Ahead of this weekend's ESEA Season 18 LAN in Dallas, Counter-Strike legend and Virtus Pro Captain Filip "NEO" Kubski spoke to theScore eSports about the team's roller coaster start to 2015, and an unpopular vote of confidence in Valve's recent controversial CS:GO update.

Virtus Pro have seen up-and-down results this year, starting with a rather successful semifinal appearance on home soil at the $250,000 ESL One Katowice major, and a win at the Copenhagen Games, while also bowing out early at the finals of this past weekend's ESL ProLeague finals, and earlier at the StarLadder Season 12 finals. Kubski believes the hectic travel schedule in the current climate of professional CS:GO may be to blame.

"Most of all I believe we have been attending too many events lately, and because of that we didn't have enough time to practice," Kubski tells theScore eSports. "With less practice, our confidence went down, and without that confidence we started changing too many things in our game. In the end each new event we have attended, a different Virtus.pro has played."

The latter years of competition in CS 1.6 only saw the game at a professional level increase in skill and competition. For a year from mid 2011-12, his team, then the Frag eXecutors and ESC, were the dominant team in the game with titles at the IEM VI World Championship, World Cyber Games, and WEG. Fnatic, Na'Vi, mTw, and SK each had their own runs during the late years of 1.6. While Ninjas in Pyjamas achieved equal notoriety for their impressive undefeated run of games to begin CS:GO's lifespan, Kubski isn't sure if getting back to that point will be attainable.

"The competition is different now, it's so strong that I highly doubt it's possible to be as dominant in CS:GO as it used to be in 1.6. But the game is still evolving, players are still learning the game, so I wouldn't count us out. At least cheering for our team is like a roller coaster ride! Entertaining, and eventually you reach the top sometimes."

During this same time span of results in early 2015, Fnatic and Envy have taken home major title wins at Katowice, StarLadder, and Gfinity respectively, and are seen by many as the best two teams in the world. It's hard for Kubski to disagree, but he believes the gap between the top teams are smaller than some may think.

"I believe the gap is very small between all the top teams right now," Kubski said. "Fnatic is ahead of everyone, Envy is very strong but not that stable Top 2. NiP have been going through lineup changes and because of that they were a bit shaky, but I think allu is a perfect match for that team and I already see them coming back even stronger. You also can't out teams like TSM, Titan, Na'Vi or Cloud9 which are also capable of winning a competition. But to answer the question, if we take placings on tournaments that would be pretty accurate."

On March 31 Valve released their latest major update for CS:GO, which included changes to many of the guns used in competitive play for both professionals and amateurs, along with the substitution of Train for Nuke to the Active Duty map pool.

Updates were made across the board to the AWP, Tec-9, M4A1, and several SMGs. While professional players and the community at large requested Valve to reduce the power of the Tec-9, the decision to slow down the AWP and beef up machine guns was made without that same request. Professional players and critics have had a wide variety of viewpoints on how these changes have affected CS:GO and the metagame, but there is predominant thinking that there are a number of negative results.

.@csgo_dev Take care of your boost SMG, played few pracctices tonight, the metagame is becoming like CoD and that's not why we love CS :( — Richard Papillon (@shoxCSGO) April 6, 2015

Yes, this update make all of us really sad :( http://t.co/DOjAyPjBfJ — kennyS (@Titan_kennyS) April 1, 2015

RIP AWP [*] And guess everyone will use the m4a4 now :D would be better to nerf the recoil of the m4a1 instead imo :( — Olof Kajbjer (@olofmCS) April 1, 2015

Complaints have ranged from aggressive AWP'ing being too slowed down with bugged crouching movement to boot, fear of 'run and gun' Call of Duty-esque gameplay with SMG's, and a reduced ammo clip given to the Tec-9 that has not properly addressed the original problems of the gun.

Kubski, who has played Counter-Strike professionally for more than a decade as one of the greatest to ever play the game, has found a different perspective. One that tends to side with Valve on what they've done.

"I find the changes to be pretty accurate, actually," said Kubski. "The Tec-9 and AWP changes are just fine. I AWP from time to time on our team and since I’m pretty old and rusty, it feels the nerf was just perfect for me. All these OP snipers just got slowed down.

"I also like the small buff that SMGs got, it makes them more efficient against ECO (T-eco9) rounds. It was a good idea. Now we have higher chances of winning anti-ecos than before, even though the amount of ecos won is still high. The only one change which I don’t really support is the cost of m4a1 which got higher by 100$ - not much, but you can feel it.

"1.6 was just different. You almost had no chance to win ecos over there. Maybe pistols being so strong in GO is a good thing since we have so many twists and turns during the game, which just make it more interesting to watch. As a player it is frustrating when you are ahead, stomping your rivals, and all of the sudden they go full REKT-9 and win a round, while rifles couldn’t make it work.

"But that’s just part of the game. Valve is doing some good work."

That being said, Kubski does have some concerns with a gun that has had its issues brought up before.

"The Scout issue. The gun is practically OP – after the last update your movement with the gun is even faster now, plus, you can shoot while jumping and it's 100 percent accurate. It costs $1700 right now, which means after losing the pistol round and getting one kill, you can afford buying the gun. That is too cheap for such a strong weapon. To me it should be at least $1900, so you can only buy it after getting two kills in the pistol round."

Kubski's biggest concerns actually lie in the money system, one of the unique core mechanics in CS that defines the game. Valve has made several alterations to the system in CS:GO, but Kubski believes this is more of the reason for matches getting out of hand than anything else.

"What is the worst case scenario for a team playing a CS:GO match? With the current money system, after being down for example 0-6, it is better to keep losing than to win a round (it gets even worse when its a 1on1 situation). Why? Because after losing a few rounds in a row, the money reward you get for a loss is higher than for winning. Plus the whole system gets reset and if you lose afterwards you get only $1400, which means your team has to Eco twice, again. By this point you end up 1-8 already and still if you lose the next round, you need another eco because your team gets $2900, so the snowball continues even further.



"My thoughts here are: what if instead of the full reset to $1400 after winning the round, the reward just decreases by some certain amount, $1000 for example. This way in the situation where we are so behind, after winning and then losing, we are not so screwed up in the end. I'm open to ideas."

During the 1.6 era, Train was one of the most dominant and successful maps for Kubski and his Polish squad, and one of the most iconic maps in professional games. Kubski isn't quite sure if this iteration will live up to the same expectations, but he'd like to see Valve make changes and decisions to maps in a larger way — including not tampering with maps right before major tournaments, and tournaments to have more consistency across each other.

"I have played only a few matchmaking games on the new Train. It seems like a cool map, but it is too soon to say if it is ready for competitive games. [I] always loved train, our team was always good on that map so I am looking forward to that. But honestly there are some other maps which could use changes, like for example inferno, where the game relies only on counting smokes.. Or for instance, why no one plays Overpass. Nuke wasn't that bad imo, teams still tended to play it.

"I also wish every tourney had the same map pool. To me, when Valve decided to remove Nuke and add Train, every tournament should follow same changes. The best example here is de_season, which is only at the ESEA. Nothing against the map really, but come on, teams never practice the map since no one else hosts it, and then you need to guess who’s been actually playing It and who wasn’t."

Kubski added a final request. "Last thing I guess, which is actually a small, friendly request to Valve: Stop releasing your updates on the day before tournaments. Died in-game plenty of times - because of you guys – because I had no time to check the map changes, so please – UPDATE the game on Mondays!!! Cheers!"