Due to the coronavirus epidemic, the tournament schedule of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been completely destroyed for this season. CS.MONEY tries to find out, what is going on in the game during the quarantine?
What happened?
Trying to stop the spread of the disease, governments of countries such as Germany or Norway began to ban public gatherings, which puts all LAN-tournaments of this year in jeopardy. The vast majority of competitions in the first six months of 2020 have already been canceled or moved online.
What tournaments have been affected?
The first one who suffered in this situation is DreamHack. Since the beginning of the year, it has already canceled a whole bunch of tournaments and now tries to figure out how to overcome the crisis. The latest victims of the epidemic are DreamHack in Montreal, Valencia, and Hyderabad. All three tournaments were moved online, and DreamHack in Hyderabad had to be split into two parts.
ESL is experiencing similar troubles. For example, Intel Extreme Masters XV – Melbourne had to be delayed until better times, which are expected presumably only in 2021.
What about the majors? They are also being seriously challenged. The tournament in Rio was shifted from May to autumn, and the second major was canceled completely. At the same time, the organizers try to promptly transform the tournament rules to fit the online format.
What kind of transformations?
Some recently introduced tournament innovations had to be rolled back. The main change is that coaches now can again talk to the players during the game. The tournament operator rightly considered that it would not work to control communication with the coach and lifted the restriction.
The major format itself has also been modified. Instead of qualifications in the regions, minors and other attributes of the last major in Berlin, we are now waiting for mass transfer of all possible stages of the tournament to online.
Pros and cons?
Of course, we can’t underestimate the offline atmosphere of tournaments, but there are also a lot of positive things to be mentioned. The tournament operators have reduced their expenses significantly, teams can save lots of money on flights, and internet viewers have more online content.
To sum up, we can say that the current quarantine situation affected the CS:GO pro scene, but the negative impact is rather minimal. In addition to that Valve has good reasons to celebrate –
