"It’s never too late to fix something and create better circumstances. In fact now is the only moment anything can ever be changed so every moment that passes becomes a chance to do something great for the future. I don’t think it’s possible to corner the esports market. The more years that pass the more games that will come out and the more players that will come into the market as a whole. The aim shouldn’t be to unite a scene or to corner a market or to tap into a certain mainstream demographic. The aim should be what it always should have been: create a really good game which is fun to play.

If you want to be assured of some kind of success in the competitive arena then make it fun to play but also cater to the most hardcore players and get them in your corner first of all. When you have the great players playing your game then the casual players are going to see what your game is capable of. When you have all of the casual players but none of the great players then you’re not going to convince them based on seeing a bad player do relatively will in his first try on a public server. In fact that’s going to put them off if anything.

The idea of a time limit on competitive games is entirely artifical in my opinion and is pushed by people who try to homogenise all competitives games into this esports movement which must march ever onwards, so in other words mainly tournament organisers, team managers and players who couldn’t cut it and are looking for the next game to hop onto so they will have some early parity while everyone is getting good. The first two groups only care about money and the last only care about themselves. If a game is good then people will play it. If it’s good and you can showcase that it requires skill then people will watch it. If people watch it then you have an audience and you can advertise to them. If you can advertise to a captive audience then there are companies who will pay for the advertising space/time. What does any of that have to do with the graphics of a game, what year it was released in and how many people are playing it?

In my opinion if Valve had been on the ball then they’d have had a promod designed around the middle of 2002, when they switched to 1.5. The Promod would basically have been some options for rolling back the features they implemented which only applied to public servers, contained basic match features such as readying up (which OSP had created for Quake 3 years beforehand) and tweaked some of the very simple problems that existed. Valve couldn’t even bothered to change nuke so flashbugs didn’t happen in ramp room, train so CTs couldn’t look under the alley wall from CT ramp and so on. These are 5 minute tweaks and yet the former took the better part of a decade and the latter is still unfixed.

If Valve wanted to make good competitive games how about hiring some programmers/designers who were competitive players at one point in time. If you keep hiring noobs/casual players then they’re going create games for noobs/casual players."

"I don’t really know why either game was made. Firstly think I think Valve, along with id software, have shown themselves to be woefully incapable of understanding the scope of e-sports and competitive play of their games. It has taken them almost a decade to actually understand just how many people play and spectate their games competitively and thus that it’s something worth paying attention to. I don’t even think they understand fully at this point. As a result I think Valve probably work in a frame of mind more familiar with single player games.

They probably think if they release a new version of a game with better graphics then people will flock to play it. I mean after all if they’re operating under the assumption that people only play games casually, for the most part, and that it just has to be sort of similar then they might not have even been entirely off. Their problem is that 1.6 isn’t just any old game that you can followup on, it’s a phenomenon in terms of how it has spread and built a loyal player base. Even with all of the limitations imposed on 1.6 by stupid changes from Valve the game still has a quality which shines through and is not catered to in Source."