When Is a Counter-Strike Player Good?

Is this score meant to be like a derivative of one's rank? How fast one's expected to climb from their current rank? Or, more like a game-agnostic aggregate ranking?

Author here. You're absolutely correct in that there are two levels of skill indicator.

Something like a rank or rating is the gold standard for determining how good a player is against the rest of the group rated by the same system. It's the gold standard because it's verifiable: it translates to a probability of winning and this can be calibrated over time to increase faith in the rating. But by design, it's a fairly slow-moving indicator.

Faster feedback is interesting for figuring out in-game decision rules or improving more effectively, and that's where these per-match ratings like the Leetify rating comes into play. They are naturally more difficult to verify because they are working on a very small, noisy sample, and since the outcome of the match (win/loss) is attributed to an entire team, it can be hard to detangle the individual contributions to that, without resorting to subjective judgment. Leetify have, from what I understand, tried to take a quantitative/verifiable approach to it, but they haven't shared any details around exactly how they verified it – if at all.

I'll take a look at tracker.gg and see what else I can learn about this. Thanks for sharing!

I love this site. Great job! Nice to see you're on HN.

> the skill level is so high that you basically need tools to tell you your mistakes. Otherwise you're in for a truckload of frustration as a new player.

The onboarding experience is also non-existent. I've played a few hours of CS and stopped because I couldn't figure out what was going on and I wasn't invested enough to find out. When I say I couldn't figure out what was going on I don't mean I couldn't understand the angles I should take or other tactical things like that, but, once I went beyond quick play where I just shoot everyone, what team I was on and what I was actually trying to do.

Author here: I really appreciate the nuanced and constructive discussion in these comments -- this is the reason I post to HN. Thanks!

> This is sad that the article goes on to explaining the crucial importance of smokes, flashbangs, etc while not focusing on them for analyzing games.

There are several layers here and I should write a follow-up article to discuss that because I realise now I was stuck in my mental context too much to explain the bigger picture in the article.

This article is not, strictly speaking, trying to explain performance; it tries to explain the Leetify rating which is hopefully a fair proxy for performance. Nor is it really about giving details on how to achieve a high rating -- that requires the things you mention to put oneself in position for a favourable engagement. (In fact, one can think of the kill itself as a proxy for several other things, such as successful flashbang usage.)

This article focuses entirely on one specific kill-or-get-killed decision. It took that much analysis to provide a useful guide for that decision alone! A more complicated set of decisions I don't even know how to approach quantitatively.

Like, how would you define a successful smoke, if you had to do it based on anything that does not boil down to community feels?

I'll look into scope.gg (and tracker.gg mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) and see if I can be inspired to analyse other decisions. Thanks again!

The analysis should also be done separately for T and CT sides since they have different objectives.

On the other hand, there are a lot more competitive video games than there used to be, so the best competitive gamers are spread all around instead of just in Counter-Strike.

This is true. Even at mid levels of faceit, people throw full executes and run around clicking heads easily.

Yeah, as someone who grew up in ye old days of even pre-Steam CS, the skill level the "average" player has now is incredible. Hoping into a casual match of Counter-Strike you'd think you accidentally ended up in someone's scrim match.

I don't have the time or passion these days to practice, but even if I did, I'd imagine it'd still be a very difficult environment to just be somewhat decent.

I‘d say I‘m very proficient with FPS games. I also got to Global Elite in CS:GO. My take is that you mainly need two things, map awareness and aim. The first can only be acquired by playing A LOT. The latter too but the time it takes by playing gamemodes line Free For All Deathmatch where you get to practice the shooting aspect very frequently.

If taken seriously I‘m confident a player can get proficient within 500-800 hours of playtime. That sounds like a lot but with daily practice/playing ofr 1-2 hours its not that big of a deal.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast

This is available in some of the current FPS trainers, they often have a time scaling feature which will slow the target down.

I'll second this. The upper echelon of 5v5 is an entirely different game. It's similar to what was alluded in the post[1] about chess in another thread. The level of complexity is so high and the depth of refinement is so technical that generic statistics just don't quantify the conclusions we draw from simply watching someone's FPV. One would need to start by analyzing data at the most basic level: did the player move between two points as efficiently as possible without penalty or mistakes? How far away was their crosshair from where it needed to be at the point of contact for each engagement? How often did they misjudge where everyone else was? How accurate are they at timing enemy movement to another location without seeing them? What is their level of consistency at making certain well-known plays at certain locations? These are just the basics. The game-world data is available though for analysis at this level of detail.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40330923

You know it's gonna be bad when the analysis starts with explaining what a flashbang is (then doesn't include it in the stats)

The other difference is that chess is a 1v1 game: the only person you can blame if you lose is yourself.

Counterstrike is a team game, where (if the matchmaker was competetently designed) on average you shouldn't be able to carry your team. I think this contributes to a lot of toxicity, because it's very easy to find a cause for the loss that isn't your own skill.

Imagine a team match of chess where everyone controls a couple pieces. At low brackets, you could know "tech" like en passant or underpromotion. You might have vague ideas like "control the center" and might know a few lines of theory. You might be screaming at the screen when a teammate castles into mate-in-3 and blame them for your loss - even though you were the one who moved a pawn to h3 on turn 1.

Ladder or ranking is the best overall performance indicator (given ideal conditions, no cheating).

It is a system of averages. I was a top 80 player in Age of Empires: AoK and easily beat the crap out of everything from below the top 100.

Above me, I could compete with most players on some maps on some days, top 50 would beat me in a best of five, but top 20 usually eat me under competitive conditions.

Most of them were already pro gamers back then and trained hard to maintain their ranking.

It piles up. Micro management especially. Being constantly a couple of milliseconds faster in organizing stuff and decision making is like a formula 1 driver who is 0,5 faster per lap. Worlds apart with 60 rounds to take.

This. I used to play pretty high level cs more then a decade ago. I can still join deathmatch games once every blue moon and usually come out on top.

You got kicked by many, many different players over a tight enough timeline and you think it's simply because you were aiming too good?

> Surprised at the small size of the dataset here.

Author here. For answering the research question that spawned the article (engage or stay away from a do-or-die encounter), the data set actually appears to be "too large" – see the significance values of the parameters. I got carried away when copy-pasting match result tables, but the effect is so clear that a much smaller data set would have sufficed for showing it.

I think the thing you're asking for is what the Leetify rating tries to encode, but people in this discussion have suggested alternative rating systems which I have yet to look into.

Time to kill.

In most FPS games, a single shot does relatively little damage. A typical weapon in Apex Legends or CoD takes about 0.8 seconds to take a player down to zero health. If you're losing a firefight, you'll often have the chance to retreat, heal and re-engage unless your positioning is very poor.

In CS, many weapons are capable of killing in a single shot and most are capable of a kill in less than 0.1 seconds. If you carelessly blunder into the crosshairs of a player with good aim, you'll probably die before you've had time to react. This is a deliberate design decision, because it raises the skill ceiling. You can get away with errors in positioning and game sense at a lower level, because your opponents are likely to have poor aim; as the standard of aim improves at higher levels of play, tactical errors are punished with increasing severity.

COD is designed to have a low skill ceiling, so casual players can feel like champions. For example, it has crazy high aim assist. See

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernWarfareII/comments/ykdqhs/aim...

So you don't need much actual skill at aiming. Plus weapons generally have huge magazines relative to the number of shots needed to kill people, so you can spam fire and will usually get a kill.

CS is designed to basically be the opposite.

More casual shooters might have auto-aim, especially on console. CS is very fast and twitchy compared to more mainstream shooters.

Also, CS has recoil that moves you cursor / aim point. Other games might only have bullet spread. It's an interesting decision whether or not recoil should extend to UI elements like cursor position, in CS it does. One result of this is skilled players can move their cursor just right and counteract the recoil, potential putting every bullet on target like a laser beam, but I don't think any human can fully realize that potential.

CS feels more punishing?

I think the answer is a combination of factors.

- TTK (time to kill) is very, very low. Without a helmet, all pistols 1shot headshot from <= medium range

- Accuracy while moving is reduced

- The default mode is 5v5 no respawns

- No gamification rewards (unlocks, killstreaks) to distract from the pain of dying

This all works together to make the game feel more "precise" and less "fun"

Besides what everybody says there is also slight difference between engines in terms how they behave. I used to be “progaming” going on tournaments in quake 3 and then COD1 and 2. They are all on same quake engine and feel very similar with different timing.

The way of the counterstrike source engine feels is different in a way i never fully absorbed. Also the gunplay is different you might have the pure aim (aim at target and click) but im CS you have to compensate for the each gun and really know them. In quake it basically shoots where you point no matter if you are running or in middle of a jump. Other games have aiming down the sights. That is a lot more forgiving and transferable skill than in CS.

Wat? CS is crawling with cheaters. Totally sucks. I can’t wait for the day when we have enough bandwidth that the entire game can be rendered on the server side and you just get a video feed. That would end most of this crap.

The argument I've heard is that Russian players have relatively high ping to EU servers, so are more prone to becoming frustrated and playing in a silly but fun way.

I'm not entirely sure I buy that, because the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was basically "Rush Kyiv, don't stop blyat"; an overwhelming advantage in manpower and equipment was squandered due to poor planning. Russia seems to have a very long martial tradition of just charging ahead and trying to win through sheer force of will.