IEM Sydney exposes CS2 flaws, prompting pro players to call on Valve for fixes

A lot of professional Counter-Strike players are playing their first official CS2 matches at IEM Sydney this week—and they’re already urging Valve to fix the new game after some poor first impressions.

Most tier-one pros barely touched CS2 while it was still in beta because they were still playing at CS:GO events. This slowed down their transition to the new game, and some pros can’t stop comparing how raw CS2 still looks in comparison to CS:GO, a game that was honed to perfection over the 11 years of its existence.

CS2 criticism is coming from a lot of pros, including notable players like G2 superstar NiKo and ENCE’s in-game leader Snappi.

“It’s just weird, especially MR12, the games just feel off,” NiKo said in an interview with HLTV on Oct. 17, after helping G2 beat Complexity at IEM Sydney. ” They don’t feel good playing, and there’s just a lot of things that need to be fixed. I don’t want to be too negative about it, but I just hope for Valve to be as reactive and supportive towards it.”

Valve implemented MR12 to CS2 towards the end of the beta and now regulation only lasts a maximum of 24 rounds instead of 30 like CS:GO. This system was used back in the CS: 1.6 days and is most notably featured in VALORANT nowadays.

Snappi also criticized MR12 in an interview with HLTV by saying that it “dumbs down” Counter-Strike, but that isn’t the only thing bugging the ENCE captain at the moment.

“I think everything is [super buggy] at the moment,” Snappi said in a post-match interview on Oct. 17. “Like, the game is in such a bad state at the moment that it’s actually hard to play it on a high level, I feel, because the movement just doesn’t feel like CS:GO at the moment, and we’re trying to abuse everything we can about it, but it’s a bit tough, and I hope that Valve is fast [with the fixes].”

Some of the issues Snappi has with CS2 like how the game’s audio works and the peekers’ advantage have already been brought up by casual players, which gives Valve more than enough reason to at least look into it in the coming weeks.

Though Snappi and other pros seem to miss CS:GO, the harsh reality is that they’ll have to adapt to the CS2 changes sooner rather than later as Valve will likely keep most like them, especially MR12.