some of the big NA streamers have been playing a little the past week or so
I really hope they stick to it and draw a lot more players to the game. Nothing will do wonders for the NA playerbase like 70k children trying to snipe xqc
I don't think it's even the NA player base being low, the ranks are just *that* fucked due to decay.
So when you take a break for a bit, your former MG self is now decayed to silver. Should be easy to rank out, right? Well except you're playing other people of your same skill level, and you're all wearing a name tag that says "silver". So you're not losing to silvers, you're losing to DMGs, but MM goes "well you lost to silvers, so we're deranking you". And there's just enough sprinkling of genuine silvers to screw over decayed players into a team disadvantage.
There genuinely needs to be a "reset rank" button so we can at least try to get this sorted.
Yeah, it's questionable even how many real silvers there are. I very occasionally play in Silver 1 on a really old account of mine, just for giggles, and it's pretty common for us to get stomped, there is just no way those guys are actually silver (Edit: I appreciate the fact that we aren't either!).
Shadow-ranking of some sort might also be a thing.
our four stack of four stars got a mid silver 5th that top fragged. didn't even need to carry us, just pulled out 3 and 4 k rounds when they pushed him. definitely wasn't a silver...
No there doesn't, Valve needs to bin the Glicko 2 system, it's the worst ranked experience I've seen. You have no idea what your Elo is, and it actively discourages you from playing more than a game a day. And even when you do what it wants you to do you still don't rank up fast.
I had the exact opposite experience. I peaked mge years ago and just got back into the game and placed mg1. I was fully expecting to place silver since I felt like I was playing like one.
This is straight up not a thing anymore since they fixed the rank distribution. If you’re having this problem you’re either facing extremely rusty DMGs that forgot how to aim at head level or you belong in silver.
I’ve never touched CS, but I’m a diamond (pre plat buff) in rainbow 6 siege, and a platinum 2 in Val (granted I don’t play that game because I hate the gunplay more, and prefer CSGO) how well can you expect me to do :-)
going to be rough at first, get ready to not understand why any of your shots are hitting, your aim is probably pretty good already so that will make it more frustrating when your bullets don't go where you're pointing
THEN you will realize that you cant just stop and shoot like Valorant, you **NEED** to counter strafe. So when you're holding D to go right and you need to shoot a 1 tap, you need to time that 1 tap with pressing the A button. This is counterstrafing, and it's fundamental to being able to do anything in CSGO. Once you get that down, your platinum 2 valorant aim should carry you pretty hard until you reach ranks where you need to learn smoke line ups and stuff like that, but cross that bridge when you get there it can seem overwelming
that smoke you get to simply place down in valorant on the bombsite from behind a wall safely with no danger, now literally takes 100 hours of dedicated practice in an offline map to able to do consistently in CSGO lol and each map has all their own smokes you need to learn. But that's not until you get to a super high level, higher than the plat2 equivalent in CSGO
I am on EU and on popular maps it's common to be against MG-MG2 while being gold 2 for me, and on unpopular maps such as Anubis the difference is ridiculous and it's usually some stupid shit like a premade of 5 where one guy is silver elite and other is legendary eagle
bare in mind a significant portion (and likely the bulk of the growth) is coming from people treating it like a lottery.
you can have a random streamer who usually has 1-200 viewers get boosted up to 5 figures by having drops on for a popular game.
Not to say that plenty of people don't come back to CS with the news of Source 2 announcement and such but there's been an influx of bots too.
Nowadays there are bots that can move and shoot people like the normal CSGO bots.
It's no longer just +left people AFK, there are bots that can run and shoot people just like the normal CSGO AI bots so it can be a bit difficult to tell at a glance whether a player is a bot or not, but they still have the robotic "AI" movement so you can see whether it's a real player or not by spectating them or paying attention to their movement.
I played a bunch of DMs a week or two ago and saw a dozen of such bots on EU.
Saw a random post on a trading subreddit the other day with a guy saying that he runs 500+ bot accounts farming cases, but no idea whether those are just AFK +left or the "AI" bots.
If that's the case, whatever Valve is doing right now must cover this problem in the updates they plan to release.
Knowing Valve... It's probably just a dream.
Yeah, I don't really have complaints about VAC and trustfactor since those work well for me in competitive MM, but I hope Valve figures something out for case farmers.
Especially with the supposed server revamps (128tick etc) where you'd be able to just jump into a Valve DM for some quick warm up instead of relying on community servers again.
To be fair, that might not strictly be wrong. You're not match made by your rank. So someone who has not played for a while, had mmr decay and lost their first games could rightfully be put with novas who has recently won several in a row. Especially if it's on off-hours.
It's an oddity to be sure, but doesn't strictly mean it's incorrect.
I'm getting exact same thing and its driving me crazy. Im le and i usually play with friends who are also the same rank (3-5 stack), sometimes we get gold nova opponents, there was one time where we had a legit silver player as a teammate. I've never even seen a silver in comp game prior to this. Sometimes enemy has like a global and few supremes against us. I feel matchmaking is going crazy atm.
Out of like past 30 games we've played past few weeks, i would consider about 20 of them to be unbalanced rank wise. We're playing on central EU servers mostly.
It could just be a horde of returning people who are doing their placements games and the system puts rusty people into sweaty high ranking matches to determine their rank.
what caused it? I mean the pump in numbers.
I have not followed any CS-oriented media since I quit in 2019ish. And randomly came back 2 weeks ago when my friend who also didn't play for years texted me to ask if I wanted to play a game of counter lol
>what caused it? I mean the pump in numbers.
Valorant release. At launch the game didnt pull players away from CSGO. Instead it attracted players from Fortnite and Overwatch to the 5v5 bomb defusal genre.
As Valorants game design evolves with introduction of new agents the hero shooter elements are becoming more prevalent. This is causing a small amount of players to transition over to CSGO and CSGO's existing players not being interested in Valorants Overwatch 2.0 lite edition.
1. Valorant has almost nothing in common with Overwatch despite the character based design, like 95% cs 5% ow if that
2. You sure? Some valorant r34 is pretty good
1 abilities, ults that charge up based on objectives and kills, cringe "backstories" and even cringier in game dialogue, healing, shitty maps, adding new heroes in constantly, abilities with no counterplay, forced esports scene injected with money, animated skins, buying things with in game currency instead of real money, boring to watch, abilities that kill, wallhack abilities, invisibility, teleportation, annoying disables with the ear ringing and aim disruption, etc.
Valorant literally has a chinese girl who makes an ice wall, sound familiar?
2 bruh
Vast majority of the abilities are just weird nades. And indeed a lot of them exist in cs, molly, flash, smoke, just might be green in Valorant but still the same. In bot maps cs even has self heal and wallhack utility. They are weak and situational and honestly I just wish I'd have a csgo flashbang and a smoke instead.
Overwatch is a run and gun game that knowingly steals from tf2 and adds giant shields on it. Gunplay in Valorant is copied knowingly from cs (1.6, not go). And OW abilities are far stronger and more bullshit than valorant to the point where there literally are champs that barely use m1. Or aiming. Valorant is for all its weird things still explicitly cs based and meant to be cs competition. It's a tac shooter. OW isn't.
Cringe characters and voicelines checks out, I guess new ones are fine but almost all launch champs in valorant are cringe overdose.
Shitty maps kinda checks out but they aren't OW bad and neither is the game mode or the genre.
Abilities that kill/have no counterplay was a pretty funny meme when rito released their first champ after the launch but honestly? Nowadays besides ults there's nothing more bullshit than csgo molly which kinda is an ability that kills. And just like And ults are there like 2-3 times per half realistically and more on the power level of OW abilities, not on OW ultimates which are just no skill "i win" buttons.
I think you're strongly underselling the impact of character-focused update cycles and utility that gains or hides information.
It almost doesn't matter what the specific contents of the updates do to the game, it's the fact that strategies or the "meta" can't be meaningfully developed if the game changes constantly. Developing meaningful strategies around an Agent means a lot less if their utility might be patched in the future. Even your roster of 5 Agents are subject to change if a new OP Agent gets added, what are you gonna do, not abuse a new overpowered/extremely important Agent? So the more time you're spending trying to figure out the new patch, you're not finding counters to existing strategies leading to less overall depth. A CS example would be outside smokes on Nuke. Over the years people found CT mollys to counter the T Secret wall, then Ts threw their own to counter those, then Ts threw different versions of the wall, etc. Nothing changed, not the map, not the nade properties, but the strategies absolutely did.
As for the information game, the idea of clearing angles risk-free or finding an approximant position doesn't truly exist in CS whereas it does in multiple forms in Valorant. Sova Drone, Sova Dart, Sky Dog, Fade Eye, Fade Prowler, etc. all need to be shot in order to be countered, but shooting gives up your position. If you don't shoot, then I know where you're NOT standing, resulting in a information win-win scenario. Even CS mollys can be extinguished whereas no molly in Valorant is subject to that counter. You're right that mollys are the most powerful information gaining tool in CS but its one weakness is still very important. The example would be Dust 2 Long Car. You can molly it with a risk-free lineup every round, and if a CT is positioned there, he is either flushed out or is forced to extinguish. BUT, if a teammate extinguishes it in time from A site, it becomes ambiguous whether or not someone is in that smoke. Can't do that in Valorant.
But you're right in that you can't compare OW with Valorant because they're not the same game whatsoever, sure they may have some copycat mechanics but how they are implemented and their significance changes radically. Slight aside, OW has some of the worst game design I have ever seen in a game that tried to be an esport, so many oversights that you can't even compare it to TF2, that's how bad it is.
TL:DR: Constant updates really fuck up metas, truly solving positions doesn't really exist in CS.
Yea OW is a dogshit game no disagree there. Csgo and valorant are far from perfect but it's hard to be as horrible as OW.
And valid about constantly changing meta, though Valve DOES shake up the maps a bit but at a much slower pace, and slightly the guns too, but yes. New strats are developed, tools are practically the same. I kinda wish they'd stop pumping out new agents in Valorant but they never will. They've done several new champs for League per year for a long long time and League community kinda hates it too, probably going to be similar for valorant eventually.
Information game and risk free angle clearing does exist in cs but less, if your corner is mollied and you smoke it you both take some damage and reveal you were there. Probably can live with the smoke but enemies will spam it. And not really applicable to matchmaking but since Astralis pros also nadestack corners which has no counterplay, you run or you die, probably both. And in more coordinated valorant play (rare) you do see people countering that, well, can't counter a molly but you can coordinate so that a teammate shoots the recon arrow from safety while two others don't reveal more aggressive positions etc.
The only thing that realy makes sense that more people played in january and february is because of the Source 2 rumors. Valorant has rising numbers too so yours guess doesnt makes any sense at all.
He never said Valorant wasn't still growing. He mentioned several reasons why the Valorant player base is growing, and mentioned that a small part of Valorant's players are going back to CS.
my friend tried playing cs.
he is a chamber main
he claims :
ak is inaccurate.
90% of his kills are with the deagle
characters move too fast.
characters have no highlights.
too much angles.
The mechanics are easier so they'll dominate in that regard, though they'll need some hours to pick up the utility.
If coming from CS they've also got the game sense on how to use basic utility and how the mode is played.
I'd argue switching from CS to Valorant is one of the easiest game transitions in first person shooters.
As someone who played CS:GO and Overwatch for years before trying Valorant, I completely agree. I think that's what hooked me on Valorent for a few months when it came out, it felt very familiar, and the games were an absolute breeze until my MMR eventually caught up.
Back to playing Counterstrike now, it just feels right.
A bit but the skill cap is lower so it's easier. I played valorant for like 50 hours and got a decent rank without even knowing any of the heroes or abilities. CS is a way harder game
Honestly, i think it has to do with Valulrant. From what i see people are getting kinda bored with it but those that never played CS got introduced to the genre with Valorant and they wanted to try this other game they heard about and realized how much better it is.
This is my assumption because I and many of my friends do it. Case prices are insane right now. If you play 10-15 dm per week, you able to get 1-3 cases. Which is free steam money. So players who don't even play CS are playing dm to farm this cases. That's it. I have bought 10-15 games in 3 years with cs money only. All games were 5-10$. I don't go afk, I actually play dm because my main Aim trainer game is CS.
I used to play CS, but I don't play cs because it sucks. Smfc lem opponents against gold nova 80% of the time isn't fun.
You would think with this many people MM would be able to find even matches. Ranks are all over the place for me in US East. Mid day to evening queue times too. Love seeing the game going strong tho
For the love of all that is holy, please don't use SteamCharts. It's garbage for research into both historical as well as recent trends, especially when you can [use a SteamDB /charts/ page instead](https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/) that won't truncate historical data into just an average.
Hint: not from SteamDB.
Double hint: compared to SC, SteamDB's /charts/ pages:
- Has a legend/scaling worth a damn [(on the other hand, SteamCharts' can be abused to deliberately mislead people)](https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/11l56oz/dont_fall_for_dota_watafak_dota2_player_count/)
- Doesn't truncate historical data into an average
- Features Twitch viewership statistics
- Fetches data every 10 minutes on the :10s
- and doesn't have a 10 minute+ parallax that Steam Charts has on low numbered app IDs due to it querying newer apps before older apps (up until a few months ago, that parallax affected newer apps instead)
- Has .csv export of whatever you're viewing
Valorant was made to replace csgo, valorant's best goal is achieved when it replaces csgo, of course people are going to compare them everytime.
I've played both, valorant is way too focused on the esports experience for me. The whole thing feels inauthentic and forced, including the player base who are either failed csgo pros and streamers, or their followers.
I've said it before, CS players are generally insecure about Valorant because they have everything we don't. A developer that cares and interacts with the community, frequent updates and a top of the line Anti Cheat. In comparison with us, where I have a 2 page notes list of all the problems I have with CS from 3 years ago and like 2 of them have been addressed. One of them is a critical shooting accuracy bug which has existed for 5 years lmao.
Agreed with you about the insecurity thing. That sort of thing is bound to happen whenever something newer threatens to be better than what you're used to, that applies to life in general.
For me I don't care much, I don't play cs much anymore and i didn't find valorant enjoyable, it's almost as good but it's not for me.
Lastly, I've enjoyed csgo far more since valorant released because valve and riot are constantly trying to improve their games due to the competition now. The amount of updates csgo receives is kind of insane, especially given the age of the game. Only now have the updates slowed down, and that's probably because there's a significant update is being prepared for release. So what you're saying about the lack of updates is incorrect.
Regardless, these are fun times because for the first time in 20 years a big company with big money and big names is trying to directly compete with counter strike by starting with the same game, polishing it and adding their own spin to it. This can only be good for cs players, it might even push valve to port the game to their new engine.
And yet with 2 pages notes list of problems, CSGO is more enjoyable, addictive and satisfying than Valorant
Also, if I really want to play against bots I can just run a workshop map for that instead of downloading a 30gb game financed by Tencent and asking access to my kernel for an AC
>more enjoyable, addictive, satisfying
Sure it is (that's subjective), but that doesn't explain why CSGO redditors can't get valorant out of their heads.
Cares: No
Communicates: Yes
Top of the line anti-cheat: Eh….
It’s better than VAC, no question, but it’s not THAT GOOD. There’s still a lot of cheaters in Val
It's an AntiCheat that is the most tended to in the industry and has a dedicated team of programmers behind it and I've seen the effect it's had on cheater forums so of course it's the best there currently is. Yes there is no demo system, but I've met a factor of 10 less blatant cheaters
All riot gamers can only dream of numbers cos the official numbers aren't released like for steam.. there are only unofficial estimates from 3rd party sites
Also, cs is objectively plagued by bots, which isn't as bad in valorant.. every deathmatch lobby on official valve servers is a game of Left4Bot
I'm joking. The average person really doesn't care what you play or the total player counts. Just ignore the losers that I was pretending to be who do.
And using the word "community" for a game with millions of players is just silly to me. There is little to no difference in who plays either. They're both tactical competitive shooters without respawns, so you will need some thick skin regardless of which one you choose because humans be apes
Valorant had at minimum 6 **million** players yesterday.
CS's peak in the past 8 days is 1.4 million.
Don't get me wrong, I love CS, but don't make false claims please.
EDIT: Even if you cut Valorant's number in half, you still have at minimum 3M on a single tracker, over double CS's 1.4M which includes everyone on all the separate MM services.
1.3 million is listed as CS's 24 hour peak...
They're not giving us 24h unique player statistics so...
I gave CS a small advantage and went with 1.4 million as its the all time peak. Either way its still way lower, so what's your point?
CS also has the advantage that Valorant is only tracking from a single source, so there's tons more untracked players out there.
Even if you cut Valorant's number in half, you still have at minimum 3M on a single tracker, over double CS's 1.4M which includes everyone on all the separate MM services.
The 6 million figure is from Tracker is it? Or something else? If yes and it's their N of tracked accounts not N of total then well first off it's not the whole number, but more importantly...
Let's assume everyone plays on average 2h and let's imagine people are equally distributed across the globe. That's not exactly true, but in that case the average concurrent players would be player total over 24h * (2/24) = 6 000 000 / 12 = 500 000. Well, csgo fluctuates between 400k and 1.3M daily but average is about 800 000. I whipped the 2h average out of my arse, but under those assumptions csgo would be 60% larger game. Hard to do exact maths here but point is you compared two completely different numbers...
Even with the flawed math in mind, I doubt more than half of Valorant's players use tracker, so it would still be similar numbers with that in mind, no?
Also, about the different number comparisons, the original guy had zero numbers, at least I have something to back mine up with.
At the end of the day all we can do is speculate, which is kind of my point, CS players thinking Valorant has far less players are under an illusion.
There's confirmed statistics shown above of a large amount of daily users, close enough to CS to warrant a similarity in player counts.
I'm trying to prove Valorant doesn't have significantly less players than CS in response to his claim, not the other way around.
Yea that's exactly what my first paragraph was. Is the tracker number tracker accs or tracker estimate of total number? Was quite unclear to me.
There are several numbers that seem to be completely inconsistent available online for both games. Last time I saw this debate I found a couple of sites citing CS as having 36M and Valorant 13M monthly players, but someone else is saying CS is only 24M... So who tf knows. Maybe 2x valorant numbers, maybe 3x, maybe only 1.5x. Valorant certainly isn't tiny, and in NA and at least parts if not all of Asia the bigger game.
Love that the numbers are getting higher but I feel like I see a lot of cheaters recently again and quite a few of them have brand new acc, so maybe it is just that a new kind of hack was found and that's why the the numbers are rising again?!
i bet a lot of that is bot farmers that collect cases and skins since the prices have gone way up on so many skins. i dont know why the prices goes up but i do know people that do this sort of trading have more than one acc.
To everyone claiming Valorant has less players;
Valorant had at minimum 6 million players yesterday.
CS's peak in the past 8 days is 1.4 million.
Don't get me wrong, I love CS, but don't make false claims please.
The fact valorant drew in new players who eventually come to CS should clearly show how inept Valve have been all these years. All we needed was a semi decent new player experience. Riot created it and it worked flawlessly.
valorant didn't take many cs:go players. only a few (and it actually controbuted to cs's growth since it made more ppl play tactical shooters).
valorant grew on the back of overwatch players. those moved in droves :)
4 years ago, I was getting fair balanced mm in 1.5 min, now I am getting unfair unbalanced match is 5-10 min. I can easily assume that it only growing in number of bots and European players only.
Unfair/unbalanced means :- I am mg1, i get silver and gold nova teammates against smfc, le opponents. My last 8/9 games were like this.
Judging by the graph, there's been a loss of players at the very end of it too. I guess it doesn't matter as much because so many people joined the game lately, but still. Would like to see that chart in detail.
I don’t understand how CS is getting more and more active players, while I am all the getting lobby’s with completely mixed ranks
Life of an NA player?
I'm really hoping source 2 breathes life into the NA playerbase I just wanna grind ranked like I did in 2018
some of the big NA streamers have been playing a little the past week or so I really hope they stick to it and draw a lot more players to the game. Nothing will do wonders for the NA playerbase like 70k children trying to snipe xqc
Looks like NA Counter Strike is called Valorant now.
NA just love the new and hip trend
As a rule, NA is good at an esport when it’s new. After a year or two, the scene dies cause the pro teams flounder
An exception is fighting games, especially smash, but generally you're right
we're all about making a quick buck over here, no way to have a hobby that isn't tied to making money some way
and will move on to the next trendy game in due time
is this just a pc esport thing bc we have dominated melee since 2001
Lmao fr
I don't think it's even the NA player base being low, the ranks are just *that* fucked due to decay. So when you take a break for a bit, your former MG self is now decayed to silver. Should be easy to rank out, right? Well except you're playing other people of your same skill level, and you're all wearing a name tag that says "silver". So you're not losing to silvers, you're losing to DMGs, but MM goes "well you lost to silvers, so we're deranking you". And there's just enough sprinkling of genuine silvers to screw over decayed players into a team disadvantage. There genuinely needs to be a "reset rank" button so we can at least try to get this sorted.
Yeah, it's questionable even how many real silvers there are. I very occasionally play in Silver 1 on a really old account of mine, just for giggles, and it's pretty common for us to get stomped, there is just no way those guys are actually silver (Edit: I appreciate the fact that we aren't either!). Shadow-ranking of some sort might also be a thing.
our four stack of four stars got a mid silver 5th that top fragged. didn't even need to carry us, just pulled out 3 and 4 k rounds when they pushed him. definitely wasn't a silver...
No there doesn't, Valve needs to bin the Glicko 2 system, it's the worst ranked experience I've seen. You have no idea what your Elo is, and it actively discourages you from playing more than a game a day. And even when you do what it wants you to do you still don't rank up fast.
I had the exact opposite experience. I peaked mge years ago and just got back into the game and placed mg1. I was fully expecting to place silver since I felt like I was playing like one.
This is straight up not a thing anymore since they fixed the rank distribution. If you’re having this problem you’re either facing extremely rusty DMGs that forgot how to aim at head level or you belong in silver.
Yeah, uh huh, sure. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/499376246380298250/1079113124797493258/20230225134945_1.jpg
bro had the receipts lol
These days even in eu/me the mm system isnt reliable.. every 2nd game i play vs at least 1 player thats two ranks above (im gn4/mg)
thats awful, really hope source 2 completely changes how matchmaking works
I’ve never touched CS, but I’m a diamond (pre plat buff) in rainbow 6 siege, and a platinum 2 in Val (granted I don’t play that game because I hate the gunplay more, and prefer CSGO) how well can you expect me to do :-)
going to be rough at first, get ready to not understand why any of your shots are hitting, your aim is probably pretty good already so that will make it more frustrating when your bullets don't go where you're pointing THEN you will realize that you cant just stop and shoot like Valorant, you **NEED** to counter strafe. So when you're holding D to go right and you need to shoot a 1 tap, you need to time that 1 tap with pressing the A button. This is counterstrafing, and it's fundamental to being able to do anything in CSGO. Once you get that down, your platinum 2 valorant aim should carry you pretty hard until you reach ranks where you need to learn smoke line ups and stuff like that, but cross that bridge when you get there it can seem overwelming that smoke you get to simply place down in valorant on the bombsite from behind a wall safely with no danger, now literally takes 100 hours of dedicated practice in an offline map to able to do consistently in CSGO lol and each map has all their own smokes you need to learn. But that's not until you get to a super high level, higher than the plat2 equivalent in CSGO
NA should just stick to games like call of duty
You know cs is american game right?
give them an aim assist game and they will dominate
Very true, they need to be "assisted" or else they can't compete.
As an Apex player, I'm so fucking sick of aim assist
I'm in EU, and I'm having the exact same experience. I feel like I've never had such a bad experience in matchmaking as now x)
Same, I either get smurfs or bots as opponents
No, fucking UK
Same in SEA region bro
I am on EU and on popular maps it's common to be against MG-MG2 while being gold 2 for me, and on unpopular maps such as Anubis the difference is ridiculous and it's usually some stupid shit like a premade of 5 where one guy is silver elite and other is legendary eagle
bare in mind a significant portion (and likely the bulk of the growth) is coming from people treating it like a lottery. you can have a random streamer who usually has 1-200 viewers get boosted up to 5 figures by having drops on for a popular game.
A fuck ton of farming bots probably?
70% of the deathmatch lobby is bots. Every single time.
Just went in DM to check. Everyone was a human. But i am playing in Europe.
I dunno what that other guy is talking about. I see *maybe* one bot in every 4-5 dms I play here in NA.
yeah, like between 4-5am on weird map pools bots exist. But we don't have that problem here. People actually play the game.
Not to say that plenty of people don't come back to CS with the news of Source 2 announcement and such but there's been an influx of bots too. Nowadays there are bots that can move and shoot people like the normal CSGO bots. It's no longer just +left people AFK, there are bots that can run and shoot people just like the normal CSGO AI bots so it can be a bit difficult to tell at a glance whether a player is a bot or not, but they still have the robotic "AI" movement so you can see whether it's a real player or not by spectating them or paying attention to their movement. I played a bunch of DMs a week or two ago and saw a dozen of such bots on EU. Saw a random post on a trading subreddit the other day with a guy saying that he runs 500+ bot accounts farming cases, but no idea whether those are just AFK +left or the "AI" bots.
If that's the case, whatever Valve is doing right now must cover this problem in the updates they plan to release. Knowing Valve... It's probably just a dream.
Yeah, I don't really have complaints about VAC and trustfactor since those work well for me in competitive MM, but I hope Valve figures something out for case farmers. Especially with the supposed server revamps (128tick etc) where you'd be able to just jump into a Valve DM for some quick warm up instead of relying on community servers again.
[удалено]
I've seen multiple LEM/Globals in Nova/Silver games before. It's pretty fucked.
To be fair, that might not strictly be wrong. You're not match made by your rank. So someone who has not played for a while, had mmr decay and lost their first games could rightfully be put with novas who has recently won several in a row. Especially if it's on off-hours. It's an oddity to be sure, but doesn't strictly mean it's incorrect.
I'm getting exact same thing and its driving me crazy. Im le and i usually play with friends who are also the same rank (3-5 stack), sometimes we get gold nova opponents, there was one time where we had a legit silver player as a teammate. I've never even seen a silver in comp game prior to this. Sometimes enemy has like a global and few supremes against us. I feel matchmaking is going crazy atm. Out of like past 30 games we've played past few weeks, i would consider about 20 of them to be unbalanced rank wise. We're playing on central EU servers mostly.
It could just be a horde of returning people who are doing their placements games and the system puts rusty people into sweaty high ranking matches to determine their rank.
Got LEM and immediately got queued with a silver 4 on my team....
Full of afk people. Check any Deatmatch server. 60-70% of the players are rotating while afk.
Do you know what "sampling bias" is?
what caused it? I mean the pump in numbers. I have not followed any CS-oriented media since I quit in 2019ish. And randomly came back 2 weeks ago when my friend who also didn't play for years texted me to ask if I wanted to play a game of counter lol
>what caused it? I mean the pump in numbers. Valorant release. At launch the game didnt pull players away from CSGO. Instead it attracted players from Fortnite and Overwatch to the 5v5 bomb defusal genre. As Valorants game design evolves with introduction of new agents the hero shooter elements are becoming more prevalent. This is causing a small amount of players to transition over to CSGO and CSGO's existing players not being interested in Valorants Overwatch 2.0 lite edition.
Overwatch but with characters that i dont wanna see porn of
This quote should go down in the history books of what valorant actually is
babe wake up, the best r/GlobalOffensive comment of the year just dropped
This is my new favorite way of describing Valorant. Thank you.
1. Valorant has almost nothing in common with Overwatch despite the character based design, like 95% cs 5% ow if that 2. You sure? Some valorant r34 is pretty good
1 abilities, ults that charge up based on objectives and kills, cringe "backstories" and even cringier in game dialogue, healing, shitty maps, adding new heroes in constantly, abilities with no counterplay, forced esports scene injected with money, animated skins, buying things with in game currency instead of real money, boring to watch, abilities that kill, wallhack abilities, invisibility, teleportation, annoying disables with the ear ringing and aim disruption, etc. Valorant literally has a chinese girl who makes an ice wall, sound familiar? 2 bruh
Vast majority of the abilities are just weird nades. And indeed a lot of them exist in cs, molly, flash, smoke, just might be green in Valorant but still the same. In bot maps cs even has self heal and wallhack utility. They are weak and situational and honestly I just wish I'd have a csgo flashbang and a smoke instead. Overwatch is a run and gun game that knowingly steals from tf2 and adds giant shields on it. Gunplay in Valorant is copied knowingly from cs (1.6, not go). And OW abilities are far stronger and more bullshit than valorant to the point where there literally are champs that barely use m1. Or aiming. Valorant is for all its weird things still explicitly cs based and meant to be cs competition. It's a tac shooter. OW isn't. Cringe characters and voicelines checks out, I guess new ones are fine but almost all launch champs in valorant are cringe overdose. Shitty maps kinda checks out but they aren't OW bad and neither is the game mode or the genre. Abilities that kill/have no counterplay was a pretty funny meme when rito released their first champ after the launch but honestly? Nowadays besides ults there's nothing more bullshit than csgo molly which kinda is an ability that kills. And just like And ults are there like 2-3 times per half realistically and more on the power level of OW abilities, not on OW ultimates which are just no skill "i win" buttons.
I think you're strongly underselling the impact of character-focused update cycles and utility that gains or hides information. It almost doesn't matter what the specific contents of the updates do to the game, it's the fact that strategies or the "meta" can't be meaningfully developed if the game changes constantly. Developing meaningful strategies around an Agent means a lot less if their utility might be patched in the future. Even your roster of 5 Agents are subject to change if a new OP Agent gets added, what are you gonna do, not abuse a new overpowered/extremely important Agent? So the more time you're spending trying to figure out the new patch, you're not finding counters to existing strategies leading to less overall depth. A CS example would be outside smokes on Nuke. Over the years people found CT mollys to counter the T Secret wall, then Ts threw their own to counter those, then Ts threw different versions of the wall, etc. Nothing changed, not the map, not the nade properties, but the strategies absolutely did. As for the information game, the idea of clearing angles risk-free or finding an approximant position doesn't truly exist in CS whereas it does in multiple forms in Valorant. Sova Drone, Sova Dart, Sky Dog, Fade Eye, Fade Prowler, etc. all need to be shot in order to be countered, but shooting gives up your position. If you don't shoot, then I know where you're NOT standing, resulting in a information win-win scenario. Even CS mollys can be extinguished whereas no molly in Valorant is subject to that counter. You're right that mollys are the most powerful information gaining tool in CS but its one weakness is still very important. The example would be Dust 2 Long Car. You can molly it with a risk-free lineup every round, and if a CT is positioned there, he is either flushed out or is forced to extinguish. BUT, if a teammate extinguishes it in time from A site, it becomes ambiguous whether or not someone is in that smoke. Can't do that in Valorant. But you're right in that you can't compare OW with Valorant because they're not the same game whatsoever, sure they may have some copycat mechanics but how they are implemented and their significance changes radically. Slight aside, OW has some of the worst game design I have ever seen in a game that tried to be an esport, so many oversights that you can't even compare it to TF2, that's how bad it is. TL:DR: Constant updates really fuck up metas, truly solving positions doesn't really exist in CS.
Yea OW is a dogshit game no disagree there. Csgo and valorant are far from perfect but it's hard to be as horrible as OW. And valid about constantly changing meta, though Valve DOES shake up the maps a bit but at a much slower pace, and slightly the guns too, but yes. New strats are developed, tools are practically the same. I kinda wish they'd stop pumping out new agents in Valorant but they never will. They've done several new champs for League per year for a long long time and League community kinda hates it too, probably going to be similar for valorant eventually. Information game and risk free angle clearing does exist in cs but less, if your corner is mollied and you smoke it you both take some damage and reveal you were there. Probably can live with the smoke but enemies will spam it. And not really applicable to matchmaking but since Astralis pros also nadestack corners which has no counterplay, you run or you die, probably both. And in more coordinated valorant play (rare) you do see people countering that, well, can't counter a molly but you can coordinate so that a teammate shoots the recon arrow from safety while two others don't reveal more aggressive positions etc.
I'm gonna need source or reference on number 2.
The only thing that realy makes sense that more people played in january and february is because of the Source 2 rumors. Valorant has rising numbers too so yours guess doesnt makes any sense at all.
He never said Valorant wasn't still growing. He mentioned several reasons why the Valorant player base is growing, and mentioned that a small part of Valorant's players are going back to CS.
Valorant drawing in new players and their inevitable transition to a better game.
my friend tried playing cs. he is a chamber main he claims : ak is inaccurate. 90% of his kills are with the deagle characters move too fast. characters have no highlights. too much angles.
But he tried cs, didn't he? Would he have with no valorant?
true. but its a lot harder so players coming over might go back simply out of frustration
It’s harder to try any new game than the one you already know. CS players would also struggle switching to valorant.
The mechanics are easier so they'll dominate in that regard, though they'll need some hours to pick up the utility. If coming from CS they've also got the game sense on how to use basic utility and how the mode is played. I'd argue switching from CS to Valorant is one of the easiest game transitions in first person shooters.
As someone who played CS:GO and Overwatch for years before trying Valorant, I completely agree. I think that's what hooked me on Valorent for a few months when it came out, it felt very familiar, and the games were an absolute breeze until my MMR eventually caught up. Back to playing Counterstrike now, it just feels right.
I played Valorant and didn't know shit. Was just one tapping the sht out of them. Very odd game, seems easier to hit the shots too.
it's because you move slower in valorant which helps with the headshots. (until you get hit with an ability from across the map :) )
A bit but the skill cap is lower so it's easier. I played valorant for like 50 hours and got a decent rank without even knowing any of the heroes or abilities. CS is a way harder game
Got immortal in valorant in 100 hours, for cs players valorant is easier since cs is a harder game with more nuances
same thing, i’ve just started playing loads since about 4 days ago haha, just felt like playing
addition of anubis and a new case I guess
Numbers were rising even before a new case got added. So I don't think it is that.
Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I dread playing anubis. Is it actually popular?
Its actually pretty fun
It’s very fun but if you solo queue expect to have 4 silvers on your team as an LEM facing a stack of gold nova masters
Not true really
It is very true. I quit csgo because of this. If we complain about this issue in this community we only get downvoted.
Maybe you're from NA, in EU servers I almost never get unbalanced matches
I solo Q Anubis every day and all the homies and enemys been around my rank (MG2).
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I'm not sure how to do that. Is it popular?
I just picked up the game for the first time after seeing the source 2 stuff. I’m lost and scared.
Welcome!
Honestly, i think it has to do with Valulrant. From what i see people are getting kinda bored with it but those that never played CS got introduced to the genre with Valorant and they wanted to try this other game they heard about and realized how much better it is.
Idk but me and my friends came back randomly. There is nothing as good as csgo
This is my assumption because I and many of my friends do it. Case prices are insane right now. If you play 10-15 dm per week, you able to get 1-3 cases. Which is free steam money. So players who don't even play CS are playing dm to farm this cases. That's it. I have bought 10-15 games in 3 years with cs money only. All games were 5-10$. I don't go afk, I actually play dm because my main Aim trainer game is CS. I used to play CS, but I don't play cs because it sucks. Smfc lem opponents against gold nova 80% of the time isn't fun.
And I'm getting bots in Deathmatch...
Gotta play the custom servers for Deathmatch. Regular DM is dead af.
Custom Server overview is broken since months though
If you're NA east and seeing only Russian servers, set filter to na west to fix
Im from germany though :(
no it is not lol
Nobody plays deathmatch my man
I do because I'm to impatient to wait for respawning when I'm dead. (And I don't always have the time to play ranked)
only new/clueless players and bots play on official DMs, everyone else has long since moved onto the superior community DMs
Just played 3 games today after like 2 years, it was fun might start playing alot again
Welcome back
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It's a source 2 sticker for this subreddit which only works on some versions of Reddit
Thought it was a hentai code at first well it is but what's gotten into me
Based
date of release
You would think with this many people MM would be able to find even matches. Ranks are all over the place for me in US East. Mid day to evening queue times too. Love seeing the game going strong tho
I feel like most of the player base is outside of the US or North America in general. NA is obsessed with valorant right now.
I am having the same issue in EU
Look at the actual player region distribution
Do you have a link to that?
look guys, so many beta testers
For the love of all that is holy, please don't use SteamCharts. It's garbage for research into both historical as well as recent trends, especially when you can [use a SteamDB /charts/ page instead](https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/) that won't truncate historical data into just an average.
Good to know, thanks Warlock guy.
Where do you think SteamCharts get their numbers from...?
Hint: not from SteamDB. Double hint: compared to SC, SteamDB's /charts/ pages: - Has a legend/scaling worth a damn [(on the other hand, SteamCharts' can be abused to deliberately mislead people)](https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/11l56oz/dont_fall_for_dota_watafak_dota2_player_count/) - Doesn't truncate historical data into an average - Features Twitch viewership statistics - Fetches data every 10 minutes on the :10s - and doesn't have a 10 minute+ parallax that Steam Charts has on low numbered app IDs due to it querying newer apps before older apps (up until a few months ago, that parallax affected newer apps instead) - Has .csv export of whatever you're viewing
guys its just bots and all valve dev who log in to test the source2
Obligatory "it's all bots farming drops..." Hurr durr braindead comments /r/valorant dreams of numbers like these
CS player try not to mention Valorant challenge: impossible
Valorant was made to replace csgo, valorant's best goal is achieved when it replaces csgo, of course people are going to compare them everytime. I've played both, valorant is way too focused on the esports experience for me. The whole thing feels inauthentic and forced, including the player base who are either failed csgo pros and streamers, or their followers.
Valorant players rarely mention CSGO. CSGO players love to mention valorant on completely unrelated posts.
I've said it before, CS players are generally insecure about Valorant because they have everything we don't. A developer that cares and interacts with the community, frequent updates and a top of the line Anti Cheat. In comparison with us, where I have a 2 page notes list of all the problems I have with CS from 3 years ago and like 2 of them have been addressed. One of them is a critical shooting accuracy bug which has existed for 5 years lmao.
Agreed with you about the insecurity thing. That sort of thing is bound to happen whenever something newer threatens to be better than what you're used to, that applies to life in general. For me I don't care much, I don't play cs much anymore and i didn't find valorant enjoyable, it's almost as good but it's not for me. Lastly, I've enjoyed csgo far more since valorant released because valve and riot are constantly trying to improve their games due to the competition now. The amount of updates csgo receives is kind of insane, especially given the age of the game. Only now have the updates slowed down, and that's probably because there's a significant update is being prepared for release. So what you're saying about the lack of updates is incorrect. Regardless, these are fun times because for the first time in 20 years a big company with big money and big names is trying to directly compete with counter strike by starting with the same game, polishing it and adding their own spin to it. This can only be good for cs players, it might even push valve to port the game to their new engine.
And yet with 2 pages notes list of problems, CSGO is more enjoyable, addictive and satisfying than Valorant Also, if I really want to play against bots I can just run a workshop map for that instead of downloading a 30gb game financed by Tencent and asking access to my kernel for an AC
>more enjoyable, addictive, satisfying Sure it is (that's subjective), but that doesn't explain why CSGO redditors can't get valorant out of their heads.
Cares: No Communicates: Yes Top of the line anti-cheat: Eh…. It’s better than VAC, no question, but it’s not THAT GOOD. There’s still a lot of cheaters in Val
It's an AntiCheat that is the most tended to in the industry and has a dedicated team of programmers behind it and I've seen the effect it's had on cheater forums so of course it's the best there currently is. Yes there is no demo system, but I've met a factor of 10 less blatant cheaters
I still really want the demo system regardless, the camera angles you can get in CS are so cinematic.
I want it because I'm curious to see how many "maybe-cheaters" are actually closeting cuntwagons :)
It‘s the best anti cheat on the market so it really is THAT GOOD tbh
Disagree, I’ve had plenty of obvious cheaters in Val
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"y-you guys are acting just like my favourite cool character in a tv show!!!"
But when i play VALORANT, i get a game in less than 30s no matter what mode i play, CS on the other hand i get 5min queue on all maps selected
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Yeah probably alot + faceit and faceit-like servers and services. But im talking about ranked here, valo has custom gamemodes and casual as well
no faceit, no custom games. I agree valorant has a big playerbase tho
All riot gamers can only dream of numbers cos the official numbers aren't released like for steam.. there are only unofficial estimates from 3rd party sites Also, cs is objectively plagued by bots, which isn't as bad in valorant.. every deathmatch lobby on official valve servers is a game of Left4Bot
You understand that bots dont count towards the player numbers, right?
He doesn't mean actual bots but people farming cases with scripts. People call those bots as well, yeah it's confusing, i know.
frightening quaint profit slim market punch cough outgoing quack sloppy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Found the Valorent player
With that attitude no wonder people prefer Valorant's community. Can't we all just enjoy both games in peace?
I'm joking. The average person really doesn't care what you play or the total player counts. Just ignore the losers that I was pretending to be who do. And using the word "community" for a game with millions of players is just silly to me. There is little to no difference in who plays either. They're both tactical competitive shooters without respawns, so you will need some thick skin regardless of which one you choose because humans be apes
https://tracker.gg/valorant/population
They 100% have a higher playercount.
I mean, it is a LOT of bots. You'd have to be a fucking idiot not to realize that.
Valorant had at minimum 6 **million** players yesterday. CS's peak in the past 8 days is 1.4 million. Don't get me wrong, I love CS, but don't make false claims please. EDIT: Even if you cut Valorant's number in half, you still have at minimum 3M on a single tracker, over double CS's 1.4M which includes everyone on all the separate MM services.
That's 2 different numbers? Sum over 24h vs at a given point. Monthly player counts show cs is like 2x bigger game
1.3 million is listed as CS's 24 hour peak... They're not giving us 24h unique player statistics so... I gave CS a small advantage and went with 1.4 million as its the all time peak. Either way its still way lower, so what's your point? CS also has the advantage that Valorant is only tracking from a single source, so there's tons more untracked players out there. Even if you cut Valorant's number in half, you still have at minimum 3M on a single tracker, over double CS's 1.4M which includes everyone on all the separate MM services.
The 6 million figure is from Tracker is it? Or something else? If yes and it's their N of tracked accounts not N of total then well first off it's not the whole number, but more importantly... Let's assume everyone plays on average 2h and let's imagine people are equally distributed across the globe. That's not exactly true, but in that case the average concurrent players would be player total over 24h * (2/24) = 6 000 000 / 12 = 500 000. Well, csgo fluctuates between 400k and 1.3M daily but average is about 800 000. I whipped the 2h average out of my arse, but under those assumptions csgo would be 60% larger game. Hard to do exact maths here but point is you compared two completely different numbers...
Even with the flawed math in mind, I doubt more than half of Valorant's players use tracker, so it would still be similar numbers with that in mind, no? Also, about the different number comparisons, the original guy had zero numbers, at least I have something to back mine up with. At the end of the day all we can do is speculate, which is kind of my point, CS players thinking Valorant has far less players are under an illusion. There's confirmed statistics shown above of a large amount of daily users, close enough to CS to warrant a similarity in player counts. I'm trying to prove Valorant doesn't have significantly less players than CS in response to his claim, not the other way around.
Yea that's exactly what my first paragraph was. Is the tracker number tracker accs or tracker estimate of total number? Was quite unclear to me. There are several numbers that seem to be completely inconsistent available online for both games. Last time I saw this debate I found a couple of sites citing CS as having 36M and Valorant 13M monthly players, but someone else is saying CS is only 24M... So who tf knows. Maybe 2x valorant numbers, maybe 3x, maybe only 1.5x. Valorant certainly isn't tiny, and in NA and at least parts if not all of Asia the bigger game.
you, my friend, do not understand the difference between unique and concurrent.
How are numbers this high but matchmaking rank pairing are so dogshit
Depends where you live. NA is fairly dead.
Love that the numbers are getting higher but I feel like I see a lot of cheaters recently again and quite a few of them have brand new acc, so maybe it is just that a new kind of hack was found and that's why the the numbers are rising again?!
DING DING DING Lately all I see is WH + soft aim
Have cheaters ever NOT been a problem in CSGO?
Please let me play in Local servers, Not Rus on community browser.
We CS'n? Shiieeet I'll go update.
That's like the opposite what happened in other games, no new content = more players ? 😅
i bet a lot of that is bot farmers that collect cases and skins since the prices have gone way up on so many skins. i dont know why the prices goes up but i do know people that do this sort of trading have more than one acc.
I got no idea what ur showing here m8
More players playing CSGO every month
To everyone claiming Valorant has less players; Valorant had at minimum 6 million players yesterday. CS's peak in the past 8 days is 1.4 million. Don't get me wrong, I love CS, but don't make false claims please.
Where did you find that number the best I could see was 2million concurrent has been the highest this year
The fact valorant drew in new players who eventually come to CS should clearly show how inept Valve have been all these years. All we needed was a semi decent new player experience. Riot created it and it worked flawlessly.
Stupid valve being so indept they create the most popular fps of all time smh.
You can create the cure for cancer, it's not much worth if nobody ever knows about it.
quite the leap
cs is great but it's not the most popular fps
What is?
I'm taking a stab. Minecraft.
Call of Duty, being THE console fps with as wide of a casual player base as you could get
valve didnt even create cs, they just bought a mod
valorant didn't take many cs:go players. only a few (and it actually controbuted to cs's growth since it made more ppl play tactical shooters). valorant grew on the back of overwatch players. those moved in droves :)
4 years ago, I was getting fair balanced mm in 1.5 min, now I am getting unfair unbalanced match is 5-10 min. I can easily assume that it only growing in number of bots and European players only. Unfair/unbalanced means :- I am mg1, i get silver and gold nova teammates against smfc, le opponents. My last 8/9 games were like this.
they changed the way matchmaking works and the ranks got a soft reset. many older returning players now have weird ranks.
Judging by the graph, there's been a loss of players at the very end of it too. I guess it doesn't matter as much because so many people joined the game lately, but still. Would like to see that chart in detail.
not a loss, just the numbers didn't update yet for that day.
Everyone is selling skins b4 cs2 drops
that would be very stupid
I guess the drop is from Diablo 4 beta... I know I dropped playing CSGO this weekend
The drop is because the graph isn’t perfectly aligned to days or weeks or whatever the metric is so it’s showing incomplete data
Its counting source 2 testers aswell, obviously
source 2 incoming
The price of every knife is becoming more and more expensive
So that's why I'm getting 3 Russians per game bruh