The Major just finished, and the Valve bashing is in full effect - just as it was before. Almost daily the opinion leaders of the CSGO community blurt out various attacks or digs at Valve, sometimes the players chime in, sometimes not. Hell, even people I have a great deal of respect for often chime in, and it saddens me a bit, as I do not think it is a fair representation of Valve, or the development of this game.



Common for most of the attacks are that they happen on twitter, a place Valve has never really taken to, so there is never really any defense. Often the attacks are followed by clever little sarcastic comments about how terrible the CSGO devs are.



All this may lead the community to think Valve are not interested in our feedback, or very hard to reach, but this is simply not true. At every single Major the same Valve guys are around for the entire tournament, and very much accessible to discuss CSGO. I believe they used to call meetings with players, something that does not happen anymore, but that does not mean you do not have a chance, you can easily run into them at the venue, at the hotel bar, or even at a game of foosball at the afterparty (we played for 128 tick matchmaking - and won, so I’d imagine we will see this soon, right?!).



My point is that at the Majors, Valve are very easy to approach, and I have never seen them shy away from a topic or a discussion.



However, just talking to Valve will not solve anything, as some of the players often tell us on Twitter, then they listen, but they do not do anything, why is that? Well in my experience they do listen, and they do act, but, they will not take your word or gut feeling for it. They want hard evidence, or compelling arguments, and why would they not? They are not only fairly intelligent people as far as I have observed, they are also professional game designers that have threaded the needle and made it into Valve, something that is by no means easy. So naturally they will not take your word for whatever change you want, even if you are the world's best player, or the analyst with the loudest voice, because they are simply not just designing this game for you, or for esports, or for casuals, or for the 1.6 diehards, they are making this game for everyone, so no change is made lightly.



I think a great example of a change they did was the bomb timer, Valve (and players I believe?) felt the molotovs, smokes and so on were too powerful, in after-plant situations, and thus 5 seconds were added to the bomb timer. More time to let the smokes dissipate, makes sense! -- Well it did not back then did it? There was a ton of criticism - people claimed all of CS was ruined. Hell I too thought this was stupid, we had 35 seconds on the bomb forever, if you had a problem with these new fangled molotovs, make them burn out faster! So the consensus was clear everything would change now, and for the worse no less! -- Only it did not, and today I doubt anyone wants to go back.



I can mainly speak from my own experience, and for a long time HLTV.org tried to get changes into CSGO as well - we needed some more stuff in the logs for better stats, and we mailed Valve, and talked to them at the Majors, figuring of course they would understand, of course they would do our change, because it made sense to us. We were met with a response that was not really to our liking, instead of adding to the log system, they just asked us to parse demos. We did not have any good counter arguments for this, and thus, could not really do much, we however learned soon that guaranteeing demos for all matches was very hard, and back came the frustration, even leading to venting from me on Twitter about Valve, go figure.



At the next Major we had a talk again, and we explained our issues with demos, we explained how hard it was to reconstruct a demo if it was not recorded properly, but how logs could be edited by hand. After we made this argument Valve agreed with us, and since we have gotten a ton of extra stuff added to the logs. This is just one example, but I like it, if not then just for my own reasons, as a reminder that of course you need to back up your points, why should Valve make their game more complex, if it is about you being lazy? Why would Valve do a big change to the game, if there is no evidence or compelling arguments beyond your gut that it makes any difference?



I also once asked Valve about the Majors, why they did the Major rules the way they did, why they did not allow coaches, and the response at least taught me a lot, so I’ll share it. Valve thinks of the Majors as a way to find the best team in the game you can play in matchmaking, not the greatest CS team in the world by any other set of standards, now I bet someone are already fuming, ready to ridicule them for this, but give me a minute here. Because in the same breath they said, that it was fine by them if other events wanted to allow coaches to speak, if other events wanted to allow different rules, and not only did they say it was okay, they actually hoped more events would go out there and do different things, and prove to them that different things could work. I made the argument that they set the rules, and the standards with the Majors, and that this may be a too simplistic way of thinking of this, and I still somewhat believe that, but I can also appreciate their argument, and to be honest, who am I to tell them to do it otherwise.



I do not know exactly how we ended up with the swiss system in the Majors, but I am guessing that Valve saw something they liked when ESL started doing it, and then it was only natural to run it at a Major, and it has since caught on. So maybe if we want re-seeding, or if we want BO3 matches for the X-2 matches, or some other change, we should lead the way, and prove this system better? Why would Valve ignore if we presented a better system? In none of my talks I have ever gotten the impression they just decided not to listen, it may have happened to others, but why do we not then discuss how to convince them, instead of taking cheap shots on Twitter?



We all get frustrated now and then, and Valve sometimes do work in mysterious ways, I think they too know that they mess up sometimes, because we all do, we are human, but they are exactly that, intelligent people that will listen to well thought out opinion, and hard evidence, so how about we spend our energy on that, and not the unproductive bashing on Twitter.

