What is the "Agent Problem"?

First, a bit of context: CS:GO has chosen to support itself by using cosmetic items known as skins to give players the opportunity to customize their weapon (and glove) loadout in order to be able to financially secure the future of CS:GO. Together with operations, such as the Shattered Web operation that gives you the opportunity to buy the operation pass in order to fulfil missions and receive mostly cosmetic rewards, such as stickers that you can put on your weapons or sell, or a weapon from a weapons collection.

Together with the Shattered Web operation, Valve introduced the agents. Agents are cosmetic customisation options for your own playable character, as seen in the graphic above. You can equip an agent such as Ava, the female on the right of the graphic, and whenever you play on the CT-Side, you will play as Ava. This has caused an outcry in the CS community for a rather simple reason:

The visibility of the agents is not very good. This, on the one hand, has to do with the nature of adding premium model skins into a game of generic playable characters that you couldn't even choose before: They have to look different. Another aspect of this has to do with being able to choose an agent skin alone: Successful CS:GO map creator FMPone has pointed out that one of the most important aspects of optimizing a map for gameplay is the ability to choose which models are used, for visibility reasons.

Custom player models in CSGO is, unfortunately, game breaking. The only way this idea works is an option to disable it.



Sorry. I know this isn’t what Valve wants to hear. The idea is bad for gameplay. Mappers pick certain skins (.kv file) because they want clear contrast https://t.co/zwf7Aia5dE — FMPONE (@FMPONE) November 21, 2019

There have been multiple rather alarming showings of the custom agent skins being a problem in CS:GOs official maps, such as this:



Picture by Reddit user Papashteve

If you can't see the enemy, his head is above the silver missile capsules in the middle of the screen. This is the Agent Problem.

Valve can't just roll back all agent skins

It's not hard to see why just plain removing these skins can cause problems since people have spent money on these skins. With the consumer protection that is in place in the EU and in other places, it would be hard to justify just running away with the money. I also don't think that is the solution, neither is the solution to keep micro-adjusting the agents or the maps as Valve has started to do, since just seeing something you won't expect, like a different looking agent compared to everyone's character, will cause you to delay your reaction. These microseconds can mean the difference between victory and defeat on the pro level, which is where the problem is most severe. Why not just disable the skins in your own professional competitions? Well, Valve has stated in the past that they want the players on the lowest level to play on the same playing field as the professionals, which is why only giving the professionals the option to disable the skins can be a problem, from their point of view.

Also, giving everyone the ability to just disable the skins is a problem, too: Adding these skins was a financial decision, and financially speaking it doesn't make too much sense to give people the ability to ignore the swag that people bought with their money. Worst case scenario is that the selling of these skins will cease almost entirely, which is probably a no-go for Valve.

Here is our solution

It is obvious that Valve can't just disable the skins, generally speaking. That would be the same as shooting themselves in the foot. Instead of this, add a simple option to disable enemy agent skins, but not the agents of your teammates. On top of this, have the enemy agent skins enabled by default, which means that people that don't care about such an option also won't seek it out. Since CS:GOs player base probably isn't 90% people playing competitively, a high number of people will see the agents of other people. People that do care will still see the agents from their teammates, which means that no one has spent money for nothing. This, to us, appears to be a good middle ground between disabling the agent skins and completely leaving them be, a good compromise between the financial aspect and the competitive aspect of CS:GO.

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