It all started in June with the release of de_thera. Well, that’s not entirely truthful, but this is more about the journey overall for de_basalt than the preference for community maps. I told myself that I would become the best in the world at de_thera, and unfortunately this fizzled out quickly as I was interested in some other gaming things at the time that were otherwise pulling my attention from Counter-Strike. It wasn’t until the start of this winter where I finally had time to devote to CS2 again, and instead of practicing for laundersLAN 2 I found myself messing around with the annotation mode in a new CS2 update launched with the return of de_train and a rotation of the community maps. I was initially really bummed because cs_agency had been just reintroduced into the Steam Workshop for the game, and it felt like it was guaranteed to be in the next update.

This update however introduced a map previously released in CS:GO that I played a tiny bit of while working on my degree, and that was de_basalt. I thought that the layout was intuitive and the overall gameplay of the map felt like peak Counter-Strike with the amount of opportunities there were for setups, rushes, lurk plays, the works. The only community map that introduced something so refined for the defusal mode to me was de_seaside, but this was slowly becoming a close second.

Part One: Annotations

I was extremely involved in learning the new annotation console commands, but I felt that it made no sense to use the new tools for maps that already had tons of documentation out there. These commands are tools that were introduced in November of this year, and they have tons of potential in general for teams to use. In my previous suspended quest on de_thera, I had found smoke lineups that I would take screenshots of to remind myself of where they were. Eventually, I got OBS out and contributed to csnades.gg with some of the nades I found. Ultimately, I found that to be a poor option because the requirements over on that site made it so that I was constantly changing my crosshair, video, and HUD settings. It was tedious to contribute to their site and a lot of my flashbangs and a few of my smokes simply were never posted due to what they perceived as having inconsistent recording properties.

When annotations first came out, I decided I would learn the tooling on de_basalt since this was a map I was roughly familiar with but otherwise didn’t have nades for. I started with a search on YouTube for videos showcasing what nades people were throwing on CS:GO. If they were good on CS:GO, they’d likely be good here too with a few tweaks due to how nades work now. I would say roughly 20% of my nade kit came from this. It was very easy to translate new lineups for those nades due to the utility preview camera already. This was already a fantastic tool introduced with the game’s GO -> 2 update, but now with the ability to annotate what I was throwing, I could easily load up a server to practice and put down notes on what the nade is good for and how exactly to throw it (ex: running jumpthrow, crouch jumpthrow, etc).

This eventually became an obsession. I would learn a few nades and them try them out in matchmaking. Some of my earliest nades, like the A lower smoke or the middle garage smoke for T side proved to be extremely useful. In game when I found that there were some positions that would be extremely useful to either molotov or smoke off. Eventually, I would find lineups for them too. While on sites, I also found that there were some flashes I could throw to different positions to help teammates out in various ways. These would get labbed in a practice server, and when I found something it became assimilated into one of the multiple guides I had open. At the time, the annotation limit was 100 and for me to have every single nade and all of the associated nodes in the file would make that number go over 100.

When I had this collection of utility compiled, I wanted to share it with people. Annotations did not have Workshop compatibility on launch, so the next best thing I did was open up a pastebin account to upload the .txt files there- this would involve people manually installing the files into a directory on CS2, and in all honestly I don’t think anyone I ever shared these with ever did it (some were like, nah I’m not clicking this link that this guy I just met shared with me, and others simply did not care). If they did and if they are reading this, my apologies and thank you for checking those out!

Part 2: Together, we ride

Part 2 theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgnpCa9d_kQ

By nature, matchmaking is antagonistic when you solo-queue. It’s not full of generally friendly people and is usually filled to the brim with 16-24 year olds that never say anything in earnest. They and they alone want to get the win and your progress is not considered. You are paired onto a team with four other people who may or may not be queued together and if you have any semblance of what you want to do in a round, you’re seen as either a complete nerd (which is weird, I thought we all are since we’re playing competitive games…?) or a tryhard. It can get infuriating. This is before even considering the fact that you’re playing a community map.

Some of my encounters were outright disheartening. While some were completely understandable, or ones such as saying that they have not played the map before (which I still don’t quite understand- just launch a practice server before you queue and learn some of the basic spots!) I had many more teammates that simply would not listen or make basic calls, such as just calling how many they’d see mid or A. These are basic callouts on nearly every single map, not knowing these isn’t a not knowing the map issue, it’s a not knowing the entire game issue. I can understand if “go after my flash/smoke” or “I’m playing contact/off of your contact” can go over newer player’s heads, but in some cases there were players that clearly played the game (had more expensive skins than I did, had multiple thousands of hours) basically giving me grief for trying to coordinate in what is labelled as the competitive mode. The worst it ever got was someone telling me that if I wanted to play competitive, to go and play Premier or Faceit (for those not aware, this map simply is not selectable in Premier and Mapcore is not running this map right now).

Pic related.

Naturally, there were some pretty dark moments. Beyond all of that however, I would occasionally come across teammates that were good and willing to learn. After the match, I would offer for them to add me. I would also offer to share all of my utility that I had created if they wanted to learn it. It was never a requirement, but it would have been nice to have had one other person throw my nades so that I could fully utilize them. In most of my soloqueue games, I fill the support role, the entry role, and the IGL role (lessened, since it’s still a pug) assuming no one else is doing any of that. Being able to have teammates that have some semblance of consistently with so that they know the util set I throw or ones I know that will be able to hold/lurk well meant that a lot of those stresses were lessened.

I created a group Steam Chat for these players and I would occasionally broadcast to them when I was queuing. I think that once I had enough players, I could realistically five stack all of my matches to farm wins. When I first did this, there was a stretch of 12 games that I won with Soma and Space (shoutouts to you guys if you are reading this), probably my longest winstreak I have ever had in Counter-Strike. It was early on in my wins, but we went from Silver Elite Master to a rough average of Master Guardian 1. I would keep gathering other players in this manner, some I hadn’t played with more than once, but a couple kept coming back whenever I intended to queue Basalt. Currently, we’re a bit dormant and I have been resulting back to soloqueuing.

It felt nice to meet people that were able to hold their own. It was something that I still look forward to as I very much enjoy having consistency in matches. Also, it helps that having people around me consequentially makes it so that I cannot get another random person that is going to flame me for communicating in a team based game (while I am known to be talkative also the kids are calling it yapping which makes it sound like a negative thing, it is always better to overcomm than undercomm and if you do not use snd_voice_scale at all you are a noob anyways).

Part 3: All I need is 30 kills

Part 3 theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05qcC6rS8vQ

For a while it got to a point with skill based matchmaking of me knowing that I would need to get 30 kills in a game if I stood a good chance of winning the match. I have screenshots of me getting 28-29 kills but barely losing by one round or getting a tie, and a lot of this had to do with the skill based matchmaking. The game knew I was good, and it unfortunately could only ever balance me by putting me into the worse 4 stack that would queue up. There were times where I was going against Faceit level 10s, and not even base level 10s but some of the top rated in the entirety of NA purely because the game could simply not put me on their team to balance me. A lot of them also talked trash and would not have won against me in a 1v1. The darkest moment I had was trying to track down this one guy after the game online to get him to 1v1 me for $500 if he won. I would have won because he wasn’t good at the game, but he chickened out. To protect his identity, I will not post his screenname here; we both know that he’s a wimp and I can leave it at that. I gave him a fair chance to prove his worth and he declined. Eventually I had to use cl_mute_enemy_team 1 which is a real good reminder for people that don’t use it- no one in a pick up game or matchmaking on the enemy team will ever say anything beneficial to you, so it’s worthwhile to have the enemy team mute on so you avoid flaming and spam.

Overall however, I just felt that the SBMM which is inherently designed to make sure I win 50% of my games is not fun to have. I shouldn’t be paired with people that do not know how to play the game, it is as simple as that. The ranking system is flawed somewhat, and it’s mainly due to how ranks are initially issued. If you look at the csstats leaderboard for de_basalt, there are tons of people sitting in LE and LEM that have less than 10 wins and that’s bullshit, especially the people with two, because I will never be going against them let alone have them on their team. I didn’t rank high because I don’t really tend to my CS rating, which I am positive is used in the determination to a certain extent. The 10 wins on a map to get your rank was way too extreme (I was still fine with it), but the 2 wins now gives the opposite effect- now I have no one to get a higher rank off of because the higher ranked players who were higher ranked in my eyes by having a better CS rating do not play the map after getting their rank (I don’t play premier because you cannot have instabans, so me playing Mirage is fundamentally a waste of time since it’s also map I do not enjoy alongside a map that my team instabans when we go to LAN).

I’ve still beat the odds technically- I am sitting at a 64% win percentage, but if you compare that to cs_office which is a map I never soloqueue and play a decent amount too I have an 84% win percentage, which is way more indicative of my performance when I have teammates that also know what they are doing. I have always felt that I am the tofu of Counter-Strike players, where I only ever do as good as my teammates allow me. It has happened multiple times where people instantly tell me first round in MM to “SHUT THE FUCK UP” and I end up just muting them for the first 3 rounds. I don’t know if they’re joking or if they’re serious, but I don’t want that negative energy while I’m otherwise attempting to enjoy my free time, plus it gets in my head and makes me play worse. People like that are children and need to learn to treat people with respect, otherwise I’m not giving them the time of day.

I cannot trash the matchmaking system entirely since it has to put me in a game with the few people queuing de_basalt. I have sat in the queue for over 15 minutes sometimes trying to find a de_basalt match, so I understand that it is not going to be perfect and will end up trying to just make do with the best it can do. Also, even when the teams are imbalanced due to number of players queuing together, there have been plenty of matches I have played where I’m the odd man out paired with a four stack (yay, diplomatic immunity!) against a full five stack and have still won because I’m literally the X factor that the five stack didn’t have on account of being a five stack. If I sound cocky about being good at de_basalt, it’s because I feel that I have earned it. It is possible that out of anyone in the world playing de_basalt, I have been the one to rank up the most or at least very close (I started at Silver Elite, am currently DMG).

Part 4: The climb to the top (?)

Part 4 theme: https://youtu.be/sIB_LwtR9sg
“It’s gonna be a long hard road. But who knows? Could kick ass. Could be dangerous. Could totally suck.” – Travis Touchdown

The end goal that I have, ideally, is to hit Global Elite. So far no one in the entire world has done this. I would wager with ranks being held hostage by people not playing, that it is impossible to even get. This is not going to deter me from trying to accomplish it, and I will have substantially more time to do so after the holidays. I want to eventually get a five stack I can run strats with. It’s been hard to get to that point, but I feel like it is possible.

If that is unobtainable, I want to end in the top 10 of players for number of wins. Right now I am ranked 18th. I have found that a lot of these players are doing nothing with their days but playing de_basalt. The top player has double the wins I have, but is somehow in Silver Elite. This means that their win percentage must be so low that they are idling in their games or something to that effect and not actually playing. A lot of the other players in that bracket however are genuinely formidable but entirely passable in the leaderboards. It’s good to have goals and I think that one map and two separate contingencies based on the overall environment of the matchmaking system will effectively make it so that this is measurable in some way and will has a definitive conclusion when this map is rotated out.

Part 5: Where’s this all going? Why are you doing this?

Part 5 theme: https://youtu.be/pw6S3c_Qb3E

I think there’s some truth in saying that I am doing this because I may not be able to easily compete on Active Duty maps. I think that’s what the detractors would say, anyways. Active Duty doesn’t really interest me enough to learn a wealth of utility or positions. We’ve been playing Mirage, Inferno, dust2, even Train and at this point Ancient for years. Community maps give me that initial feeling of “learning the game” that I so desperately missed about the initial curve. There’s a point in many fields, professions, hobbies, you name it where you end up hitting a plateau and everything that comes with that.

A friend about a month ago mentioned something I had never heard before called the Pareto Principle, where effectively 20% of your overall efforts go into 80% of your results. He then said that if you spend ~34 hours a week or 20% of your time focused on Counter-Strike, you could effectively being in the top 20% of players as you’d pass the 80% that were not doing that. But where does that extra 20% come from? That extra 20% comes from years of practice, long nights alone without friends and early mornings dedicated so that you are in peak form. Simply put, the 20% of effort I could allocate is already a wall I’ll never break with the amount of time I would rather spend with friends.

With knowledge gaining and general learning, you end up not knowing the things you don’t know. Comparatively, you end up knowing the things you do not know in something that is newer and you end up learning or creating them yourself. The things you didn’t know you didn’t know still come, and they’re much more welcomed surprises. I think that community maps give that back to someone who has had almost 5000 hours in the game, but is much too old to think about picking up competitive leagues again when so much more is going on I’d rather do than just to be stuck maybe playing 4/5 days a week with a team. This is also why I still go to LANs but usually never make day 2, I enjoy the competition of it all over any sort of standings. Plus playing LAN Counter-Strike is peak gaming.

One day de_basalt will rotate out of the map pool. If I make it to the very end of the ranking system and it’s just gone the next week, I don’t think I’d be sad. I think I’d be reminiscing on the matches I had, the joy I had at finding smokes and sharing them with allies even if they hadn’t used them directly, and glad that I had given what is an amazing map the time and attention that it rightfully deserves.

For those of you that stuck it out to the end, here’s my annotation file I made. I made it public with the go live of the annotation system on the Steam Workshop.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3387024686

Stay well, stay kind and maybe we’ll see each other in the Basalt queue. I’ll promise not to get too mad if you’re new to the map.