4 ms·

To be clear, I played well over 1000 hours in 1.6, I'm not new to the game! I've also played CS:GO, but only 50 hours or so. I think you might be getting thing

To be clear, I played well over 1000 hours in 1.6, I'm not new to the game! I've also played CS:GO, but only 50 hours or so. 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.

blattimwind 7y ago
I don't think comparing TTK across genres makes much sense, since e.g. in a fighting game a single kill is an entire round of the game. > 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.
- MattRix 7y ago
  Sorry for the late response, I forgot to check this thread for a while... 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.

blattimwind 7y ago

I don't think comparing TTK across genres makes much sense, since e.g. in a fighting game a single kill is an entire round of the game. > 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.

MattRix 7y ago
Sorry for the late response, I forgot to check this thread for a while... 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.