Astralis took the ECS Season 5 crown at the SSE Arena in Wembley, London on Sunday, along with the $250,000 first prize.

All eight of the teams which took part in the finals went home with at least $35,000, so they should be feeling pretty good about themselves.

However, Mail Esports spoke to someone from each team before the finals, and they all had some things they wanted to get off their chest about Valve, CS:GO, and the pro scene.

Certain overpowered weapons and a packed tournament schedule were a common complaint. But interestingly, they don't all agree on the main talking points. Read on to find out what they had to say.

dupreeh - Peter Rasmussen - Astralis

'We're coming to a stage where online tournaments are going to have a drop both. You get the feeling people are starting to get a bit tired of it. Because let's say you watch 20 online games and then you have a tournament, then another tournament, then another tournament, that's too much content to watch. You get bored of it.

'I think player breaks and when you come back to watch CS maybe after a couple of weeks and you go back to watching a tournament where the team's been able to practice, you haven't watched any online games, that's where things get exciting.

'It would be cool if the tournament organisers got together and created something, so you have less tournaments, but you would create more hype and more of an atmosphere. Now we have to handpick what we want to attend, right now we have too much to attend and we have to say we don't want to go to this, this and this.

'For the Majors, I think that teams that change a lot of players or a team that doesn't perform, they shouldn't get their free invite, it doesn't make much sense in my opinion.'

Mail Esports spoke to eight professional CS:GO players, and they all had some frustrations

NAF - Keith Markovic - Team Liquid

'I think Valve... not a lot is being done. There's still a lot of issues, not a lot of updates. There's still a problem with the CZ being overpowered, if you asked Reddit this question I'm sure they could figure out all the problems.

'For me, playing competitive, the biggest problem is the CZ [CZ75-Auto pistol], playing anti-eco rounds it's still the scariest thing ever, especially on maps like Inferno. The thing I want most is better communication [from Valve], more explanations on why they're not doing things they're not going to do.'

GuardiaN - Ladislav Kovacs - FaZe Clan

'If you are a top 5 / top 10 team you have the opportunity to choose between events, we didn't go to StarLadder for example. You have to be able to choose or sacrifice events to be able to refresh your team. But if you think about it if some teams don't go to StarLadder it gives other teams the chance to play. In some ways it's good to have a lot of events. I think we should be happy to have a lot.

'The question is more about Majors and CS in general. Valve hasn't done anything for the game in the past year, I think it will hurt our game if they don't start anything.

'If you compare two Valve games, Dota and CSGO, you see a huge difference. In Dota you have major updates after every single major, and in CSGO you have almost nothing. They make some updates that you don't even want because they're useless for the pro scene, and sometimes everyone.

'They should get everything together and do something new. People want operations, people want new skins, people want everything. But Valve is not doing anything, in some ways they are killing the joy to play CS for people.

'If I'm a casual player, I want updates and something to do in the game. The way they are taking care of this game is the wrong way. Hopefully they'll start doing something.'

The main issue people have is with the CZ75-Auto pistol being overpowered, among others

SmithZz - Edouard Dubourdeaux - G2 Esports

'We are going in a good direction. But we are losing a lot of viewers because of sponsorship with different streaming platforms, and I think it's not so good, but that's just my opinion.'

FNS - Pujan Mehta - Cloud9

'We'll talk about ECS first, the format for groups. It's so stupid to me, and I can't stress this enough, that we played an entire league season, and coming into this LAN there's a good chance you could be out in 3 maps. That's ridiculous.

'If you're going to play an entire league season it needs to be swiss best of three, or at least swiss format. It gives s*** teams more chances to improve throughout the tournaments. For example NRG at StarLadder, they were 0-2 down and came back 3-2. They also ended up beating teams they lost to previously in the groups.

'When you play a season for a big LAN like this with a big prize pool, it shouldn't be three maps and you're out. That shouldn't be a possibility.

The number of tournaments we have right now in CS is too much. It was a massive deal for my team, because we went to tournaments as soon as I joined. I've played 45 maps for C9 in the last 45 days I've been with them. In that sense, it's unreasonable for people to expect consistent results from a team that gets zero practice.

'If there's not going to be a cut in tournaments, there should be a two and a half month off season. Every sport you think about there's an offseason, to mentally reset, physically reset, and then have the hunger to come back and reinvent yourself as a team.

'It's important for CS and in sports when you're competing throughout the year, for there to be an offseason for players to make changes, a certain amount of time where you can create a new strat book, add new things. There's too many tournaments constantly with very little practice, and you're seeing teams that are like 20% prepared when they could've been 100% prepared.

'When it comes to op stuff like the CZ not being fixed, you can tell we don't really know what's going on. It's good to be optimistic and think that Valve is working on something big that maybe we don't know about, so I don't want to give them too much shit about it, but you just don't know.

'The problem is they're not communicating with us or the people that play their game. It's disappointing. I gave up hope a really long time ago that that's gonna change. So now I just kind of accept it for it is, and I'm grateful for what we have now.'

There are also complaints about the tournament schedule from some, but not all of the players

Brehze - Vincent Cayonte - NRG Esports

'I think Counter Strike is the best FPS played competitively. As for the game itself, it's at a point where, I don't know if it's declining, but it's flattening out. I don't know what they do to change that, whether it's adding a gun or taking away a gun, I feel like they need to add like a new map or something to spice the game up more.

I know some playters have contacts with some of the Valve guys, and I'm pretty sure sometimes they don't get any response or they don't listen to the feedback. There's definitely some frustration from the players.

NEKIZ - Gabriel Schenato - Luminosity Gaming

'They need to invest in the game, more money or something. Look at Dota and other games like League of Legends. The CZ is overpowered, some pistols too. They need to decrease the CZ a bit because it's op in my opinion. In other aspects it's good.'

Xizt - Richard Landstrom - Fnatic

'There's a lot that could be made better. Making the CZ worse would be an improvement, it's so good, it's like a rifle that costs $500.

'I still think that the competitive scene overall is really good right now, there's a lot of good teams that compete for the titles. A couple of months ago a lot of teams were not that good, but a lot are coming back to a good level right now.

'I don't think there's too many events right now. If you prefer going to IEM / ECS / Dreamhack, most teams will prioritise over tournaments like StarLadder or other smaller tournaments.'