I’m a depressed Counter-Strike fan.
Heading into the CGS World Finals, I was upbeat, or even happy-go-lucky (can somebody be depressed-go-unlucky?). The moment we’ve all been waiting for had finally arrived. Well, everybody that isn’t a 1.6 fan has been waiting for it, anyway. Life was good.
Still, after the first day, I was a little unnerved. The action was great, the production was excellent, and the whole atmosphere was simply mind-blowing. But a dark cloud had inhabited the darkest depths of my mind – nay, my very soul.
Alright, that’s a bit melodramatic. I was a little uneasy, though, for some reason. Then, when I found the cause of my concern on the third day, I was in a full-blown mental panic.
Counter-Strike, the game I love, that’s been closest to my heart for six years, was utterly, irrefutably boring. So boring that when the matches were about to start, I was actually disappointed, and I wished DoA 4 was coming up, instead.
I know what you’re thinking, and no, Andy Reif didn’t spike my Mountain Dew. No drugs of any kind were involved. The game, right now, is flat-out bad.
Before my CS fans start marching towards SoCal with a guillotine in tow, let me re-profess my love for the game. I’m still head-over-heels for it. Done right, I think CS could be the Cadillac of eSports, much like No-Limit Hold ‘em is the Cadillac of Poker.
The problem, of course, is “doing it right”. The CGS has to balance boring gamers to tears, and losing a TV audience that can’t understand the big picture unless they’re literally staring at the big picture in the map overview. I don’t think the current solution is good for either group, though.
It’s obvious that gamers don’t like the production. But I don’t think the TV audience will understand the action even in third-person view. The maps are incredibly complex. There’s still a lot of cover in the bombsites; players can simply disappear off screen and never come back. You can’t tell when people are flashed, which means that players (occasionally) just run into things, and fire wildly. And even though third-person view provides a wider angle, I don’t think any single angle can provide a complete picture. You lose rotations, flankers, and deep sniper shots (from, say, A site on Inferno to CT spawn, or from the A site on Dust 2 into the pit at Long), to name a couple.
It comes down to this: gamers love the small things in CS. But you need a background in CS to appreciate those things, and most people don’t have that. We need to find a way to focus on the details, without losing sight of the big picture. We need to examine the Mona Lisa’s smile and still see the whole painting.
This is normally the part of the article where I present a solution. Unfortunately, I have no solutions. If the problem was easy enough to fix in an hour of thought and a six-hundred words, somebody would have done it already. The people working at the CGS aren’t idiots.
Plus, I don’t have the necessary background in broadcasting to really know what I’m talking about. I could present a meritorious idea, and DirecTV might have already tested and blown holes in it.
That’s not going to stop me from trying, though. The easiest way to have a brilliant idea is to have a thousand really bad ones. For every Thomas Edison invention that’s still alive today, there’s an untold number that never made it past the bottom of the garbage bin. And every Stephen King story has a counterpart that never made it past the Windows Recycling Bin, where banal plot twists and flat characters go to die.
Basically, I’m going to present every idea I can think of to solve these problems. More than that, I’m not going to let myself be burdened by common sense. No idea is too ridiculous, although I tried to stay within the confines of what the CGS wants to do (e.g. live broadcasts). Hopefully, like a failed Edison brain-child, these might spark a discussion that gets us on the right path, or give somebody else an idea that withstands the test of time and logic.
(Feel free to laugh at these ideas, because I did when I thought of them. Thankfully, I already consider myself an idiot, so I’ve got nothing to lose. If you think that way after reading this, well, the more, the merrier.)
1) Lengthen Freezetime
After that introduction, I might as well propose a crazy idea first, to show I’m serious.
This has obvious problems. It goes completely against the CGS’s standard operating procedure, which is making the games shorter and faster. I’m not sure it’s good for the players, either, because more freezetime is horribly boring.
But, from what I’ve seen, this is often wasted time. Instead of sitting around for ten seconds, what if you show key plays from the round before in fifteen? Even an extra second or two might help. It would give the announcers some time to explain confusing rounds for non-CS players, or replay a particularly sick shot from the last round for the gaming audience. It could be useful, especially if combined with the next idea.
2) Use a Telestrator
The announcers do a fantastic job of explaining all the action, but wouldn’t it be a thousand times better (and easier) if they could point things out in the map overview, or third-person view? Instead of trying to describe every detail with words, which can be awkward at best when describing a completely foreign map, they could show exactly what’s happening (and why) as it’s occurring.
Or, in the recap of last round’s action, we could return to the map overview while the action is explained with more than just words. Gamers are bored during freezetime, anyway, and it would go a long way towards educating other viewers. On a site take, AWPers and rotation patterns can be pointed out, along with where and when players get blinded. Even if a viewer is confused during the round, there’d be an explanation on the way.
3) Picture-in-Picture Viewing (PiP)
This would probably be the hardest thing to do from a technical perspective, but if you could combine it with third-person view, you can, literally, appease the educated and inexperienced audience groups at the same time. Even if it’s a very small first-person view in the corner, it’s better than nothing.
There were also times during the broadcast when we were watching the bomb get planted, with no enemies in sight. Why? Why waste those five seconds, which have about as much drama as the tenth viewing of a Brady Bunch episode? If you put that in a small window, and enlarge the map view, it gives us a chance to see defensive rotations. Announcers can explain it to ignorant viewers, and it’s a small detail that gamers appreciate. The same idea applies when a team is just setting up a strat when there isn’t any action going on, which happens fairly often.
PiP viewing has a lot of different uses, too. You could do two first-person views in a 1v1, or you could do a first-person view and the map overview. There are so many combinations that can give different kinds of information, it’s worth exploring.
4) Use Wallhacks
This is one of the crazier ideas, which means it’s also one of my favorites. Remember, we’re just trying to throw anything out there that gets people thinking. It helps to think outside the box, considering we’re stuck in the box right now, and we’re not liking it very much.
When they go to first-person view, the CGS is worried about losing the general audience because the information is too limited. What if they loaded a wallhack? As a gamer, I’d find it interesting. And the audience would know where to look for the action, since they’d be able to easily see the players.
Again, if you combine this with the other ideas, we have some interesting possibilities. If we put everything together, we can have a split-screen (or PiP) with a wall-hacking first person view, and the map overview.
An example: during the Birmingham/Rio match, Birmingham was hitting Top A, and Rio would fall back to Long A to watch as Salvo players tried to enter the site.
On the map view, we could have a telestrated view of which angles Rio is watching, while in the wall-hacked view of the attacking Birmingham team, the audience can know exactly where to expect the action to happen.
A wallhack could be confusing to the audience, as well, but I don’t think it’s hard to explain, especially if it comes with a specific graphic like “CGS X-Ray Cam”, or something like that. The walls are still partially visible, and although “X-ray” is obviously the wrong term, it would convey the necessary information to the general public.
5) Listen to (and use) Player Calls
During the first round of the Carolina/Seoul match, Carolina planted at B without losing a single player. It was a really good strat.
At least, I think it was. It was hard to tell, considering I didn’t see a single player die. I’m pretty sure Carolina faked A, first, but managed to kill the defenders, which drew a rotation. I have no idea if that happened, though, which is inexcusable, in my mind.
I understand using third-person view, and the map overview, but can’t we at least see some action?
Listening to the player calls tries to address that in a less dramatic way than some crazy idea like using a wallhack. I mean, using a wallhack? You’d have to be totally insane to suggest something like that.
Counter-Strike is incredibly decentralized. There’s no ball to follow, and there are too many players spread out to follow them, instead. If you listened to strat calls, and mid-round adjustments, though, you’d have an idea of what was about to happen, and could go to the right camera/angle.
6) Delayed Broadcast
I don’t mean delayed like the MLG broadcast, because the CGS is committed to broadcasting live. But, what if there was a five-second gap between the live action, and what the announcers were broadcasting, similar to a SourceTV delay?
This would give a “director”, or somebody similar, the ability of foresight. If somebody got picked early in the round, they’d know exactly which player to spectate, or they’d know ahead of time where players were moving, or strats, and pick the appropriate camera angle, etc.
I’m not sure how something like this would work, technically speaking. The announcers would have to watch the delayed version. And the audience would have to do the same, or the audio feed would have to be delayed by the same amount of time as the video feed, or else the crowd noise wouldn’t sync. But they’re all in the same room, right now, and I don’t know if you can solve the problem while that holds true.
Other than moving the players into a separate room, and then streaming the delayed broadcast for the audience/announcers, I don’t have any suggestions. It’s a tough problem to solve, but, again, hopefully my lack of common sense will provide a spark for somebody that knows what they’re talking about.
The Future
The CGS is fond of patting themselves on the back for what they’ve accomplished and seven months, and it’s well deserved. Establishing the franchises, broadcasting the games live, and creating a league from scratch are absolutely huge accomplishments.
At the same time, there are still huge problems to solve, and I don’t see any reason why the next seven months can’t be just as revolutionary. CS doesn’t fit right now, but there’s a place for it in the CGS, and I think we can help it fit. Take these ideas, and make them better. Make your own ideas. Steal ideas from your friends. Do whatever it takes.
Just don’t e-mail me. I’ve got better things to do than listen to your cracked-out ideas on how to fix the CGS.
(Just kidding, please e-mail me. I’d love to hear them. mike@landodger.com)
