**Yes, I know it’s wishful thinking.**

There’s a lot of talk about Riot Games’ recently announce Project A and how it could be the Counter-Strike or Overwatch “killer” due to some similarities between the titles.

Project A seems to be a crossover between the two leaning towards Counter-Strike’s tactical first-person shooter mechanics in terms of gun fights while adding in character based abilities like Overwatch. The key difference brought to light by CEO of Riot Games Nicolo Laurent is that “in Project A, shooting matters. You don’t kill with abilities. Abilities create tactical opportunities to take the right shot.”

Now that you understand what the game is (or at least with the information we’ve been given), now we can talk about how it can help improve Counter-Strike and that’s all thanks to the early messages from Riot.

During the breakdown video provided by Riot and hosted by Anna Donlon, Executive Producer of Project A, there was a lot of emphasis placed on lag, tickrates, netcode, peeker’s advantage, cheaters, etc.

“With Project A we’re going big on things like global infrastructure and netcode designed to go to war on peeker’s advantage,” Donlon said. “Just know, we know these are critical things to get right.”

“We know you hate second guessing if you really lost or if someone was running an aimbot or a wallhack. Since day one we have put anticheat at the forefront of our development,” explained Donlon. “We will do whatever it takes to preserve the integrity of our matches,” she added.

This sentiment was amplified by Laurent who stated that players “can’t count on cheats or internet lag to help you,” and added “we sent the team on a war against peeker’s advantage and aimbots.”

You’ll need all your creativity and style to win: can’t count on cheats or internet lag to help you. We sent the team on a war against peeker’s advantage and aimbots. — nicolo (@niiicolo) October 16, 2019

How can this improve Counter-Strike? Well that’s up to Valve. If they truly see Riot’s new project as a competitor, it’s time to step up and show they’re here to compete for their long held territory.

When Riot said they were joining the tactical shooter space to solve the problems in it, many of those problems are brought to light via Counter-Strike. It’s not too hard to find players complaining about lag, variance, inconsistency in-game, low tickrates, or cheaters across the realm of CS:GO.

Riot may have been the first to step up and say hey, we’re going to combat these issues and we’re not kidding around, but that doesn’t mean Valve can’t get it done.

The integrity of Counter-Strike matches has long been questioned from the bottom to the top. There’s a 99% chance you yourself have been in a match with a cheater on more than one occasion and that’s if you’re new to the game. While getting rid of cheaters altogether and forever may be near impossible, the number and regularity certainly be lowered. Riot says preventing cheaters is of the highest priority and I think they’re being honest about being able to stop a majority of it before it even starts.

Server performance issues are still popping up entirely too often for a game that’s been out since 2012. Whether that be in matchmaking, ESEA, FACEIT, or even servers for professional level matches. Riot claims they’ll be solving this while providing high tickrate matches.

The messaging from Riot is clear and music to the ears of gamers everywhere. Now it’s time for Valve to step up before the gaming giant loses its hold on the throne of the tactical shooter scene simply for not being willing to put on it’s gloves and throw some punches for the sake of it’s player base.

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