Bigger, scarier & more in-number: 2018’s sharks in their low-tier pool

This year has seen the most amount of teams given the chance to compete full-time ever. From the upper tiers of North American Pro League, to the dredges of European Premier, there are more teams playing more Counter-Strike with more chances to think about how to do-so better. It is no easy feat to be a top thirty Counter-Strike team in the world. Cloud9, Vitality, Gambit, and Virtus.pro are all organisations with huge resources, but very little in the way of momentum outside the top twenty. The pool of sharks that is tier two and tier three play didn’t shrink — the sharks just got bigger, scarier and more in-number.

When you look at a closed qualifier for a big LAN in NA or EU, you look at half a dozen, to a dozen teams who are all competing five to seven days a week with support staff. Players have a better idea of how to approach the game and structure their line-ups. The rewards for simply making the top 15 on HLTV are far higher than ever before. Personal politics still play a role, but emphasising friendships over ability will squander opportunities once reserved only for elite line-ups.

There was more at stake in 2018 and the manner in which teams conceptualise the game reflect this, both in and out of the server. The pathway to big paychecks became more clearly defined this year, but only because more people tread on it.

In North America closed qualifiers, one has to overcome countless online terrors. From the ever dangerous Brazilians, to Australian and South African imports, to domestic powerhouse like Ghost Gaming. It’s almost no surprise that someone like NRG or Complexity can beat top European teams internationally in a way that would’ve been impossible for the second to fourth best NA team a year ago. These teams have to dominate legitimately good full-time regional entities just to qualify for LANs.

This effect is obviously amplified more-so across the Atlantic in the beautiful mess that is online, lower tiered European play. A hierarchy exists only in the loosest possible sense of the term; there are teams who tend to qualify and those that tend to not; sides who go big on LAN and those who fall short. Even these broad categories though, are tenuous.

For example, Vitality boasts a line-up brimming with experienced veterans, canny map play and a powerhouse star. It took them four runs of the open qualifier, however, to just make it into the closed qual for the IEM Katowice 2019 EU Minor. They then barely scraped through via the lower bracket of this closed qualifier to make it to the EU Minor. Even a team with one of the hottest, hard-carrying impact players in the game surrounded by legendary names struggles immensely in a 2018 online EU bracket.

This furiously dense, choppy, and savagely competitive pool of play forces a certain level of excellence in order to not be consumed.

Linear win conditions and overly top heavy line-ups are so last year (or there about). Cloud9 may be able to gimmick their way through a major using a fresh sort-of aggressive pacing in new strategies. Even a tier four side like Team One, though, was able to counter their Mirage game weeks after-the-fact. The same could be said for Fnatic’s overly loose, default-orientated T-sides at the end of last year with dennis. Even the overly stiff CT-sides of Renegades that plagued their roster throughout 2017 took nearly a full year, and multiple roster changes to dynamically face their NA peers.

When you look at the teams who top the lower tiers nowadays, you see sides brimming with pathways into a round and contingency plans should their expected impact players not fire. ENCE, Hellraisers, BIG, and NRG all have showed for stretches throughout 2018 their ability to layer and compound ways into a game.

ENCE structure their game but not in a debilitating sort-of way. They feel comfortable making greedy switch-ups against sides far higher in the rankings. Hellraisers and NRG have the same characteristic, but inversely. Both daps and ANGE1 seem totally comfortable dominating top tier opposition based on reading and calling to the ebb and flow of the match-up. They don’t pin down their star players as much as others might given their age. In interviews, however, ANGE1 will outline his use of ‘waypoints’ and the complexity of executes in order to keep these stars on the straight-and-narrow in important series where mistakes often bubble to the top.

The shark pool of lower tier competition has bred the most nuanced, complex, individually strong, and above all ‘good’ tier 2–3 line-ups in history. From how teams contest banana on Inferno, to the variance in the pace and complexity of their executes on Mirage, there is a remarkable difference from 2017 to 2018.

This is, of course, to be expected.

Metagames, in this sense, trend upwards. In the case of CS:GO’s 2018, the driving forces for this is, broadly speaking, two-fold. The first, as outlined, is the widening of opportunity for more teams to push forwards the meta via resources. The second though, is more focused. It’s how the scene at large is forced to contest with its manifested apex predator; how they — and the meta as a whole — is forced to adapt to the dominance of Astralis.