It's free to play, download it and see for yourself how "point and shoot" weapons in CS are.
Slightly less snarky - in CS shooting while moving (as practiced in most other shooters, including BF and CoD) is extremely inaccurate, sometimes comically so (close up, you will miss your opponent, despite your gun barrel visually sticking into their player model). This means that just to fire a gun accurately you require good left/right hand coordination (you move with the left hand, and aim and shoot with the right). For example, you might strafe left to check a corner, register an enemy, you will then flick on their had and synchronize your counterstrafing with your shot. This might sound simple, but the skill ceiling is extremely high.
As a long time player of both BF, CoD and CS (all versions) I can tell you that the gunplay of CS is by far the most difficult to master (or rather, get to a half decent level) out of all popular shooters.
The time to kill in CS is very low - often zero.
> Burst fire weapons (which aren't very popular in CS afaik) take slightly more skill, but still, projectile weapons are objectively more difficult.
In most games burst fire weapons are easier to use than their full-auto counterparts, since their bursts are often artificially more accurate than manual bursts
I think you might be getting things backwards. The fact that it has a low time to kill means it takes less skill to get a kill. When a fight takes longer, there are more opportunities for the higher skill player to increase their advantage over a lower skill player. This is a pretty well-known relationship in game design.
To put it another way, if you look at a game with a long time to kill, like a fighting game or moba, if you put a top 1% player vs a top 5% player in a 1v1, the better player will ALWAYS win every single encounter (assuming equal start). This is because even if the better makes a mistake, or the worse player gets lucky, the fight is long enough to compensate for that.
In a game like CS, because the time to kill is so fast, it only takes one single mistake by the better player and the worse player will win the encounter.
I should clarify that like most games, I think CS still has a very high skill ceiling, but a ton of it is in communication/positioning/knowledge and also the kind of "raw skill" like reaction time that can't fully be trained.
> When a fight takes longer, there are more opportunities for the higher skill player to increase their advantage over a lower skill player. [Therefore making the game more skillful]
I very much disagree. Letting your opponent get the drop on you is a major mistake. The game giving you opportunities to plaster over huge blunders easily does not make it more skillful.
In CS you have short time to kill, long time to reset, precisely to make positioning and game sense more important and to heavily punish whiffing. If a slightly better player in terms of mechanical skill could always just do a 180° and get the kill regardless of how poor their positioning was, you are clearly not increasing the skill gap of the game. Rather you end up with a CoD-style experience.
Similarly, the importance of a single kill in CS varies widely. It could be relatively inconsequential, or it could decide the round (even if it is the first kill in a 5v5).
> In a game like CS, because the time to kill is so fast, it only takes one single mistake by the better player and the worse player will win the encounter.
That's the point of the game's design. You can't and shouldn't expect raw mechanical skill to save you every single time if you get yourself into a bad situation. Sometimes it might, some bad situations are also very hard to avoid. But if you keep getting into bad situations w.r.t. to your opponent you are clearly not the better CS player. Similar to racing, if you get off the track in a corner, your mistake was seven corners before that.
This original thread started with a discussion about the mechanical complexity ("skill") of CS. Not positioning, game sense, etc. Though other games have that stuff too!
> The game giving you opportunities to plaster over huge blunders easily does not make it more skillful.
The thing is, having a long time to kill doesn't really allow you to plaster over anything, at least not at a high enough level. Once you're at the highest tier of a game, every single one of those positioning + game sense decisions matters too... but then raw mechanics wise, those long ttk games are more complex than CS.