Oh, no!
Anyway …
On a more serious note, if this is what people choose to waste money on, that’s of course their right. It’s just NFTs with extra steps.
yeahhh at least in this context there’s a built-in playground where you can show off your expensive purchases. NFTs are insufferable because NFT owners are always trying to talk to you about their NFTs. I think CS players know that their skins are only cool to other CS players. lol
The whole concept of in-game purchases is just foreign to me. I wasn’t even willing to pay 99 cents for a few extra lives in Candy Crush. This market being worth billions is frankly unfathomable.
as someone who has a few fortnite skins, I can speak to that side of the market. When you’re playing a game like that, which is high budget and also free-to-play, it’s easy to talk yourself into spending a few dollars. You get sick of using the default skins, everything else looks so cool, and you’ve been getting hours and hours of joy out of the game, haven’t you? In a way, it’s like you’re showing support to the kindly devs that gave you this game for free. Then once you have a couple, you might get addicted to the rush of joining a party with your friends and hearing their reactions to your new skin or dance. Plus, if you’re like me, you might just enjoy the inherent humor to watching Master Chief do a TikTok dance. It’s actually enhancing your enjoyment of the game. Then, $50 later, you finally realize that you’ve been getting diminishing returns on the enjoyment with each purchase, or you just get bored with the game overall, so you finally stop spending money on new skins.
That’s been my experience. When we talk about the potential for “billions”, most of that money is coming from the whales. The people for whom money is no object, so they never hit the point where they realize that buying the skins isn’t bringing them any real happiness anymore. And of course, in the CounterStrike market, these skins are resellable, so there’s also a collector’s mindset that takes hold. Either you treasure your collection of high value skins, or you get caught up in the rush of pulling an expensive skin from a crate because you know how much you can sell it for.
I guess I just don’t understand motivations in the F2P market. Like, I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for a game, but I have no interest in being nickeled and dimed – I can’t tell you how many games I’ve noped out on because of that shit. Like, if Factorio charged for cosmetic add-ons, that would just be ludicrous. Either you made a playable game for the price of entry, or you didn’t.
I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments.
I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments
You and every other corporation, pal
Yeah, but corporations don’t need to eat!
I want my guns to look pretty and track how many kills I got with each gun.
Granted my total collection is like, $50
The engineer needs a new tiktok dance.
NFTs are at least independent and won’t disappear if one corporation goes down. Other than that, they’re one and the same, and it’s insane that the same gamers who worship Valve are often the first to bash NFTs.
Unless it’s the web host for the file, because the nft is just a link. The AWS outage showed that quite clearly.
AWS going down wouldn’t erase the NFT out of existence. Valve closing down would certainly remove every Steam market item.
Sure, but your entry in the block chain that is just a link to nowhere isn’t much more exciting that telling people about the cool skin you once had in a defunct game.
Or if someone else buys the domain name and now your fancy url resolves to porn.
In one instance, you’d have indisputable proof of ownership, but only your word in the other. The former is not that different from money, which is not even paper these days but a record in a database.
Indusputable proof of ownership of what exactly? The expired domain the nft points to? Nope. Whatever the link once pointed to? Nope. You only have owner ship of that particular urls representation in that particular block chain which confers you exactly nothing else. Not much different to the state you’d be left in with skins in a defunct game as I said.
NFTs with fewer steps, but yeah.
virtual speculative shit gonna do virtual speculative things
What a weird fucking world we live in where this is a headline.
Over pixels?
Nah, you got what you get.
Is Counter Strike ever going to innovate or just keep monetizing with empty fluff?
I got bored in the 1.6 and CS Source days, are people even playing different maps or is it still the same 5 maps over and over and over?
This is like watching someone turn an especially satisfying lever toy with a great tactile CA-CHUNK when you pull it into a slot machine over the course of 25+ years without ever changing or adding substantially to the toy mechanism/lever part of the machine.
Think the biggest innovation they did for csgo was molotovs, and for cs2 was smokes being affected by bullets and explosions. Other than that, I think it’s been largely the same.
Though do keep in mind, I have about 30h across source, csgo, and 2 combined; odds are I missed stuff.
Missing all of the fun custom maps people made, like surf, gun game, glass, think there was some zombie game mode where Ts were Zombies
The Minigame maps in source days were crazy good!
Those still exist. Use the community server browser instead of matchmaking.
I tried looking for some surf stuff in csgo, but it was all basic.
Back in 1.6 I played tons of surf maps, some very elaborate and massive, but in go all I could find was at best 10 seconds of basic waves.
I miss those days…
My understanding is there’s currently a bug with surfing in CS2 where you’ll occasionally just stop when sliding on a curved surface. I don’t know if that’s been fixed, but I think surf is largely dead in CS2 because of it. You need to go to one of the older games if you want to do surf right now probably.
Hmm… For surf, specifically, I am actually wondering if you can even set the proper cvar commands for the air control needed for it to work properly in the current iteration of CS… 🤔
It might be easier to find servers for a different game, like TF2 despite having more or less the same base.
Just to clarify I am not saying I don’t understand there being a core competitive game that is meant to stay relatively unchanged like a sport… but CS2 doesn’t have destructible environments, it doesn’t have vehicles, it doesn’t have any innovation at all other than being more like a slot machine than the last Counter Strike which was basically the same as the Counter Strike before it.
A game this big I expect to have a core competitive minimal core that stays relatively unchanged, yes, but I also expect a bunch of more fun, varied and changing stuff surrounding it that keeps most players actually engaged who aren’t fully committed to an endlessly repetitive sweaty grind. No I am not talking about skins and shit, it makes me want to vomit even looking up that stuff and how many results you get for how to “invest” in CS skins (eeeeewww wtf?) I mean actual different gameplay with novel experiences to sustain and compliment the competitive unchanging core….
I see modern Counter Strike as a natural next step of de-evolution of FPS design in late stage capitalism. Halo 3 was the last time a big budget FPS game company really tried to wow players not simply addict them with casino mechanics and dark patterns. Halo 3 had splitscreen multiplayer, full co-op campaign, vehicles, custom multiplayer match settings galore, forge mode… the list goes on.
Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4 then roared onto the scene and demolished that practice by showing business suits in the industry who didn’t give a shit about videogames that you didn’t have to try that hard, you just needed addictive carrots on sticks like giving players a purposefully hamstrung weapon and making them grind to make it fun to use…
Counter Strike 2 is the natural endpoint of that process and it just makes the game come off as tired and boring to me.
The missing vehicles thing is a major one. Remember CS_Prodigy in 1.5/CS:S? Give the CTs back the APC. IDGAF how utterly useless it is.
“Blood on cs_siege” is still out there on YouTube to document the dangers of drunk APC driving.
CSGO was peak, before they added agent skins. Then competitive integrity was thrown out the window. CS2 actually downgraded a lot of the game, I’m still not sure it functions fully now.
They butchered community servers and don’t seem interested in supporting that scene the same as in the past. So there’s no “fun” until they give it to us. The game is just for siphoning money, more than it has been in the past. The entire industry is like that and new consumers are accustomed to it, so it’s never going to change and it’s probably why Valve jumped on CS again.
… CS2 doesn’t have destructible environments, it doesn’t have vehicles, it doesn’t have any innovation at all other than being more like a slot machine than the last Counter Strike which was basically the same as the Counter Strike before it.
Honestly, I think that’s part of why it has lasted so long. None of what you listed are necessarily better. They’re just flashy. They would ruin the design of the game though. CS could have vehicles, and some custom maps did, but it doesn’t work to improve the game so it never became a part of the primary game.
The need to always do something flashy and new I think is a reason why so many modern FPSs suck. They don’t understand their game and ruin it with features that don’t improve it.
I say all this while my primary game for ~2 years is The Finals. It’s easily the most innovative shooter I’ve played in a decade or more. It has the best destruction I’ve seen in a game ever. However, they understood how it work with their game. They didn’t just do it to advertise it as a feature without it adding anything. It actively combines with the other parts of the game to make one cohesive thing.
CS 1.6 with War3 mod was peak. Classes, Skill Trees, leveling up based on kills and rounds won.
Reviving teammates, insanely OP grenades, partial invisibility, and other ridiculous abilities.
Yeah that was really fun and really helped with community servers bridging pepe together
I got bored in the 1.6 and CS Source days, are people even playing different maps or is it still the same 5 maps over and over and over?
At least you can surf and bhop properly in these games.
Try searching for surf_.
Eeew they got rid of surfing/made it way slower?
I would be way more disgruntled about this if Xonotic didn’t exist, that was one of the few spontaneous aspects of CS that I found fun to explore on custom servers.
I don’t think they got rid of it or made it slower. They did introduce a bug where you randomly stop when sliding IIRC. They’ve “fixed” this bug multiple times now, but it never actually fixed it. It could be actually fixed now for all I know, but I remember hearing that surf in CS2 is practically dead because it’s bugged.
They keep finding innovative new ways of removing skill from the game and making more shit up to RNG.
That’s why I quit playing. First shot accuracy should have never have been fucked with.
Ok but the game is so full of cheaters its not even worth playing.
What if I’m only role-playing for the skins?
Haha! Sucked in, idiots!
Oooh I feel like that might be a bad idea for valve, but might be good for everyone else. I don’t personally play, but I would assume some of their player base is invested in the gambling. If they feel discouraged, it might be enough for them to stop.
I want to see ohnepixel face on this one.
