

The addition of flower pots, cans, trash, arches, window sills, steps etc etc made grenade physics less predictable. if they were running at you and died they might still be falling forward in what looks like a running/ducking animation for 100ms or so. The ragdoll deaths made it harder to detect if a player was dead or not If you took a quick peek this might make you think it's a player crouching and still alive. Occasionally players would die while sitting or leaning up against a wall. CSS had ragdoll physics instead of death animations. It took a while for 3rd party anti-cheat clients to catch up. Head hitboxes were bigger in CSS than 1.6. I never learned how to abuse it, but it was obviously very effective. There was a bug where a players view would sit above their player model - so they could duck behind a box and see over it without being seen. Leagues had to ban this tactic, but there was no setting to just get rid of the movable barrels so it still happened occasionally. If you didn't have a grenade or extra ammo (pistol rounds?) this was hilariously difficult. We used to shoot barrels on top of the bomb that would prevent defuses until you shot them off. I probably played until 2008/2009, and then started CSGO again in 2012 or something. Valve hasn't really been very active in its own competitive scene, which may also be hurting.ĬSS got better as it got older, but I heard about grumblings from the 2010 update after I had already quit playing it.

It's definitely lost steam from the battle royal shooters (PUBG & Fortnite), and now Valorant infringing on it's player base.

CSGO has enjoyed a great run from like 2013-2018?. Imo, CS was an incredible scene from like 2000-2008.

There weren't many NA 1.6 players good enough to keep up with European pro teams after about 2010. After CGS folded in 2008, global competition sort died off and many of he top NA players retired. Teams in Europe, Asia, Brazil & elsewhere continued to play 1.6. The 1.6 scene in the US was still large and active, but never the same. most of them openly hated the game while playing in this league too. The top pro players all left the 1.6 scene for 30-40k/yr contracts to play in CGS (a no brainer). In 2007, DirectTV killed the North American professional CS scene by pushing CS:Source into their televised CGS league. Many people I knew didn't move to CSS, because getting a $1000 PC was out of the cards - most of us were kids. For 10 years, it had the best gameplay and a huge playerbase, with entry level system requirements. That's what made 1.6 so wonderful - you could run it on single core Pentium 4 processor and literally anything better. The half-life 2 engine was a disaster, and most players didn't have the hardware to run those games well at the time. It took years of updates before that game was playable competitively - it never truly was.
