Counter-Strike star Spencer "Hiko" Martin tells The Score eSports that it will take at least a year for a North American CS:GO team to be a top contender. Martin speaks on the future of North American CS, and his own.

Martin returned to streaming today after a casting stint at ESL One Katowice, and a stopover at PAX East 2015. It's been over three months since Martin parted ways with Cloud 9, and two months since some of North America's best players were banned by Valve from Valve-sponsored tournaments for at least a year due to their involvement in match-fixing.

During this time, eSports organizations Counter Logic Gaming and Team Liquid picked up North American CS teams, while Cloud 9 moved forward with its new lineup. Through tournaments at the MLG Aspen X Games, ClutchCon, ESL One Katowice, and this weekend's Gfinity Arena event, these three teams have gone for a combined 9-22 in map score against non-North American opponents. Cloud 9's results take up much of that stat, but have ultimately failed to impress on the global stage. While the European scene has consistent title contenders in Fnatic, Envy, NiP, Virtus Pro, and TSM, the gap with the North Americans is only widening.

"The American scene has undoubtedly gotten worse", Martin said pointedly, having watched this year's tournaments from home instead of on stage. "With all the match throwing and fixing, the American scene lost five of the top eight players we had. Now we're trying to scramble around on all these teams because a lot of the North American talent is gone. Two of the top teams were killed when everyone got banned.

For the most part you're going to see the same six or so top teams in every tournament and then one or two who are trying to break into the bottom half of the top teams, outside of that, you don't see any difference. The top teams are getting better and it seems like the bottom teams are getting worse.

Finally, we took a step forward in the American scene. But, since all the bans have happened we've taken two steps back."

Martin sees the problems that he and his Cloud 9 teammates were having at the latter half of 2014 as indicative of larger issues for both NA CS and his own career motivations of being a champion.

"The question I get asked the most is 'Hey Hiko, if you knew this was going to happen, would you still have left Cloud 9?' And the answer is yes. I've said this on my stream a lot - we went through four tournaments in a row where we didn't make it out of groups and we weren't getting any better. I feel like we plateaued at ESL Cologne.

We didn't have roles. We didn't have set things to do. If you look at our results on Cloud 9, ever since coming over from Complexity, we never really beat a European team really badly. A lot of the wins we had were because of individual rounds and individual performances by Semphis, by Jordan [n0thing] and by me, that really pushed us to take a big match.

But once you get to the point where people aren't having those individual performances and have to play standard CS, textbook CS against a team that is overall more skilled and more prepared than you, you can't really do anything. That's the problem we ran into."

With Braxton "swag" Pierce, Sam "DaZeD" Marine, Joshua "steel" Nissan, and "AZK" Lariviere out of contention, the NA super team Martin was hoping for along with Tyler "Skadoodle" Latham went with it. It's been close to nine years since a North American team won a major international CS title - Complexity 1.6 at WSVG/ISC 2006 - and Martin is having a tough time seeing it happen, even for himself.

"If you were to tell me tomorrow 'all of the contracts are null and void, everyone in North America is a free agent, make what you would have as a super team', I could come with three or four people roster, but it would be hard. There is a not a clear cut best team you could put together with North American players.

Martin cites up and coming North American players for not playing needed roles/positions required to win at a high level.

"You need a start caller, you need an entry fragger. This is something that's a problem in the NA scene, and maybe even in Europe, but I don't have as much insight. A lot of the up and coming players - no one wants to be an entry man, and no one wants to be a support player. The entry man never has a good scoreline, and the support player is doing the bitch jobs and doesn't have a good scoreline either.

In a community that heavily revolves around stats, why would you go down a road to not practice your aim rather than practicing smokes and flashes. Those people are integral parts of the team, but no one wants to do it. None of the new-school players are willing to take a hit to their ego of 'we know you're good, but we need you to do this'".

The 25-year old is entering the middle era of his CS career, and has to start thinking about all aspects of his life beyond playing professionally during a situation like this. Martin says he has the drive and the skill to win a championship for at least a couple more years. To do so, he believes it will take the NA scene quite a while to break the near 9-year losing streak.

"From talking to the other North American players, the consensus is that it'll take at least a year for people to step up and be a top contender. I would love to be able to put in 8 hours a night and obtain a salary from a team. Realistically, there are many players in the scene including myself that are older and need to have stability in life. So in respect to putting together a new team with unproven players trying to prove and mold them, I won't have enough years left in me. I know I have another 3-4 years left in me for professional Counter-Strike until I have to look to other places. I can't afford to try and mold new players when it may not work in the end."

Martin would also like to see Valve set specific rules for actions such as match-fixing potential and cheating. Throughout the pixel boosting actions during DreamHack Winter 2014 and the match-fixing scandals in both North America and Europe, Valve has been vague regarding their process, insight, or data into the issues.

"It seems like players get a one-year ban if they're proved to have done something, but we don't have a defined rule about what will happen for certain actions. We need to legitimize the pro community more, and have actual rules in place with prevention strategies.

I think if Valve was a little more open to the community, even for us pro players, then they wouldn't have to tell us exactly what they have in store. They'll say 'oh we will have something cool in 5 months, just wait and we'll let you guys know.' They don't have much of a community presence, and I'd personally like to see that increase over however long it takes."