Why CS:GO is a better sport than hero shooter FPS esports

Counter strike is not a hero shooter, which means that all of the 5 players on your team have access to all the items in the game. A hero shooter like Valorant or Rainbow Six Siege is an FPS which some characters are the only ones with access to certain utility.

I think Counter strike is a better display of team tactics because there’s much more ambiguity of who should do what since everyone can do everything. Teams that are able to make quick decisions about who flashes who into what and who anchors and who lurks and play off of each other’s skills will win often. This is because your average team that doesn’t communicate much will not be able to resolve the ambiguity fast enough to capitalize on situations.

Meanwhile, in hero shooters, everyone has a distinct role. This reduces the ambiguity of who has to do what, and makes it easier to work together as a team. In Valorant, if you play Phoenix, you’ll be expected to flash the team into areas, for instance if your team is rushing mid on attack. If you’re Sage, you’ll be expected to play back a bit and be ready to heal someone with significant damage.

In Rainbow Six Siege, it’s more clear who should anchor and who can roam because operators have different speed and armor stats and slower operators often make more noise too. Siege is still an incredibly complex game, possibly due to the destruction, gadget meta, and more.

Hero shooters might be useful if there is such a large amount of utility or attack types in the game that restricting it makes it easier for players to know how to play their character and for enemies to know what to expect you to do when they see your character or your team’s composition before the round starts.

For instance, imagine if all 150+ League of legends champions were one omni champion that could just choose any Q, W, E, R, and passive that they wanted. You could balance this with an economy like counter strike does, but it would still be impossible to predict your enemy until you see them.

CS:GO doesn’t have enough utility to make this a problem. It also gives more power to you as an individual and to your team as a whole by giving all players all utility. With all 5 players able to smoke, (as opposed to 4 in Valorant?) or all the team having 10 flashes (instead of max 6 in Valorant?), your team can execute fine grained site takes with smoke set ups and still have some left over for the endgame. Also, all players will be able to pop flash all other players into areas, increasing the usage of this utility and the relative team play.

This essentially means that there will be less focus on just shooting when you have more utility at your disposal, despite the time to kill being so low that shooting is inevitably the way to frag.

I guess it makes it easier to understand to a spectator if you have a hero shooter because then they will know which character is meant to do what. But it will also decrease the team’s creativity and ability to synergize in new ways, which looks very slick to spectators and possiblity surprising because the play might not have occurred to them.

In some sense you could say esports like Counter Strike are like Go in that all the pieces are the same and the rules aren’t complicated but the interplay is very complex. Whereas hero shooters might be more like Chess in that you are playing a piece with a specific role and it’s more clear how to set up your teammates and more clear to spectators what is a good position for the team to be in and what is a bad position.

All in all, these games are all fun to play and complex. After playing a lot of different fps esports though, I’ve concluded that cs:go is the greatest test of team skill: tactical cooperation between team members on the fly. This makes it a better sport in the sense that a sport is made better by it’s increased ability to both challenge the individual and the team at large.

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