One of my favorite games of all time is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For a while after high school, I was playing so much of it that I truly believed that I would go pro. After a few various tragedies, I decided that it was no longer worth most of my effort and instead calmed down and stuck to my studies much more.
Even into CS:GO’s lifespan, a mappool used to be something that wasn’t actually chosen by Valve itself. Early on, a player could be playing in the CEVO League and still be playing on maps such as Tuscan or Season. ESEA used season as well, and the non-remake version at that. The very first CS:GO pug I played on ESEA was that old version of Season. A long time ago, maps were either bought out by leagues to use in their formats (see Mill and ESEA) or maps that were deemed as competitive and balanced just naturally came out on top. Also, revisions to maps existed that improved the base maps in some aspect. Nuke is an example of this, as a competitive edition exists that added the entire ‘secret’ area. In some aspects, these competitive editions of maps eventually made it into the stock maps. It wasn’t until Valve standardized the round and bomb timers and started to consider major tournament hosts due to their ruleset that we even started to see the idea of the ‘Active Duty’ map selection exist.
Everyone seems to have an opinion on what map is in the game, but this post isn’t going to necessarily be about what map should be in over what, like Mirage out and Train back in and all of that. Instead, I would like to really discuss what really ought to be considered in the context with all of the maps overall.
The very first thing is that the most important aspect of the mappool is and has always been the safe picks for a team that ideally both teams could end up winning due to having good strats. I always saw maps like Mirage, DustII, Cache, and to a lesser extent Inferno and Overpass to fulfill this niche. The general idea is that these maps adhere to a mostly tried and true format that is used in not just Counter-Strike but in many other FPS games, that is three lanes that act as points of contact with important map control decisions scattered throughout the map that give a T side more options if they are to take it, coupled with the fact that there is more risk involved in getting those positions. The actual playable maps that a team has varies from team to team based off of their style and can get funky, but in competitive play and especially in best of three formats, if a team knows you have a good setup for these maps, they are far more likely to match it than outright ban it. These maps are inherently a big more pick up game oriented than the other maps in the map pool.
The second aspect of good mappools is the idea of dedicated picks/counter picks. I always saw maps like Nuke, Vertigo, Train, and also to a lesser extent Overpass and Inferno again. These maps typically learn towards one side a lot (mostly the CT side) more than the first maps, which how much they lean being a factor in how these counter picks work. The mark of an extremely good team in my opinion is having two maps out of this category that they can reasonably win against most players by having good teamplay on the T side and good synergy and layers of defense on the CT side. If a team is well prepared for these types of maps, they are extremely better off in the map ban process- this is in fact how my team, the LAN LORDS, won many of our games.
The last aspect of map pools which is probably the worst by design simply put is ‘the maps no one wants to touch’. These are typically new maps that are put into the game and the reason why no one wants to touch them in competitive is because they are too volatile and too new to really determine a good meta on all of them. They’re usually the first to go in the map banning process so often so that many teams will count on the other team banning said map so that it isn’t played. Maps that have had this distinction in the past and currently are maps like Vertigo, Ancient, Anubis, and even some more mild map remakes like Nuke and Train (to be fair, the outside scaffolding in Nuke was anything but mild). These maps have the highest degree and feeling of a ‘war of attrition’ when it comes to the banning process. If neither team ends up banning this map and they decide to heavily favor counter-picks, you have a really interesting best of three scenario when these types of maps get picked as the last map.
Three three aspects and categories of maps bring the map pool altogether in a more meaningful way than just ‘here’s seven maps’. I apologize to people that would like to see more changes and community maps in the map pool, since anything else would make the map ban process effectively moot and the map pool itself to be entirely out of balance. With all of this information in mind, is the current map pool adhering to this sort of format? Ancient still seems rather new, and admittedly I cannot comment on how people are playing it now, but if Ancient still isn’t a map that is mostly known and has a developed meta, then the map pool is a bit out of whack. Otherwise, the map pool is in a good position as of right now. Vertigo is definitely a map that can be seen as a neutral pick right now in the same manner that Inferno eventually was against many teams.
Also, as a personal note, seriously, remove Mirage. It has been in the game far too long and the fact that it survived over remakes of Train and DustII is just wacky.