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> the skill level is so high that you basically need tools to tell you your mistakes. Otherwise you're in for a truckload of frustration as a new player.

The onboarding experience is also non-existent. I've played a few hours of CS and stopped because I couldn't figure out what was going on and I wasn't invested enough to find out. When I say I couldn't figure out what was going on I don't mean I couldn't understand the angles I should take or other tactical things like that, but, once I went beyond quick play where I just shoot everyone, what team I was on and what I was actually trying to do.

Maybe I've got this all wrong, but back when I was an active player, mostly in the CS:S days, you didn't need onboarding. You could just play a game and not think about strategizing. Really good players would do this, but for most, it was some skill shooter that was still mostly run and gun.

Exactly. In my opinion, casual CS/TF2 is the “real” game and competitive is its weird mutant offshoot. But I guess the majority of gamers today prefer hardcore competition and ranking over just dicking around and having fun.

Competitiveness and skill-based matchmaking is what killed multiplayer gaming for me. It used to be you were good at a game or bad at a game, and you could always tell yourself you lost matches because too many really good players happened to be on the other team. Now there are only two options: you play better than you did yesterday and you win, or you play worse than you did yesterday and you lose. I despise that constant pressure. I want days when I get rofl-stomped by a team of demi-gods, and, dammit, I want to occasionally be the one doing the stomping. That just doesn't exist anymore. You're playing with a bunch of people who are about as good as you and if you don't try your hardest you're going to lose every time.

Seems like you want exactly the opposite of what everybody else wants. The biggest reason why people get frustrated with games is when challange is eithet too big too small.

I like the element of randomness. I hate knowing that every time I lose it isn't because they were better than me, it's because I didn't try hard enough. I play games to have fun, not to push myself to the limit every time. What precipitated my mostly giving up multiplayer was when I noticed I was forming my habits around winning and it was working. If my room lighting was good, if I drank coffee before a match, if I played during the right hours of the day, I won. When I started avoiding using the bathroom because having to pee made me more alert, I knew it wasn't worth it anymore. I like games, not sports.

Well if you chill a bit in the system your rank will naturally go down and you will get worse opponents. Many people do that.

Its much better system than one out of 5 games being balanced. Not sure where the problem is… maybe you dont like about yourself that you are actually competitive? I mean i played esports on pretty high level and i am pretty sure not going to a bathroom to keep you alert is not a thing. Sounds like pretty serious urge to win.

Good thing is i think one can learn to be less competitive, enjoy it more and it makes people even better. You can work with this and not make it all out competition.

During TF2’s massive popularity in its first decade, “everyone” wanted fun, casual shooting. The audience for social shooters is vast, but for some reason competitive play gets all the focus today.

Sounds like you jumped straight into competitive?

In general, I would recommend spending some time playing casual to get an overall feel for the game - game/round format, weapon types, popular maps and their layouts, using sound, using the minimap, among others. Combine this with some YouTube videos and you’ll be in a much better place.

CS has such a long history, yet never really a good tutorial mode. I think partly because the core game loop is so simple, but also because of the wealth of knowledge and material out there. Of course, Valve’s online games are notorious for not having a decent tutorial mode, so that might be the main reason lol. I am a huge TF2 fan, and man does the “tutorial” sell the game short.

Author here: I really appreciate the nuanced and constructive discussion in these comments -- this is the reason I post to HN. Thanks!

> This is sad that the article goes on to explaining the crucial importance of smokes, flashbangs, etc while not focusing on them for analyzing games.

There are several layers here and I should write a follow-up article to discuss that because I realise now I was stuck in my mental context too much to explain the bigger picture in the article.

This article is not, strictly speaking, trying to explain performance; it tries to explain the Leetify rating which is hopefully a fair proxy for performance. Nor is it really about giving details on how to achieve a high rating -- that requires the things you mention to put oneself in position for a favourable engagement. (In fact, one can think of the kill itself as a proxy for several other things, such as successful flashbang usage.)

This article focuses entirely on one specific kill-or-get-killed decision. It took that much analysis to provide a useful guide for that decision alone! A more complicated set of decisions I don't even know how to approach quantitatively.

Like, how would you define a successful smoke, if you had to do it based on anything that does not boil down to community feels?

I'll look into scope.gg (and tracker.gg mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) and see if I can be inspired to analyse other decisions. Thanks again!

Thanks for the clarification, I see that I misunderstood your article as "I’m dissatisfied with existing tools so I’ll make my own", while it’s more along the lines "let’s reverse-engineer leetify". And for the latter it’s an excellent one :) Thanks!

Indeed k/d is an overall good proxy when taken with a step back, eg for a whole game. When looking at a single round, it ends up being noisy. Which is not to say it’s useless! In the end this is a shooter game, and to shoot is in the name (and not to die but that’s another matter) :D Now to the matter to evaluating odds of winning a combat.

To develop a bit on smokes: with some domain-specific knowledge you could approximate its usefulness. Smoke in catwalk on D2 allowing T to go through mid while a CT stands on shirt unable to take info nor shoot? Now that’s a good smoke. But this would require very tedious work an be non exhaustive. You could make a rating of "how many people walked in front of an opponent thanks to a smoke". Or how many bullets missed a CT defusing in the smoke. Possibilities are endless but not perfect.

For example scope.gg rates flashbangs by how many people were blinded. And I’d not be surprised if they gave a negative ranking to flashbangs that were heard but did not blind anyone: those give info to the opponent without helping you.

Now if you made a follow up that’d be great but you’ll end up meta-gaming instead of gaming. But that’s fun too!

> For example scope.gg rates flashbangs by how many people were blinded. And I’d not be surprised if they gave a negative ranking to flashbangs that were heard but did not blind anyone: those give info to the opponent without helping you.

Not sure if you'll read this, but I've been trying to figure out how the scope.gg "Rating 2.0" is computed, and all they say is that it's similar to the HLTV 2.0 rating, which in turn basically decomposes into kills and deaths and proxies thereof, i.e. no contribution from e.g. flashbangs. This would be in contrast to Leetify which at least counts flashbang assists.

Do you have more information I don't?

I haven't used it in over a year so my memory may be failing me.

And to be fair I used their match explainer that focuses on rating in a single round, and to show you your mistakes. They rate pretty much everything, including the flashbangs I described. I must admit, I was not interested in my ranking, only in my mistakes. It is very possible I assumed all ratings in a match analysis counted towards your overall rate, but appears to be wrong.

So yeah, in the end we are not talking about the same thing. Sorry for bothering you with this!

(although it would be pretty interesting to have all those fine details be at least a signal for a player's overall rank)

The analysis should also be done separately for T and CT sides since they have different objectives.