The Counter-Strike community is often hesitant about any changes. But this time, most of the player base—including longtime veterans like Wiktor “TaZ” Wojtas—enjoyed the matchmaking updates Valve shipped to the CS2 beta on Aug. 31.
From now on, CS2 players will be put in a separate skill group for each map, meaning they can be Global Elite on Mirage but just Master Guardian on Nuke, for example. Players will also rack up points to compete in a global leaderboard, regional leaderboard, and even friends leaderboard.
This is a major matchmaking change in comparison to CS:GO, which only has one rank valid for all maps and no leaderboards whatsoever. While this may not please all CS veterans, TaZ is pretty much on board with the changes and even asked Valve to borrow some features from Dota 2.
Though TaZ didn’t specify what kind of Dota 2 features he wants to see in CS2, there are at least a couple of interesting ones.
Dota 2 has a matchmaking feature called Rank Confidence. If the system is 100 percent confident in your ranking, you’ll gain the standard amount of matchmaking rating (MMR) for wins and losses. If your Rank Confidence is low, the system is more prone to move you around.
Dota 2 also makes use of an algorithm called Glicko, which can detect smurfs playing at lower levels and quickly move them closer to their actual MMR. A system like this could do wonders for CS2 as lower-level players have dealt with smurfs across CS:GO’s 11 years of existence.
We’ll see if the matchmaking changes Valve is implementing in CS2 will be enough to convince players to ditch third-party services like FACEIT and Gamers Club, and most importantly, to convince players who left for other FPS, mainly VALORANT, to return to CS2 when it releases worldwide.
