Team damage is a staple in FPS competitive games such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Call of Duty. Due to the added mechanic of shooting and potentially killing your teammates, players tend to be a lot more careful with their shots. In CS:GO, however, this mechanic tends to play against you more than it does in your favor.

Since CS:GO is a game heavily based around team play, having a team member dead at any time can be severely detrimental to a round’s performance. This is further enhanced by the fact that if you kill a teammates three times, you get kicked from the game and receive a cooldown of anywhere from 30 mins to 7 days. This means that three accidental kills could place your team in a 4v5 for the remainder of the game. You might think that there is no way you are going to accidentally kill someone three times, but when you’re an AWPer and people are trying to kill steal, that probability rises significantly. There is also the chance that a teammate is trolling and will kill the rest of his team on purpose, once more hurting the team’s chances to win the game. If one kills a teammate at the beginning of a game, they will automatically get kicked and receive a cooldown.

Team Play

Third party matchmaking services like CEVO and ESEA have team damage turned off because they understand that a game with random people isn’t always the most friendly and competitive environment. Unless you’re playing with a full queue of five people you know, the chance is high you’ll find some less-than-serious players. Even when you do queue with friends, sometimes you might want to kill your friends out of a joke, but the three kill limit prevents you from doing that unless you fancy getting kicked. Even if you damage your teammates too many times, you will get kicked.

All in all, no team damage should definitely be something that Valve adds to the game, among other things. In my opinion it would make the game a lot nicer to play when you’re not getting killed by a fellow raging teammate and would even be beneficial to low ranked players who get killed by smurfs. Perhaps gameplay changes instead of stickers, skins and graffitis would bring more people to the game but that wouldn’t make as much money for Valve, of course.

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