Baby Beta
I was excited for CSP. I really was. I couldn’t imagine myself personally switching, considering I don’t play professionally and my friends play Source, but who can argue with CSP’s goals? Developers that listen to the community? Sign me up. A “tweakable” (to use CSP’s buzz-word) game? Sounds good to me. I’ll even take the unified community, provided we’re still allowed to make fun of walking, talking (read: sitting, typing), internet clichés that can’t understand anything beyond their own ego-centric worldviews. I was looking forward to the whole shebang.
Then it actually came out.
This might have been the worst “beta” in history. I think a “beta” product is roughly akin to your average teenager – a beta person, if you will. They’re mostly functional, but a little rough around the edges. One chocolate bar gets translated into a hundred zits. Image is the most important thing in the world, even if it means being shady and stabbing your friends in the back. And your hormones act more like a cartoon divining rod, leading you wildly from place to place without any sort of control. Those aren’t features of being a teenager, they’re bugs of adulthood.
But through all that, we make it through and become “real” people. (Most of us, anyway.) To extend the analogy, the CSP beta was more like a baby – an alpha person. It craps all over the place (spawning in walls), it falls over randomly (crashes), can’t control its limbs (crouch bugs, grenade throwing), and it makes incomprehensible sounds. And worst of all, if you’ve become a new parent (or just tried CSP), any emotion that isn’t complete and utter bliss gets treated like you’re an ungrateful, greedy jerk. Even stating the obvious, like “man, I love my son, but I wish he would stop using my carpet as a bathroom” gets translated into, “I’m an unloving parent that hates my child, please call DCFS.”
CSP shouldn’t get a free pass just because it’s a beta. There are specific reasons you enter a beta stage. You want the public to test it out, find all the bugs that the developers couldn’t, and generally stress-test and try the game before you release a final product. CSP wasn’t even playable, let alone ready for a stress-test.
There’s the blatantly horrible hitboxes that let a person crouch without their model crouching. Or, in other words, you get a headshot when you’re trying to shoot their kneecaps like you’re torturing somebody in a movie. The developers temporarily abandoned their thoughts on using 1.6 sounds for a quick fix using Source ones at high volume (the footsteps are clearer and louder in 1.6). Hitbox registration is spotty, although it’s hard to tell because you can’t see where bullets are hitting, anyway. The AWP quickscope only works some of the time. And the grenades. Oh the NADES. Let’s put it this way: they’re so messed up, I’ve heard them referred to as wiffle balls, bowling-balls, throwing in super-high gravity, and a retarded child in the Special Olympics. The scariest thing is those all make sense when you actually throw a grenade in CSP.
Then again, there were plenty of strange additions. The grenades are as bad as advertised, but the radar includes player names and it’s customizable (two new features). Models don’t crouch, but the scoreboard has new categories. Don’t get me wrong, I like both of those things, but why waste ten minutes coding them when crouching on a ladder still makes noise, or you can respawn indefinitely and keep the round alive? The bugs aren’t even sticking out like a sore thumb. They’re sticking out like Yao Ming at a midget convention. It’s literally impossible to miss them, and the CSP developers didn’t, they just released it, anyway. They’ve already got an update coming – for problems they already knew about before the beta release.
Alex Garfield has done a phenomenal job rallying support from his fanbase and promoting CSP, but this was a huge misstep. Everybody that didn’t like the idea of CSP now has (in their minds) concrete evidence that it sucks. People that were waiting for the release to form an opinion about the actual game (including me) have knocked the quality down about five notches, and the timeline back another two years. Even people that supported it are forced to make concessions – “it’s only a beta”, “it has great potential”, etc. Those aren’t the same as “it’s good”.
In other words, all they got from the release was negative publicity. They didn’t need information about bugs. It’s not nearly ready for competitive play, so it’s not like they can sneak the game into CEVO, let alone the CGS, a season earlier. The whole thing seemed motivated for two reasons, which were included in the first line of the readme: “Yes, CSPromod is here... finally. No, this is not a hoax.” It’s obvious they’re aware of the community’s feelings towards the delays, and even the minority’s opinion that the whole thing is a scam for donation money. I’m sure those weren’t the only two reasons for the beta, but when that’s the first line of the readme file, it seems pretty important.
They can’t afford that publicity hit, either. The mod, like the XFL, needed to be a home-run. Both of them were going up against huge, entrenched, insanely popular games. You don’t break habit and loyalty with a decent game that gets better over time. People try it at “decent”, decide their old game is still better, and never look back.
People forget this, but the XFL wasn’t a complete failure from the start. There was a ton of hype leading up to the first XFL game, and people tuned in. They had a television rating of 9.5 for their first game (roughly nine to ten million viewers). For comparison, the 2006 NBA Finals had a 6.2 rating, ESPN’s first Monday Night Football brought a 12.8 rating, and the Super Bowl is somewhere around 40. The XFL didn’t set any records, but people were genuinely curious. The problem is that the product (except for the cheerleaders) didn't live up to the hype. Sound familiar?
And CSP’s job was even harder, considering they had to appeal to two communities. Or that was the plan, at least: bring everybody together under one version of CS, for the good of the community. The game could still be a home run, actually. They’ll need some help, but they could make it. Through updates and more effort, it’s entirely possible they’d end up close to the product everybody wanted, which would be an incredible effort worthy of “HR” status.
The only problem is that it might not matter, thanks to the early release. For comparison, how many people still think Source is the buggy, poorly coded, hitbox-laggy mess it was two years ago? Far too many – that pesky first impression thing, again. The biggest problem with Source as a competitive game, right now, isn’t that the hitboxes lag, or that it’s not fun to watch, it’s the perception of those things. It became common knowledge that Source sucked, and people didn’t go into it with an open mind. They go in expecting not to like it, and that’s probably what they get.
If Source was released too early, I think we can all agree Team Fortress got released too late. It got delayed for years. How many people refused to play TF2 because it came out too late? Or, if Duke Nukem Forever came out tomorrow, don’t you think all the old fans would come out of the woodwork? Then compare those reactions to Source. People would still try CSP it if the game came out two, six, or twelve months from now. But that first impression of a buggy, worthless game is set, and it’s going to take time to win back the disillusioned people.
If it’s even possible.
