Astralis has long been the main trendsetter and role model in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The only four-time major champions have proven that in the transient and unstable world of CS, stability can be maintained over a long distance. At first, the club was the first to set the fashion for sports psychologists, and now it was the first to expand the composition to seven people, where everyone can replace a partner at any time – just like in big sports. Cybersport.ru talked with representatives of CIS organizations about how they relate to this practice and whether this approach is applicable in our region.
-> ->
->
Why are expanded formulations needed?
Leaving aside the period of the coronavirus pandemic, Counter-Strike hosts major LAN tournaments with heavy prize pools almost every week. Competition has grown incredibly in recent years, so most often champions succeed each other: teams simply do not maintain the highest pace and rarely win several tournaments in a row.
Remember the same Team liquid: in the spring and summer of last year, the team crushed everyone in a row for three months, but after the major surrendered. The same way mousesports gave an excellent series of tournaments at the end of 2019, and now it is often tormented by the middle peasants. The same can be said of Fnatic, Natus vincere and Evil geniuses.
“Imagine a team of eight professional players who understand the game and are constantly changing between matches. Will it be easy to adapt to such a team? I think not really. Yes, you say: “What about synergy between teammates? It will be difficult to create it. ” And you will be right. The classic model of a five-person stack puts a lot of emphasis on this, but let’s imagine that Astralis will manage to make an active composition of eight people, where it’s not so important for the players to be played together with someone, and the emphasis is more on a very high individual understanding games. How to win such a team? How to catch up if they become pioneers with this approach? In any case, it’s Astralis, so it will be interesting what this team has planned and how it will implement. ”
Teams surrender for a simple reason: the strength of all is not infinite. No matter how well the system is built in conditional mousesports, no one is immune from burnout. Yes, in Counter-Strike there are so-called player breaks: twice a year (usually before majors), all eminent teams go on vacation for a week. But this is clearly not enough.
It’s not without reason that almost all cybersportsmen vocally say that now from the top 10 / top 15 of the HLTV.org rating everyone can beat everyone: it really is, it depends only on the specific time. Some get tired, others gain strength – teams change places in the ranking, and this is an endless process. But if teams can replace cybersportsmen during the course of the season and at the same time not ruin the whole system, CS will gain more stability in terms of team results.
How will it work?
Now everyone’s eyes are on Astralis – everyone is waiting for her seven-man roster to work. There are two scenarios here, but not the fact that one of them will become widespread in the near future:
“Many friends from sports are trying to prove to me that this is cool: that it creates competition within the team, encourages players to develop and prevents them from being conceited. Astralis, judging by the words of its representatives, does this in order to unload the schedule, to allow players to take rest for themselves at the right time. In addition to the above advantages, there is a main minus: the player sitting on the substitution, is wasting his time in vain, does not play in the team and does not gain LAN experience. I don’t know esportsmen who would dream about it. So if Astralis collects two full-fledged teams and will be able to freely rotate and experiment between them, then this scheme will work. And if there are seven of them in a team, then two players in the reserve will simply be ballast, until Valve allows them to make substitutions during the match at their tournaments. And if it does, it will not be soon. ”
The first and most obvious way to exist for such a roster is to make replacements between tournaments. Cybersportsmen themselves know their supply of strength and will be able to tell in advance when they need a break: at this time, replacement players will be able to calmly dial in online, study the demos of teammates, and then join the team.
“Obviously, such a prospect will allow coaches to replace players who are not sufficiently motivated or do not show a decent game throughout the match, as well as increase team competition, and each player will have an incentive for more hard training.”
The second option – replacements during the tournament. For example, the organizers of the BLAST Pro Series seem to the corresponding rule will be introduced soon. If this happens, it will be the first such precedent. Will this practice be the norm? It depends on whether CSPPA will like it and if other, larger tournament operators will listen, especially ESL.
“With a team of more than five players, the coach will be able to combine their capabilities within the team strategy. There is a huge plus in terms of training: players can train and perform for unlimited time, because the team will not have irreplaceable players. ”
Who will benefit from this?
On paper, those with more money. The fact is that in teams of 5+ people the concept of “replacement player” is unlikely to be applicable: formally, everyone should be ready to replace everyone at any time, that is, all e-sportsmen will have to be on alert. In e-sports (especially in the case of the CIS) you can often hear: “The player was transferred to the reserve.” In practice, this means that he will most likely no longer play for the team: he is often cut off his salary and, in fact, removed from the team. Everything is different here.
“In sports, this is a common practice, but in e-sports, even when such experiments were performed (six people per team), nothing good came of it. This approach can only work if all the team members understand why this is necessary and responsibly take this step. ”
Compositions of 5+ people will most likely be able to afford the richest organizations: those who will be ready to pay salaries not to five or six roster participants (considering the trainer), but seven, eight or more: everyone has different budgets, not every will be ready to fork out. In addition, it is necessary to take into account possible transportation costs, etc.: it is unlikely that all extended staff will pay for accommodation and flights, for the “extra” players they will probably have to pay for the organizations themselves. Club leaders agree with this:
“Such a system will take root for quite some time, because not all, in my opinion, top organizations will be able to provide teams with more than six players, even based on salary levels, not to mention the fact that players will need to be brought to all LAN tournaments . It’s not yet clear how teams like Astralis will train and how it will affect them. ”
“Cons – the financial burden on the organization, as each player will need to pay and maintain. Plus a huge amount of time to develop strategies and create synergies between players. “
However, the financial issue is not the only one. For example, CEO Virtus.pro Sergey Glamazda believes that the practice will not take root in the CIS for another reason – the players in our region have a different mentality:
“The difference in mentality with Europeans or Americans is still very significant. First, you will need to seriously work with the players to be able to implement this practice. It will take more time here, and this is too expensive a resource. ”
What is the result?
Almost all the club leaders we talked to said they were not going to follow the Astralis example – at least for now. The Danes initiative is certainly innovative, and therefore interesting. But blindly copying their ideas is pointless. Still, e-sports in Counter-Strike are not just teams; it is possible to make decisions unilaterally, but there are no guarantees that the same MOTs adapt so quickly. And it’s far from the fact that the latter will do this at all: as we knowCounter-Strike doesn’t really like to change without the intervention of Valve.
