Since the new year (really since last year, if anything) I have been trying to play a ton more of CS2 since I no longer have to worry about classes. The good news is that I am actually still improving despite having ~4500 hours in the game. There’s no analog for ESEA I think, but I am actually getting a higher rank and ELO in Faceit, which I have mixed feeling about. Apparently rank 5 is actually the equivalent of Global Elite in the old matchmaking system. I was quite fine being at that level, but there’s just so much more to get into. I am just about one win away from rank 7, which for me right now would be comfortable if I bounced around in that for another few months before getting to rank 8. By the end of the year I want to be rank 9 or 10.
One of the big downsides of playing pick up games is that I am always subject to my team’s instaban map since it is the most popular pug map. Mirage! And I really miss dust2. d2 was by far the best pugging map and to not have it available to play as well is kind of horrible to see. Nuke for some reason is a better pug map these days somehow and I have a 0% winrate on Overpass, which used to be one of my favorite maps. The jump from GO to 2 has really been strange.
The next event I am going to is launders LAN in a month. My team is going to scrim consistently to get comfortable as a team, but I am honestly not expecting to get a top placement. My goal for launders LAN purely is to be able to take a couple of good rounds off of some teams. I hope that there’s a lot of matches played that day at the very least where we can fit in some wins; it’s a 32 team event and it sold out, so there should be tons of games being played all day. I’m about as excited for the bar and casual Melee because if I lose out (unlikely) I can just get blasted and play Melee. Kind of weird that a Toronto LAN can get 32 teams (that’s 32×5 = 160 players) and a Philly LAN can occasionally get 8 teams if NSG is lucky…
Sorry this isn’t a profound post or anything of the sort. I promised that I would update my blog and I wanted to deliver, even if it meant I just had to go on about what I have been doing and if it has nothing to deal with something that is particularly interesting or even worth reading. Karate is also still going well and I even went to a CSec conference last weekend so all in all I have been quite the busy person.