Foreword: The idea behind this post, is to provide some insight into why I think that the CSGO competitive scene could be very fertile ground for a community-led initiative towards a decentralized platform/service that can act as a community-controlled organization tool and platform for players who are aspiring pros or simply people that would like to meet others to play and receive some kind of value for being especially talented at CSGO in a way that players within the CSGO ecosystem can recognize more readily than an outside investor who normally has a lot of demand for results and as a result, the instability of investment into the lower tier of the CSGO ecosystem has stunted the growth of in actual competitiveness of the scene immensely. I’d greatly appreciate any ideas, suggestions, questions, and helping hands that anyone would offer in furthering this idea as I think with some additional helping hands we may be able to make ground on these problems and find the solutions to these numerous problems.
Core Idea/Challenge: The CSGO community around the world has a lot of trouble being able to identify and reward good talent at the amateur and semi-pro levels, as a result, the general lack of competitiveness of the lower level scenes drive viewership lower and reduce fan interest in CSGO outside of the top professional level of the game which a disproportionate amount of money gets spent on the top talent as compared to the many players who are unable to find teams that they can rely on at the lower level due to lack of investment into league infrastructure and team infrastructure, how can we solve this using Dapp technology and Cardano?
CSGO, despite having the largest player base it’s ever had recently, the wider competitive scene in North America and especially in many other regions really struggle in being able to organize safely and free from outside influence at a semi-professional level despite there being immense talents in many regions that either doesn’t have a team in their country that is good enough to compete on the wider global major circuit or are unable to find other players to play with due to the lack of competitive infrastructure that can exist to give people teams and social spaces to engage with other players and grow with a team over a longer course of time. The CSGO competitive esports scene in North America and worldwide has large incentive problems at the lower tiers of its competitive scene indicated by rampant match-fixing scandals that are ravaging the counter strike community (with FBI involved as well), that combined with many gamers with poor communication skills and the lack of stable organizations that are able to provide environments for the players to pursue the further refinement of their skillset in the game and out of the game (communication/interpersonal) has hurt the competitive scene’s growth and eroded it’s potential. CSGO’s competitive scene is a game that in many ways is the perfect opportunity to apply this for the following reasons.
First, CSGO is of the top 5 most viewed esports games of all time and has immense capability to scale in terms of viewership to audiences that very few other esports titles can, due to its relatively simple and intuitive UI, mechanics, scoring system, and most important of all, the ability to translate very real excellence in the game to a large audience like no other sport ever has. That causes many rosters to continually fail in the North American region especially due to the fact that grassroots counter strike is very difficult to come by in North America, due to the lack of LAN cafe’s that provided many of the grassroots scenes for the game in Asia, OCE, and particularly in Europe during the 2000s. The developer of the game Valve, relatively hands-off with the competitive scene outside of the Major tournament circuit that they established that provides investment into 2 big events every year to show off the best talent that the game has to offer, and outside of that circuit, the two paths for players to either show off their individual talent or talent as a team outside of that major tournament cycle, is in two places, FPL, the hub for pro players to play pickup games together ran by the gaming platform Faceit, and the old and dilapidated (in my opinion) ESEA structure, that holds the league structure for long term 3-month leagues that serve the function of developing team chemistry and communication skills between players over a longer-term commitment schedule. Over the past 4 or so years, it’s not done that great of a job of bringing exciting new NA teams and individuals to the forefront, and the answer to why it wasn’t lying in the incentives. Many players in the amateur and lower semi-pro CSGO scene in the NA scene have very little reason to take the games seriously, most teams that exist in the Premier and Advanced (top 2 outside of the Professional major circuit league products) are unable to provide players with an incentive to take the game seriously due to lack of investment from private organizations and very low prize money outcomes for players. As a result of that, many players throughout the scene are unable to find stable teams that allow them a place to grow as a player, and due to the lack of social skills inherent to the age of many players, many teams are unable to actually exist for long periods and a lot of potential competitive institutional knowledge so to speak is lost due to how quickly the rosters can change and how little genuine bonds many players find in other CSGO players. I believe that in some ways these problems might have an opportunity to possibly be fixed if there was below the Pro League, a decentralized alternative for team competition could be established and funded by a token built on Cardano, to allow for better governance in terms of how the league can be structured, qualifiers organized, and how much of a share of the wealth in the lower competitive scene is distributed. I believe that this sort of approach to the current problems being seen in this part of the esports industry could also be a massive turning point for many other esports titles that suffer a lot from corruption and lack of interest and overall competitiveness in the lower tier of their scenes.
How the value of esports experience is best sold to the wider market is through the strong narrative storylines and the experience of watching a well-observed, exciting, and competitive match with casters that the wider community enjoys. I believe a lot of consistent value can be generated as people invest more and more into that experience and the storylines surrounding it in ways that smart contracts could provide a lot of value to the NA scene in a way that could keep players really invested in putting on the best performance with their teams in leagues, but also giving them the incentive to interact with fans more, and actually go out and show off their talent on social media as on top of a platform like Cardano any player from any region could have access to this service whereas with ESEA, and FaceIt, their ability to provide service and attention to regions outside of North America and Europe are extremely limited. I believe that certain regions being able to vote for league structures that work for them would be the most powerful tool in the toolbox of Cardano to fix these problems. I’d really love both further ideas on how to make this a reality for CSGO players worldwide (and potentially shoot for the Catalyst program) but also work to answer more questions downstream from this problem alongside anybody else as I believe an application such as this could have a lot of potentials. Lastly, I believe that for me some of the best value that I can provide is in my familiarity with the scene and in what ways we may be able to use Cardano as a tool to supercharge it though I do find that I am a great/fast learner so I’d love to learn and understand how from a code developer perspective, how such a system could be implemented even though I’ve dabbled in coding classes before, I’ve yet to really become fluent in any languages but feel that I’m comfortable with a lot of the more logical problems that coding can pose. If possible, I’d love to submit a more fleshed-out idea of what these solutions can be to the next Catalyst fund and for more clarity or very specific questions about me or the proposal, anyone in the community reading can contact me at any of the avenues below.
Telegram - @Firestar916
Discord - Firestar#1018