Today I sat through the third iteration of Lurppis, Thorin and cArn´s show [POD]Cast, which for my money´s worth is an excellent show and a good source of inspiration for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about how CS:GO can be further improved. The topic which really caught my attention this time was that of the much anticipated Free-2-Play model that much of the community has been talking about lately. What really intrigued me and also what made me write this article was the emphasis on how to develop a system that attracts a good number of casual players, which can then make a logical transition from the casual ranks into the pro ranks. This task, it is widely agreed upon, is not an easy one to meet, but I think cArn and the boys managed to have an intelligent and worthwhile discussion on the subject. I realized something afterwards though, which was that there might be another way to help boost the game´s popularity, and this article is my attempt to try and explain my thoughts on this subject.



PGAT or Post-Game-Analysis-Tool. Someone might want to come up with a better name for the feature I am about the describe, but for now I think PGAT is a fairly descriptive name. So I want you to imagine that you are watching the IEM finals, best of 5, its Na´Vi versus NiP, 100k viewers and the score is 2-1. CS:GO history in the making, the fans are going wild, everyone is on the edge to find out who will be crowned the champions. We then switch to the analyst´s desk where an ex-pro, maybe cArn or Heaton, and someone else is about to discuss the highlights from the just played map. How exactly do they do this? By memory, by reference to a memorable round that maybe changed the tide and very often also by reference to specific tactical details that are almost impossible for the audience to follow without seeing the replay in slow motion. This however they won´t be able to do until after the event when the frag-video-highlights start appearing. This is where the PGAT comes in, after the match is over GOTV will send the client to the PGAT tool where each round in the finished match will appear in chronological order. If there were 26 rounds, the PGAT will show 26 entries, each of which can be played individually. Once a round is picked PGAT will allow the client to skip to every “kill event” that is listed in some neat way. Now the analyst´s desk simply has to write down what round something happened in, and they can easily find that round in 10-15 seconds and replay the important parts.



That is the basic function of the PGAT, but there are numerous ways in which this could be expanded, for example, let´s say the round that won the game for either side was in fact won by some exceptional and ground breaking use of flash-bangs or smokes. The PGAT would be able to draw, in the game and/or on the map overview, a spherical representation of the area of effect a given flash-bang had at the time of impact. This area would obviously have to be transparent and colour coded to give the viewers and idea of how effective the grenade in question is. The sphere outline would obviously also take into account any map obstacles and cast shadows in the place where the flash from the grenade doesn´t reach. These calculations must already be made in the game, they “just” need to be visible to the audience afterwards. Similarly, smoke grenade could be team, or even player, colour coded so it would be clear how a team smoked or counter-smoked to prevent a site from being taken or to take a site without being killed. There are probably many other features that could be included in such a tool, but even at a basic level this would, in my opinion, vastly improve the audience´s experience and understanding of the game.



Catering to the sponsors. By now we´ve strayed a bit from the [POD]Cast´s aim of increasing the player numbers, which is one way to attract more sponsors. But another way would be to simply increase the exposure that a given sponsor can get from putting money into CS:GO. I think this is an area that can be improved vastly, and here are a few rough thoughts on the topic. Those of you who are used to watching Dota 2 will know of the sponsor logos that appear outside the bases and also the flags wavering saying “Tt.Esports” or something, which is a simple and clever way to improve on things. I cannot think of a reason why CS:GO couldn´t implement a similar system to allow for decals on GOTV to appear around the maps. I am not talking about plastering every wall with logos so that the game becomes unwatchable, but they could appear on billboards around less significant parts of the maps. Another easy to implement idea would be to have the sponsor graphics show next to the scoreboard whenever that is brought up on GOTV, underneath or next to the team´s name. This might not seem very interesting at all, but for the teams and organizations who try and wheel in more sponsors it would make a difference I suspect. Furthermore you could have a 15-30 second long sponsor clip(video), like the Raidcall EMS one bit, that would play for everyone watching on GOTV(meaning no Adblock scripts could interfere). This would also mean that tournaments would have to worry less about who was streaming their games, and about whether or not these streamers remember to promote their sponsors. That would be taken care of by the game itself, provided the tournament organizers had uploaded the relevant graphics/video items to GOTV. More sponsors mean bigger tournaments, more serious teams, which in turn attracts more players, obviously not an infinite amount of new players, but I think it´s worth taking into consideration.



I bet those of you who have bothered to read this far can come up with many more ideas following those above, or maybe even some better and more unique ones. I understand that the ideas suggested in this article have one major objection that I would like to shut down early, which is the problem of getting Valve to actually code and invest into such a tool or such features in general. I almost didn´t write this because of this consideration, but I spoke to Tgwri1s from hltv.org, who is like the puppet-master of all things GOTV related, and we agreed that even though it might not be very likely that a change will happen, is it still important to have the discussion, and who knows, maybe Valve are listening and will appreciate some small part of what comes out of it.



Finally I want to thank those of you who took the time to read all of this. I hope it was worth it and I hope this could help the discussion go on in some small way.



- Anders.



