing is that we at least give maps a CHANCE to be good and that we consider
the terrifying possibility that we might even like them, once we’ve learned the layout
enough not to get insta-killed every round.
Or at least, that’s what I think Valve are doing to try and encourage you to play new
maps.
But who am I to speak for them… or for you?
That’s why I’ve left this video as a question.
To YOU.
I want YOU to say why you prefer to play the same maps again and again, and what it would
take to make you play a new one.
Comment below with your reasons why.
And then like and share and subscribe and follow and pay and worship and fear me.
And on Twitter, as well!