aabicus tries to CS:GO part III
The more Counter-Strike:Global Offensive I play, the more interested I get in its version of asymmetrical multiplayer. Despite being a competitively-ranked player vs. player military shooter, it does not follow the common trope of giving both teams similar arsenals. Instead, the terrorist and counter-terrorist ordnance are differ from each other in several very distinct ways, encapsulated best by the two signature rifles of each team.
Like other games, CSGO chose to differentiate these two guns primarily through emphasizing either damage or accuracy. The AK47 hits much harder than the M4A1-S but at the cost being far less accurate, a distinction that only increases if the player is moving. In general, the terrorists have access to higher-damaging weapons than the counter-terrorists, and I think this comes about as a result of the terrorists often being the defensive team, their job being to hold down either a bomb site or a room with hostages. The Counter-terrorists must assault these defensible spots and claim the objective, and to that end their increased accuracy helps them surgically target those blocking their path, at the cost of facing a likely higher-damage opponent if they aren’t killed fast enough.
But there’s one other difference between the two teams; terrorists have to spend less on purchasing their weapons. The M4A1-S is $3100, as opposed to a mere $2700 for an AK-47. This definitely serves a thematic element (you’d expect the guns scrounged together by a ragtag team of freedom fighters to cost less than the high-tech tactical ordnance of an elite SWAT team) but gameplay-wise it serves to help the terrorists who tend to die more frequently since they carry an objective that blows them up.
As for me, I just had the weirdest realization tonight when I was playing as my slightly-awkward self with my 1:30 KDR. I decided I would try literally every weapon in the game, one after the other, in order to find my favorite. And that caused me to stumble across the SCAR-20, which turned out to be my baby. The gameplay is slow enough that the lessened movement speed doesn’t bother me, but the ability to fire off multiple high-damage pellets extremely accurately without unscoping worked wonders for my kill ratio. So I went and bought an adorable 20-cent StatTrak skin off the market (and one of its terrorist equivalent, the G3SG1) and god help me, my very first round with the thing was the first time I genuinely had fun for an entire match of CS:GO. I got 15 kills and was MVP! It’s funny that the L4D2 SCAR and MSG90A1 are my least favorite weapons in that game.
So at this point, my favorite strategy is to buy a SCAR/G3 if I have the money, otherwise follow the bulk of my teammates and steal guns off the ground until I have the needed $5000. Effective? Hell if I know, but it’s doing pretty well for me, and considering I was pretty close to uninstalling this game due to lack of interest, it came at just the right time.
