Handshake line following LG's defeat of Liquid. © Robert Paul / Major League Gaming

The MLG Counter-Strike Major left a changed competitive landscape in its wake. Before Columbus, Fnatic were the comfortable kings of Counter-Strike, and most of their serious opposition came from other European teams.

With Luminosity Gaming winning the half-a-million dollar grand prize with a lopsided beat-down of Na'Vi, Fnatic losing to Team Liquid, and two North American teams advancing to the playoffs, it's starting to seem like the winds are shifting. But for the North American pro scene to take the next step, its culture may need to change.

The flag-waving American MLG crowd at the major. © Robert Paul / Major League Gaming

From the Ashes

Unlike in League of Legends, "best team, NA" wasn't always a back-handed compliment in Counter-Strike. If you go back to the mid-2000s, the best American teams didn't surrender much, if anything, to their European peers. There was even a book, "Game Boys", written about the rivalry between the two top teams, CompLexity and Team 3D, who were easily among the top five teams in the world.

The problem was that North American Counter-Strike's biggest breakthrough, the Championship Gaming Series, sowed the seeds of destruction for the North American scene. The series ultimately failed, but in the two years it ran, it was one of the best jobs Counter-Strike players could hope to get. The catch is that CGS only used Counter-Strike: Source, the "New Coke" of Counter-Strike. It was a different game that most of the competitive scene rejected.

Paul "Redeye" Chaloner views CGS as the iceberg that sank the elite North American scene. "Everyone remembers CompLexity and 3D. But in the end, it wasn't just them. There were six teams in NA under the CGS. Four other teams had to get drafted to compete in the CGS. ...So you lost basically the six best teams and the best 30 players in NA to Counter-Strike: Source."

Upcoming talent focused on CS: Source rather than the classic 1.6 game that the rest of the competitive landscape used, because the CGS was so attractive.

"If you were North American you wanted to play in the CGS because you got a $30k salary and a chance at 500 grand for the winners in the final. So why would you go play 1.6 for some no-name team that wouldn't pay salary and couldn't fly you anywhere?" Chaloner said. "So once that's all done and dusted and everything is back to normal, there's no more CGS, these guys come back to 1.6 in 2008. And they're nowhere. They're two years behind. And I think we all know what being two years behind in any eSports means."

It's hard to make-up time in eSports. Just look at how far ahead Korean organizations raced ahead in StarCraft and League of Legends. But it gets a lot harder when the culture around your game starts to misunderstand the fundamentals.

Spencer "Hiko" Martin at IEM San Jose © Patrick Strack / ESL

NA Metrics

"I took a one-year break [from pro Counter-Strike," said Spencer "Hiko" Martin. "I came back for Team Liquid, and now the whole NA meme is here. 'NA aim. NA smoke. NA flash.' If someone makes a mistake, it's 'NA and whatever-mistake-they-made.' And back when I was playing with my old team, that didn't even exist. American teams went through a bad era and we didn't have a top team and nobody was able to place well. And it just kind of carried through to now, where everyone sees us as a joke. It's hard to swallow that."

These were the thoughts running through Hiko's mind a few days before Team Liquid beat Fnatic in their group-stage matchup and nearly beat Luminosity in the semifinals, which started to repair North America's damaged reputation in pro Counter-Strike. But the Team Liquid captain also pointed out that there are deeper shortcomings that have cropped-up in the North American scene.

"All the newer players worry way too much about their stats. They'll press tab, and if they see they're 3 and 10, it's like, 'Oh god, I need to get more kills. If I don't, people are going to hate me.' There's a disconnect there, where you have too many people trying to get a million kills a game." Hiko said.

To Hiko's old-school thinking, North American Counter-Strike is a little too obsessed with getting good stats. It's even become codified in the ESEA rating system, where players are given a "Round Win Shares" score. It's an attempt to measure the positive impact a player had in victory, a bit like the plus-minus rating for hockey players. Were you a part of the big plays or not? But Hiko thinks the scene has become obsessed with the metric.

"Teams will look at a player and if that player has a 10 RWS, they can be like, 'Okay, you have 10 RWS in PUGs[pick-up games], you can try out.' But let's say I have six. Now they're like, 'You must be bad. We're not even going to give you the time of the day.' Not even going to respond to you!

"But here in reality, that doesn't matter at all," Hiko said. "I can run around ESEA PUGs and have 20 RWS. But that's not the way I play in a team environment. It has literally almost no bearing on how you play with a team."

Luminosity onstage following their MLG victory. © Robert Paul / Major League Gaming

Changing the Tone

If European teams tend to be better than their North American counterparts, Hiko said, it's because the culture around Counter-Strike in Europe hasn't forgotten what the game is about.

"In Europe, you have more options for in-game leaders. You have more options for support players. In North America, if you actually look at the scene over the last three years, there hasn't really been more than three or four in-game leaders. And almost all of the in-game leaders in the US have gotten a lot of hate for being individually less-skilled. They get fewer kills per game. So from the point of view of of an up-and-coming American player, why would they subject themselves to having the hate?" Hiko said.

"Americans are a lot more about the fame and the publicity and getting the highlight reel clips. Europe has a lot of role-players. They have a lot of in-game leaders. They have a lot of people that develop other aspects of their game outside of just their aim."

Chaloner fundamentally agrees with this take on the situation.

"I think there's a small skill gap, but I think it really comes down to things like teamwork, cohesion, communication, and then mentality. I think we all know that in sport, a winning mentality breeds more winning. And that's very true of Counter-Strike," he said.

It comes down to work and patience, Redeye said. "Look at the difference that training and sticking together made to Luminosity Gaming in the last 3-6 months. They were these crazy gung-ho, brilliant aimers, but they were terrible at tactics, strategy, and mentality. All those thing were rubbish. Yet they all moved to NA to play on a stable ping, get good practice partners. They calmed down, watched the Europeans play, and suddenly that team is a top four team in the world. So who's going to do that among the NA teams?"