Pumpin'J.Fry's Rantings

From Whisper's Wiki

Hello. This is Pumpin'J.Fry speaking.

No matter how good you think you are, I beat you without even breaking a sweat. I can go AFK and still be better than you. And I look better at it. So you better fucking listen up: I have not only spent the best part of my life playing and becoming GOD at this game, I have also gone to great lengths to understand why I am doing what I am doing, so I can explain it to worthless losers like you. In short: I am your fucking Messiah.

You might guess it at this point: this guide is not meant for the bloody beginner. I will not tell you how to start CS with the console or some shit. I will not give individual strategies for each map. I will not give you tactics for clan wars or pubs in specific. I will tell you stuff that you won't read anywhere else. This will be testament to much how more manly I am than you and everyone else.

This guide is also and invariably part rant with a very personal color: I will not only tell you how to play Valve's Counter-Strike, I will tell you how to play the game that will come after Counter-Strike. I will teach you about the basics of any computer game. I will teach you about life, because Counter-Strike is not just a fucking video game, it is a religion, and I am your fucking Messiah.

This is an advanced guide. If I tell you to rush B hard on Vertigo or some phony shit like that, I expect you to know what I mean. If you don't know what that means, read Whispers very basic War strategies or any other Counter-Strike strategy guide. There aren't many good ones because most people, that feel the need to get better, instead end up downloading cheats. In fact I expect you to read every damn guide on the whole stupid internet and save this one for last.

Most people are too fucking incompetent at getting better at anything. Most people are goddamn worthless at life. That is why they need guidance, a teacher that can beat some living sense into their stupid asses. You are here because you are such an idiot that wants an educational beating, and I have plenty of those available.

You are a player of middling skill. You sometimes own the map, you sometimes eat the dust, and you can't explain either. It just happens. Maybe you cannot cope with the terrible feeling of total worthlessness when you lose and have begun to download cheats so you hardly ever suck real bad.

This state of sometimes being shitty, and sometimes playing great is what all middling players have in common. You have not understand the more abstract underlying concepts of the game, not intuitively and not on an abstract level. Your aim should be to understand the game in both ways, with your intuition, your feelings, as well as your reasoning, that allows you to talk about this.

This guide, being in text form, invariably can only stimulate your abstract understanding of the game. In order to school your intuition, you would have to play against me, and experience true awesomeness with your own eyes and heart. But with abstract understanding, you can school your intuition to a level where it becomes more than just an useless waste of conflicting thoughts. You have to understand the game in every respect to become truly godlike at it. But this is far away. Right now, you swallow the cock. To become godlike, you will have to dedicate your very soul to the game - Anything less will make you merely another sucker of middling skill, cannon fodder for cheaters and awesome players.

Once you understand the game on a whole new level, you will manage to always rock. When you get the feeling "Oh I suck" only occasionally, you are not on this level yet. Keep this in mind the next time you play. And shut the fuck up while I'm talking.

...to be continued...

Contents 1 First things first 2 Class basics 2.1 Snipers 2.2 Riflemen 2.3 CQB 2.3.1 Submachine Gunner 2.3.2 Shotgunner 3 Map basics 4 Movement 5 Teamwork 6 Skill Management 6.1 Food 6.2 Physical Health 6.3 Focus 7 Psychology 7.1 Dealing with losing 7.2 Social Dynamics 7.3 Dealing with winning 8 The next level 9 Review

First things first

First a couple of things you need to set up because you otherwise unnecessarily limit your ascend to a manly and awesome playstyle.

1. Controls. I recommend WERD (on a QWERT* keyboard) because this allows you to keep the necessary keys under control while relaxing your hand. WASD always requires you to sort of keep your hand tight and will tire you out more quickly. Also the travel times to the numeric keys are shorter with WERD, reducing the time you need to pick a grenade or knife. Put slot1 and slot2 additionally on your mousewheel, allowing you to quickly switch to your secondary and back with the mouse.
2. Network settings. Find a good guide online to get you started with that. The CS engines have built in delays that will artificially inflate your reaction times. Most classically, interp should be as low as you can bare, but everyone seems to have their own preferences about that, and some leagues require you to set it to a specific value. Remember: interp of 0.1 means 100 ms extra delay. That is in addition to the 100ms of delay that is built into the engine, and your ping to the server, and your reaction times.
3. Frames per second. They are vital, you want constant max FPS. If your framerate dumps to 20 during a firefight, even for just a single frame, you are again losing precious reaction time. A good player will put a lethal bullet through your face in about 150-200 ms. Now recalculate your chances when a framerate of 20 means an additional delay of 50 ms from your computer to your eyes. Get decent hardware if necessary, tone down the details, but don't skimp on the screen resolution.
4. Buyscript, you want one of those. I suggest you write one yourself, because the ones downloadable are mostly toys that have no place in a real game. You want to be able to go from zero to go in at most two seconds, without picking the wrong weapon, without wasting unnecessary money, and with all the items that you want.

Class basics

Now that you're already 5% less worthless than before, forget everything that you believe you know about the game, because it is wrong. Absolute shit. Forget everything that you've read somewhere else, forget every little dumb habit that you picked up while pwning noobs when you went pubbing or warring.

Counter-Strike is a class based shooter.

There are only 4 classes in the game, and while it is important to be at least somewhat proficient in all classes/types/styles, most players tend to gravitate towards one style. A big giveaway of what class someone is, is their mouse sensitivity in relation to their mouse DPI. Mouse acceleration being off, most players have a sensitivity of 3-10 at a mouse DPI of 800. With mouse acceleration being on, most players have a sensitivity of 2-4.

Snipers

Mouse acceleration ON

Sensitivity 1-3 @ 800 DPI

Strong against

Rifles

Weak against

Submachine guns

Snipers are carrying, surprisingly, the sniper rifles. With the exception of the Scout, a sniper rifle makes its carrier invariably very slow. The long range a sniper takes his targets on is reasoned by his relative advantage: With the sniper scope and the powerful bullet, the sniper enjoys a considerable advantage against all rifles at a long range. But at the same time, the inability to quickly spray make him weak against the faster Submachine gunners, that can often pin him down at medium range with spray fire.

The autosnipers however are not so much designed to actually kill people, instead, they are meant to provide long range cover fire, meant to pin down an enemy advance.

Riflemen

Mouse acceleration

OFF

Sensitivity 2-5 @ 800 DPI

Strong against

Submachines guns

Weak against

Snipers, Shotguns

The rifleman is the meat and potato soldier of Counter-Strike. Rifles are powerful and flexible, allowing a Rifleman to play like a sniper in one moment, like a submachine gunner the next, and like a true rifleman the very next moment. Rifles pay with their flexibility with a price - They are expensive and slow their user down considerably.

The classic way of using a rifle is the burst fire, that most newbies adapt to within a few days of training. More advanced players learn how to control the weapon going full auto at long range.

CQB

Mouse acceleration

OFF

Sensitivity 5-10 @ 800 DPI

The Close Quarters Battle guy is divided into two subsections, the Shotgunner that almost invariably uses the M3 Pump gun, and the Submachine gunner.

Submachine Gunner

Strong against

Snipers, Shotguns

Weak against

Rifles

The submachine gunner is the backbone of any CS army. The cheap guns mean they are available at basically any time in the game, sparing this player from ever having to miss a decent weapon after the first round.

Unfortunately for the submachine gunner, submachines are not very powerful to begin with, and become exceedingly useless at long or ultra long range. His fast speed allows him to often dodge Snipers' deadly payload but he does not stand a chance against a rifle unless in a head on surprise suicide rush.

Shotgunner

Strong against

Rifles

Weak against

Submachine guns

An increasingly common sight in CS:Source, the shotgunner's supreme agility allows him to often dodge even concentrated rifle fire, and his supreme firepower in the close range can let him quickly dispatch anything not fast enough to evade his slow gunfire.

The task of a Shotgunner is to lead the pack, drawing fire onto him and dispatching suicide rushers as well as campers.

Map basics

The general design of a Counter-Strike map is that there are two starting points, and there are 2-3 ways to get from one to the other. Some maps have up to 4 ways, giving the attacking team the advantage of forcing the defending team to greatly divide its powers to secure each entry point. A map with only 2 entrance points on the other hand is of great delight to the defending team, which can use grenade spamming or simple bullet spamming to deter the attacking team indefinitely.

Often two individual ways cross each other. These sections are tactically important because an individual defending this point is basically worth two people guarding the individual entry points. An example is classic dust, where the balcony above the tunnel on the CT side allows a man to guard both the tunnel as well as the central building. But this comes at a price: Alone in such a position, one can be easily compromised by coordinated enemy action.

All entry points can be judged in a wide range of aspects. What is going to be the range of an engagement there? How much cover is there? Camping spots? How many people can reasonably rush through there fast without blocking each other or crossing fire lines? Do you need more snipers or a shotgunner in front? What is the worst the other side can do in there?

It is of utmost important to learn all maps by heart. If you see an enemy move through a gate, you must already know where you can intercept him - if you can intercept him at all. You must know the timings: How long until he arrives at point X,Y? Using the silenced colt, what is the max range the enemy can hear you? Practice each map until you DREAM about it. One of the key unrealistic aspects of Counter-Strike is that you are playing through the same encounter time after time after time. In real life, you never get that second chance to do the exact same thing a bit differently. In real life, every situation is a new and different: not so in CS - Exploit it as much as you can. Future CS like games will be MMO and have huge worlds so every encounter will be in a different place. Thus it is important not only to learn each map by heart, but also to learn what all maps and all gameplay shares.

Movement

Knowing how and when to move is the key skill of Counter-Strike. Most noobs and mongoloid retards believe "Skill" in CS would actually mean "how fast and how accurate can one put the crosshair onto another dude's head". While that latter notion should not be completely dismissed, as the game does require ones ability to hit someone's head quickly, ultimately it is only the most basic skill any computer mouse user has: Point and click. The level of complexity involved is exactly two figures: An X coordinate and an Y coordinate - or in spherical notation, two angles.

Movement on the other hand is infinitely more complex. Do you move into cover or do you exploit your agility in the open range? Do you move before, while, or after you throw a flashbang? Do you try to get close to the enemy or do you try to sneak up his back? To give you an idea of what really is skill in this game, consider this: Even the cheapest type of AI, the aimbot, can pull off insane headshots. But to date, and I dare to say, for a long time in the future, nobody has even managed to create an AI that can move as eloquently as a skilled human being.

Aiming skill and movement skill influence each other. Someone who is faster at dispatching enemies even at the long range will not need to move as elegantly as someone who has no aim skill whatsoever to get similiar success. Vice versa, someone who dances through the levels like a ballerina on crack can get to almost point blank range to the most fearsome of enemies, where he does not require any great deal of aiming to quickly end his enemy's existence.

This goes without saying, some people are more adapt at movement, and some people are more adapt at aiming. This is the key factor that decides whether someone's talented for being a CQB guy or a sniper, for example.

The reason why movement is so underrated is cheating. Aimbots, and less obviously wallhacks. A skilled CQB man can often out-wit human aiming by moving erratically, exploiting even the tiniest advantages that the map offers to him, and using superb timing to evade the shots. Aimbots however do not make any mistakes, they cannot be confused, and most importantly, they do not get tired. A human player has to expend a great deal of mental energy in the form of concentration and focus to be able to hit a skilled CQB, which is why in the short run, the sniper often initially has the upper range, but as he gets tired, completely loses the ability to hit the broad side of a barn. With aimbots, this does not happen: The aimbot does not get tired. Similiarly, even a wallhack can allow a cheater to play much more relaxed as he has all the time in the world to prepare for shooting someone, not needing to keep up his guard to be able to shoot an enemy within the 0.1s that are often required.

Since most of you pussies are completely worthless at the game, and you cannot cope with its rough, brutal nature, many of you have begun to cheat to camouflage the fact that you are too much of a sissy to play this game like it was intended. There's so many pussies like that playing the game that the recognition of the importance of movement skill has completely eluded the mainstream gamers. "Skill" in the game means "How fast you get the crosshair on top of someone's head", reducing the wonderful, rich and complex game of CS into an opengl variant of clickity, where most of the players don't even do the mouse part themselves, or only with serious facilitation. Wankers.

Now, what's the secret to movement? I suggest you build a time machine and travel back to a time where not every other player in the game cheated, so you may actually experience the ability to skillfully evade bullets for yourself. Attempting to practice moves can be pretty hard if half the players in the game cheat one way or another, because one gets a false impression of what works and what does not. And most importantly, of course, it would mean that you would need to get your faggot ass to stop cheating, which, in my experience, you simply can't do because you're too much of a Vagina to play this game the manly way.

Teamwork

Teams are great. In fact, that is the whole point of CS, that you have team objectives. The purpose of any war or soldier is never to kill another set of armed men. War is not fought to kill armed men, instead, war is about resources, and killing unarmed women and children.

The whole point of the game is that you can theoretically win the round without even shooting a single bullet, without killing a single individual. By just completing the team objectives. The only reason why you would ever engage in the dangerous and often fruitless work of killing other armed men is that they keep you from doing your objectives.

The purpose of the game is not to kill, or to survive, the purpose is only to complete the objective. Your life is worthless, so is the enemy's. And it is almost always easier to complete the objective than to kill every last man on the map. This has to be kept in mind when designing a team, because it is not good enough to design a team that can kill every enemy, if another design would less ably do that, but have a better chance at completing the objectives.

The first thing you have to learn about teamwork is to operate as a two man unit. This is the very first thing that you should practice: Find some guy that you can rely on and play with him. Stick together, move together, kill together, die together. You'll get the hang of it eventually.

Some retards will tell you teamwork would be where to distribute camping spots. Like, on italy, position two snipers in the house, one there, one here, one over there. That is bullshit and has about as much to do with teamwork as Sex: Everybody on his own is just a wanker that knows about other wankers. Only when people get together, it is a real orgy.

Furthermore, camping does not require any skill. Check out that day 1 noob and what he does in the game: He camps. Why? Because it does not require any skill whatsoever, except for being able to point and click, something which even my dear mother thanks to her years of Solitaire has mastered now. If you want to play Solitaire, go fucking play Solitaire, but leave CS to the pros. The only thing in the game that actually requires skill is attacking. Incidentally, this is also making it the only thing where you need actual teamwork.

So, first practice two-man teams. You will soon find that this can already teach you everything you need to know about teamwork, and that any increase of the number, 3 men, 4, 5, 6 men, is just that - an increase of quantity of teamwork, that does not change the quality in any way.

The first thing you'll learn is that it is advantageous to have different people in a team. Instead of everyone going rifles for example, you should rather combine a rifleman with a sniper, or a CQB man with a rifleman. The reason for this is that if you use different classes, the different classes can make up for the other's weaknesses and play out their individual strengths.

The different classes have different tasks in an advance, and most important is the order in which is advanced. Ideally, CQB guys should always be in the front. The reason for this is that the CQB guys, of all classes in the game, have the highest survivability of enemy fire: When unexpected contact is made, the CQB guy's task, before all others, is to draw fire onto him, away from his team. Riflemen and snipers can then dispatch the enemies while they are busy firing at the CQB man, something which would not be possible if the man in the front would be a rifleman or sniper, even.

If the riflemen and snipers are worth their salt, they can often neutralize the enemy threat before the CQB bites the dust. This is called covering: The man in front draws the fire, and the others save his ass while he is busy doing the Matrix thing to the other bullets.

Even when it happens that the man in front instantly dies, due to a particularly lucky sniper or headshot, this still means there is a time window for the backup guys to exploit: Whenever someone fires a weapon, he is not able to fire a similiarly accurate shot for a small amount of time, just below 1 second. SMGs often do not have enough lethality in their magazine for killing a second guy right away, rifles have ludicrous recoil, and snipers just fire very very slowly.

Within that time window, even when the front man is dead, the backup can exploit the situation and avenge his death before the enemy has realigned his aim. Any sort of hesitation will allow the enemy to realign, and will have made the sacrifice of the front man in vain. This is the reason why you should not only move in a certain order, with CQBs in front, followed by rifles, and lastly, snipers, this is the reason why you should have a certain distance to each other. Distance here should be measured in time: How long it takes for the guy #2 to pass the same point as guy #1. This ideal distance is about 0.5 to 1 seconds. Too close will reduce the agility of the front man and not give the backup man enough time to react soon enough. Too far away will not give the backup man the chance to retribute within the small timespan that the enemy's aim is unaligned. This is what requires the most practice, and what requires individual members of a team to get to know each others habits of movement and fire.

Skill Management

Skill Management is one the key that differs average players from GREAT players. Skill management means essentially, play in top shape.

Most average players when they play pubs for a long time notice something weird: Sometimes, for a map's duration, they totally own, and at other times, they completely bite. This is no accident, there are many reasons for this happening. First and foremost, the most obvious is that team dynamics on pubs are, well, dynamic and change a lot. That shitty 3-12 player that you chuckled at before that has left might actually have been more beneficial to your team than the 15-5 player that's still in it. Or vice versa, when a map changes on a pub, the teams are usually rerolled more or less randomly. CS itself also has a few imbalanced mechanisms: The winning team gets more money than the losing team, making it have more likely better weapons, ammo, kevlar, grenades etc, further enhancing its advantage. This latter aspect can be verified if the initially losing team manages just to win long enough for the winning team to be broke - and then doesn't win again.

The game involves a lot of luck. Not just bullet luck, but also tactical luck. That tactical move you did there might have been, in retrospect, a rather dumb idea. Or it just didn't work out because the enemy happened to do something that crossed your plans. There are many reasons that people are aware of why they sometimes own and sometimes suck, but one of the reasons that most people, especially the average people are not aware of, is their own skill management.

Normally, for a normal adult's biological energy consumption, about 40% the nervous system can be accounted for. Now when you're playing a highly stressful video game like CS, that requires top notch levels of concentration, focus, reaction times etc, while at the same time leaving the entire rest of the body completely atrophied, that percentage may go up to well 70-90%. That means, 70-90% of the energy that your body consumes while you play CS is just for your nervous system.

People tend not to realize that they indeed can get mentally tired. Playing CS results in a lot of hormones being injected into your body, first and foremost, adrenaline, and endorphines. Both of these endogenic drugs make you less aware of your physical plights. You feel brightly awake when you are in fact totally tired. In addition to that, the ability to feel one's nervous system's exhaustion is only very limited: Muscles hurt when they're overused, brains do not.

So what happens is this, apart from the whole team / game dynamics: You, as a middling player, start playing and eventually you get into situations where you start using your top notch reactions. You get to be alive more often, missing the forced breaks due to death. Your nervous system completely exhausts its chemical energy over a short period of time, but you don't realize it because the hormones, mostly the adrenaline, keeps you alert. Eventually your nervous system is so totally exhausted that it stops to function properly - and you start to suck. During this phase of sucking, your nervous system ist trying to regenerate itself. And all of that happens without you consciously realizing it.

Now, what to do about it? The next thing that you have to realize is that you can train yourself, your nervous system. If you for example, limit yourself to a certain amount of ownage, you will not exhaust your nervous system as dramatically, and thus will not suck as heavily later on. This means that you need to practice playing calm and in a relaxed way for long periods of time - Eventually to the point where you play sloppy and relaxed constantly, without ever starting to suck real bad except for after really long periods of time, when hunger, sleep deprivation etc start to kick in.

If you are a clan warrior however, and need to participate in clan wars, what you want is to train yourself to be in the best shape possible for a period of about 30 minutes to 1 hour, which is approximately how long a clan war takes. So, you want to train for 30 minutes to 1 hour at a time, timing it, seeing how long you can keep up a certain niveau, figuring out what niveau you can keep up for the necessary time. In short, practice for like, 1 hour at a time AND THEN STOP. Take a break, at least one more hour, go watch some TV read comics, go masturbate. Might seem counter-productive to actually train less, but if you train your mind to play for 2 hours or more, you play more sloppily during a clan war that you actually would have to.

You also need to realize that you can actually improve your mental endurance, not just by improving technique (playing more relaxed, even sloppy, yet still achieving better results) but also by improving your mind's endurance. Think of your brains like of a marathon runner: You can run real fast for 100m, slightly slower for 800m, but if you want to run those 42 kilometers without getting an aneurisma, you need to jog slowly and relaxedly - And will be able to jog slightly faster with improved training.

Ultimately, playing CS on a high level is nothing different from any other sport: You need to manage your energy and your skills. You can't run a marathon like you would a 100m run. You can't knock out Will Smith's Muhammed Ali if your circulatory system makes you pass out after 2 rounds. You can't expect to win the Tour the France by spurting all the time - unless of course your blood consists of 90% dope which ironically makes your balls fall off.

This is also relevant for detecting cheaters: Every human player with some skill/talent can play like an aimbot, but no human player can keep up this level of concentration for more than 10 or 15 minutes - maybe 20 if he is world class, training 10 hours a day. Meaning, don't worry if you see someone play like an aimbot for 5 minutes. It doesn't mean much unless he does it in a really obvious way. If you see someone play just like an aimbot for an hour or so however... get his ass banned and torch his house, burning all evidence after you tortured him to death in a three day sadistic spree.

Food

Food is also an important aspect of skill management. I recommend lots of raw meat. Its not exactly the wisest thing from a dietary point of view, but at least it'll make you grow some facial hair and give you the kind of balls that you need to play this game and not give everyone the impression of watching a little girl.

But more importantly of course is the drinks. Best thing is some sort of cola: It has lots of sugar (Energy for your nervous system) as well as caffeine (which helps you staying alert and awake). Beware of diabetis however.

I know at this point I should probably say you shouldn't do alcohol. Alcohol makes you dumb, and worsens your reaction times, so it should definitely not be a beverage to regularly play CS on. But here's the thing: If you're a clan warrior or something and you're before an important match, and your spirits are low, meaning, you think you suck and have no chance, take a good nip of that 55% Russian spirit. Having slightly lower reaction times or being dumb is not as bad as being a dumb loser in your mind. A bit (I repeat: a BIT) of alcohol may be able to relieve your fears and make you play better overall.

Oh, and crack cocaine. I suggest you adopt that habit. Bit expensive but no drug is more adequate when you just need to get into the mindset of KILL KILL KILL.

Physical Health

Two words: Work out. It is good for your mind if your body is in top shape as well, so you want keep your body in top shape, it'll also make you more confident in general, which is also good for the game. You don't need to hit the gym. That would involve you going outside and ruining your great gamer/monitor tan. Well, maybe not at night. You can do a lot of great physical exercise in the comfort of your house, and I am not talking about an eXtr3me masturbation Marathon.

Just keep your body in shape. You're going to be an unstoppable killing machine in the game, so why feel anyhow different when you go buy a new mouse because you've broken your old one again after only two months. Fucking cheap chinese mice. Oh, buy Logitech, they're the best. There's no point in becoming a bruiser or some such thing, but you want to have a circulatory system that doesn't pass out when you move your comp to a BYOPC Lan Party. Aluminium cases are for wimps and girlies. Are you a lady? Should I take that heavyweight steel big tower for you? Yeah? Thought so, faggot.

And for the love of god don't smoke. That is real hard, because as a professional CS faggot, you'll spend a lot of time in front of the computer, which invariably means a lot of time waiting for the computer to accomplish a certain task, which means you get a lof of opportunity just to smoke a cig and return to work. Cigarettes are bad. They make you dumber and slower, and less alert overall. And you don't want to get a craving in the middle of a freaking gunfight, do you? You wouldn't even notice it because of the adrenaline, but you still do. So, don't smoke.

Focus

This is something you should be aware of but also your loved ones that aren't familiar with intensive computer gaming. When you play a highly addictive game like CS, you start to zone out. Your mind's focus is solely on the game, and when you've done it for years, your brain becomes very good at that technique. It is a good thing happening, because it'll allow you to faster get "warm" in the game and get overall better at it.

Now the problem is, when you stop playing the game, you can't be talked to for a while. Depending on what your training schedule is, that can be half an hour or a full hour that you need to recover and become a functional being in the real life again. Your mind needs to readapt to the real life thing for a while after you've stopped playing. During this time, you will not be able to talk a lot or do anything that wouldn't be mundane.

This is something that I first experienced when I was a kid living at my mom's place. My mom would go up me and tell me some bullshit while I was focused on gaming. My mind isn't able to even acknowledge her existence when I'm gaming, because I am zoned out. These days it happens with girlfriends rather than mothers, so its just women being oblivious to the finer details of being a CS addict.

When you've played a game for a while and you're zoned out, explain that to your girlfriend/wife/mother. Tell her to shut her filthy hole and make you some coffee, and if she doesn't, beat her. If you've learned one thing from CS, nothing expresses intimate love as much as physical violence.

This goes to you mothers, girlfriends and wifes: DO NOT TRY TO TALK TO THE GUY WHILE OR RIGHT AFTER HE'S BEEN GAMING. He will not be capable of conversing like a human being, because he didn't play WoW or some other graphical chatroom, he played a REAL, DEMANDING MANGAME. And he's probably good at it too. If there is something that you need to tell him real bad, write it down on a post it note, and stick it to the computer's monitor's side. He will read it in time, and understand it. Do not obfuscate his view or try to distract him, because if he isn't a lesbianized faggot he'll rightfully kick you in your stupid ovaries. He's busy. Get lost. If you're horny because you've watched your favorite soap opera's protagonist having promiscuous sex with a stranger, make him a note and go slap that monkey but LEAVE THE GUY IN PEACE. He'll take care of you when he's ready to refocus on you.

For a good transition from CS land/computer land back to the real world, I recommend TV. A talk show or something like that, that will allow you to realign with how humans interact with each other when they don't have fully automatic rifles.

All of this does not just apply to gaming, but also to hackers that are trying to code or fixing computer problems or some similiar shit. All of these activities require 100% focus on the problem and human interaction is merely distractive and has to be zoned out.

Psychology

One of the most fascinating aspects of CS is the psychological aspect.

The first thing you have to understand in that respect is how CS is different from other games. In Counter-Strike, you actually fear for your life. In most games, you get blasted and can't do much about it, and respawn a few seconds later.

CS is somewhat realistic. Abstract and all that, but still somewhat realistic. In CS you can run. You can hide. At the same time, dying means you have to sit the end of the round out. Being pumped on adrenaline, those 1-2 minutes can easily appear like an eternity or two.

These two factors make CS the most thrilling game out there. Killing is fast and also unpredictable, random: Even a newb gamer can unconciously capitalize on the mistake of a seriously good player and quickly dispatch him with a lucky shot. So the only strategy that ensures a long survival is extremely defensive play.

But then there's the team objectives. They need to be taken in the first place, just hanging around the spawn is not going to help you very much, because ultimately, the team objectives are the only thing that matters. Killing folks is dangerous, unrewarding and often counterproductive when the team objective is taken into account.

The key difference between good players and seriously awesome players is not in their moves or skills, but purely in how they can psychologically manipulate their opponents.

Clan warfare is often done with more professional players than pubbing, but the same effects still apply. If you've been totally pwned in one place - Not just shot down, that is perfectly normal and part of the game, but instead, simply raped - you will probably not want to bring yourself into that situation right again, because you expect the exact same thing to happen again. This is your irrational fear.

Awesome players keep track of who they killed where and how badly. Within a few rounds, they know the psychological traits of their opponents as much as of their own teams. And then they can start to manipulate their opponents.

Control, domination, ownership of the map, means, you decide what happens where. You decided to kill that guy with the AWP, you decided to get shot in the back with an UMP by that lame ass camper. You decide what is going on on the map, and you have the force, the skills, to force feed it to your enemies.

The most important and obvious form of map control is manipulation of location. You can train your opponent to go into one direction, to camp in one spot or one set of spots. You can train your opponent as far fearing one place and preferring another.

The second thing you can manipulate is their choice of weapons, although there are more limitations. While regardless of you training them, people's weapon preference will still be much more powerful than their locational preferences. Someone who uses deagle/AK all the time will not be easily brought on to use the 552 instead. But there the game is again helpful to you: Because you can modify what sort of money the enemy can have access to, you can modifiy what sort of weapons the enemy has access to. If you use the game mechanics to keep your opponent stripped of money, you can control what weaponry he uses because you limit his options. This is why killing people isn't so bad: Dying costs money, you need to replace that kevlar, those grenades, and certainly the gun. If you frequently kill your opponent, he'll be notoriously cash stripped.

This is what the high level game is about: Domination. A player that truly dominates can control every aspect of his opponent. He decides - intuitively or expressively - where he moves, what he does and how good he does it. This is an advantage that is far greater than any other advantage in skill or whatever - but to get this advantage you do need skill.

Dealing with losing

This is a point of utmost importance: Most people dont know how to properly deal with being on the losing end of the map. Their enemy dominates them, and they simply have no clue what is going on. They simply die over and over and over, and nothing that they seem to be able to do changes it.

What needs to be understood here? The enemy is controlling you. He dominates the map - depending on how good he knows to play his cards, he decides where you move, how fast, how good you aim, and what weapon you use. Of course a player skilled in these psychological aspects will then use this to kill you over and over. More team oriented players may try to make sure they can complete the team objective each time.

And if you continue to play as you just did (which led to your destruction) nothing will change. You can try a different place, a different gun, a different strategy. Nothing of this will work, because you are still under the psychological control of your enemy.

What you need to do is surprise him. Take control away from him - ignore team objectives if necessary, anything for that round or two, but you absolutely must shake off his control. There's several ways to do this, but in general, you can sum them up as you take his control away. Surprise him - Do something that he did not expect. This means you need to outsmart him. Disrupt him: If you can confuse the enemy's strategy for just once, you may have broken his mental lock on you. But the first thing you obviously need to do is to defeat your own fear of your enemy.

You are scared, which is why your enemy can drive you in the direction that he wants you to be, that is the primary way of how he can control you. All those attempts to get control back - to scare him of you - will fail if you are still scared.

My personal suggestion for beginners at psychological warfare is to suicide bumrush your enemy when you lose. If you're good at this, you can take down 1-2 people - but more importantly is, that by suicide rushing, you completely obliterate his control. If you suicide rush, you decide, consciously or intuitively, that you are going to die but so will the enemy, and there's nothing he can do about it if he doesn't expect it.

Rush as hard as possible, fast and ruthless. Now, in doing this successfully, you have gained back control. It suddenly allows you to train your enemy - If you'd be shot by a gun-crazy maniac in that one alley, you'll probably try something different the next round. Be agressive, and don't let anything scare you. If you run into 5 people at once - all the better, you don't even need to aim to hit them. Start to scare them. You can suicide bumrush people with the cheapest weaponry, but you definitely need skills.

Social Dynamics

Most clans, teams, etc, only have one truly awesome player at best. More is unlikely because of social dynamics, one is the alpha male, the others follow. High level clans are not different in this than low level clans - someone will take the lead, in higher level clans, the weakest player is just way better than anyone in a weak clan. If you're up vs a clan or just on a pub, figure out who is having a spree - and then take all measures to disrupt that spree. Ignore everything else, it does not matter if you live or die, as long as you can take out the alpha male that is having his spree. If you can disrupt that, the entire enemy team will suffer psychologically: If their alpha cannot control you, who can?

If you kill the guy who is calling the shots, you will confuse and frustrate him. He will begin to make increasingly more mistakes, which will adversely affect his whole team. Which is why many good players, intuitively or not, try to attack the strongest player, rather than avoid him.

Weak players on the other hand that are not familiar with psychology in CS, usually try to avoid the strong player, and instead try to get kills or complete team objectives while avoiding him. But, without them being aware of it, they are under his control, and will fail to defeat him because they already have decided, subconciously that they can not win against him, and that they can only survive for as long as they do not encounter him.

Dealing with winning

Of course most people will assume that the only thing important is to win, and once you do that, everything else is just sugar on top. But even when winning, when you are in control of the game - even if for just a moment - there are things that you need to consider.

First of all, you will have to be aware of the counter-strategies and know how to counter them. The most important thing is to be unpredictable, even when you are winning: As soon as the enemy, even if he is losing, can predict your moves, he can find a way to counter them. If he cannot predict your moves, he cannot counter them, unless he purely gets lucky. If you're winning, never take the same route twice, and then take the same route three times in a row just to fuck with them. Just because you're winning doesn't mean that you are not losing control of the game when you become predictable. Be so unpredictable that you cannot even yourself predict your unpredictability.

Second, and this is probably more important, is the difference between pubbing and clan wars. On a pub, you play for relaxation or very simple training. In a clanwar, you want to win - for sheer sportsmanship, for the rewards, for your own glory and fame, whatever. Sportsmanship is important, the game does not work, its not interesting to anyone, not yourself, not for the enemy, not for GOD HIMSELF if you do not try to win. This is where it counts, and just because you seem to have all advantages over your enemy, you must abstain from letting your guard down for the added challenge.

But on a pub, there is no such thing as winning or losing, because you are in an essentially random team, vs another essentially random team, with members switching all the time. So on a pub, when you are really good and get to be in control of the game, especially your enemies, use this to practice stuff that you normally wouldn't. See how long you can keep control of the game with just a glock. Learn to train your enemies into rushing or camping certain spots. Learn how to use the damn psychology of CS.

Intuitively, most players, when winning too hard, start to make increasingly more mistakes as a type of handicap. If you are consciously aware of this, you can use it in pub games to practice, and prevent yourself from doing so in clan wars.

The next level

Unfortunately, cheats have been in CS for a very long time, they cannot be stopped in online leagues, and the logical consequence is that by now, the cheater quota in the higher ranks of online leagues is approaching 100%.

It is possible to ensure a cheat free game in a LAN with policed, controlled and dedicated computers, but as the majority of the gameplay, practise as well as tournament, is online, and most lan parties do not even have the means to ensure a cheat free environment due to subtle aimbots, most people have never developed a "next level" gamestyle that does not base its foot on cheating.

Cheating changes the game in many ways. Not only is it a welcome excuse when you get killed in a weird way, it downright destroys the joy of gaming when even one cheater starts to mess up the whole game.

There's people arguing that the cheat suspicions and the accusations are worse than the cheats themselves. This is nonsense, in fact, it is so utter nonsense that you should immediately strangle to death anyone who spouts pure idiocy like that. Accusations and suspicions can be ignored, if necessary by removing the chat function of the game - cheats can not. The only ones who profit from perpetuating the notion of accusations being worse than the crime are those who commit the crime.

But I want to explain to you how the next level of CS looks like. Have you ever read top clan's strategy guides on how to win maps, rounds, general strategies, stuff like that? It is all nonsense. Usually these tactics revolve around camping certain spots, but there is little tactics in the attacks - they rely on the defense to make a mistake.

The reason for this is, that with cheats - which you are obliged to use when you want to compete in the top ranks - the game becomes fundamentally different.

Rather than rifles, shotguns, snipers and SMGs being somewhat balanced against each other, rifles become utterly overpowered because of their capability to kill an enemy with an instant headshot. The AWP, already in legit play an imbalanced weapon, becomes the end all weapon. Of the pistols, the deagle is the end-all because of its ability to kill instantly with a headshot. SMGs and pumpguns are completely useless, because movement skill and evading shots is pointless when going against an aimbot. The only thing that matters is that the enemy is sooner dead than you, because you both see each other through the walls and you both will instantly put dead-on headshots on each other the second you start shooting.

With aimbots, the only limit of your kill speed is your weapon's performance - accuracy and power. Because rifles are very inaccurate when moving, yet super accurate when crouching or at least standing still, the tactically most beneficial position is being immobile.

In comparison in legit play, because of the way the netcode works, the moving attacker always has an advantage over an immobile defender: The attacker, coming around visual obstruction, sees the defender easily a quarter second sooner than the defender sees him, giving him the advantage. But with wallhacks, combined with aimbots, this advantage is reduced to zero - it is possible to headshot someone the very instant he moved around the corner, giving the defender the advantage.

Teamplay becomes cheapened with cheats as well: Rather than moving together, giving each other cover, people sit together. The extremely complex action of attacking as a team, covering each other's backs while moving forward swiftly is reduced to observing different corners, helping each other taking camping spots and calling in backup should the enemy attack. When forced to attack, the fact that everyone has a wallhack removes any sort of surprise from the game. Instead, people practice shooting through walls to take out the incredibly predictable defenders.

In legit gameplay, this is all different, but few people know this because legit people never get anywhere in online dominated CS. Camping alone in a spot without a wallhack is essentially suicide - Noobs do it, because they are too scared to move anywhere. Any attacker will have up to a quarter second of timing advantage, giving him plenty of time to kill the camper. Also, camping makes the camper predictable, losing mental and effective control to the attacker. In legit gameplay, you must even attack when you are in the defending time, purely because the attacker is in control of the game and has advantages - impredictability, mental aspects, netcode, mobility for evading bullets - over the defender. Rather than one side camping and the other sneaking, it becomes two teams rushing against each other, constantly trying to outflank the other's side. Gameplay becomes rapid, interesting, fun, and fun to watch!

So I dare you: Pretend there's no cheaters in the game. And start attacking. Practice, as a team, to attack, 2 people, 3, 5 in one package of death, well organized, almost impossible to stop. Eventually the game becomes about what it is meant to be - Who is, more so than the other, capable of maintaining his control.

Because that is what the game is about. Control. If you leave your enemy the choice to do anything he likes, as you do when you defend, he is in control. But if you attack, you make the choice for your enemy - You decide he has to defend there, you decide he's being attacked - You take his control until he eventually, internally surrenders and leaves you victory. Never grant your enemy any choice on any matter, force him into positions that are unfavorable for him, and you will be invincible.

Review

Ok, this is about stuff that is just plain unrealistic/dumb in CS. There's a lot of people that shout "Gameplay! Gameplay" whenever one tries to argue about realism in video games.

Here's the thing: Counter-Strike is a realism-based shooter. If you don't want a realism-based shooter, go play Quake. Pick up the red armor! Win the game! GAMEPLAY!

I don't like the game to be about who controls the red armor. I want to control my enemy, not items that periodically respawn. I don't want to shoot retards only to have them respawn seconds later like in BF. If I kill an enemy, I want them to fucking stay dead and out of my way. That is gameplay.

And I want to play video games that let me do amazing stuff that I can't or won't do in real life, like pimpin' da ho's, or overthrow a medium-sized dictatorship. And sometimes, just once in a while, I want to chop people's head off with a light saber.

What is gameplay? What is a game in the first place? Why do we want to play games? It is because games allow us to measure ourselves with others, which tells you something about yourself, and more importantly because we learn skills that we can use in real life. Tetris is a fun game. The challenge is only to beat a highscore. The best games are those that you directly have to defeat someone else, where you have complex ways to interact with your brothers, have fun, measure, and learn. That is gameplay.

Realism is gameplay. What people usually confuse with lack of gameplay are in fact just bad interfaces. Consider Operation Flashpoint 1985: A good simulation that lets you play everything, from helicopter pilots down to infantry soldiers. But the interface was horrible. Controlling your guy or the guns, and also the vehicles, felt more like playing a flight simulator where you have to learn at least 300 keyboard combos by heart just to get anywhere.

The quake series of games has a big advantage there. They're made by id, who are truly gamers, and not just masters of OpenGL, but also, masters of interface. Sadly however they have absolutely no creative energy when it comes to actual gameplay, and in a quake game, you still emulate PacMan: Pick up the item, win the game.

CS is a giant leap forward from this scheme, and it is unsurprising that the game industry, which is increasingly plagued by lack of creative ideas, simply recycles the pre CS concepts rather than to move on. But Quake or BF cannot dethrone CS, they both are dated concepts now that we have had CS for 7 years.

I believe that the gameplay of CS can only be improved in two ways. That is to say, the gameplay does not refer to the graphics or the interface. The gameplay just refers to what is being played, not how. These two points are:

Large world with natural places where combat occurs rather than preset maps that are played over and over. This means the next generation of CS will be MMORPG style, except for the RPG part. MMORPGs suck, all, without exception, and if they don't they aren't mmorpgs. MMORPGs have to be the worst gameplay principle that anyone could have ever thought of: Grind, then abuse players who have grinded less than you, no skill involved whatsoever. I think it's time to make a MMO FPS that has all the qualities that make CS outstanding, but does not have to rely on "maps" or "map rotations" and makes every fighting action meaningful and unique. I don't want to go into much detail about this right now.

A real wounding system. So far we still have the quake style damage system. But in real life, you don't get shot 11 times in the foot with a 9mm and suddenly drop dead. In fact, firearms are a very poor way of killing people, we only use them nowadays because the alternative is melee, and melee fighters get shot before they are in range. Melee fighters, with a sword for example, can chop arms and heads off in a split second, if needed, and can actually disable and incapacitate an enemy within that timeframe. Handguns are very poor weapons when it comes to actually wounding/killing someone. I would like to elaborate this a bit.

Fun fact

Only 5% of people hit by gunfire in the US actually die, and only 15% need serious medical assistance. [1]

First of all, the absofuckinglutely only thing that can really stop someone dead in their tracks is a *sufficiently large* wound to specific parts of the head or neck, the CNS. All other wounds do not disable an opponent immediately - Even a shot to the brain may fail to incapacitate an opponent if the shot fails to destroy the *vital* parts of it: The forehead's lobes are for higher math and understanding Rembrandt and shit like that which is turned off during a firefight anyway.

Fun fact

The average number of bullets that struck per slain suspect by the police in the US is about 10.

Handguns can incapacitate and kill, but they are bad at this. According to the FBI, someone who is shot in the heart may remain fully effective for 10 seconds, even when he collapses dead after that. It is not the shot to the heart that killed/incapacitated him, it is the lack of fresh blood in his head. Conversely, someone shot in the arm may actually die mere minutes later if an artery was ruptured and the bleeding isn't stopped.

Fun fact

The average hit probability of police in the US is 15-25%, and two thirds of the time the police fires, the distance to the target is less than 3 meters.

So, what we need is a wounding system that actually shows how bullets and bullet wounds work (or don't). Shoot someone in the shoulder and if you're very lucky, you'll hit the nerve strain, causing the weapon to be dropped or at least unable to be used in an useful manner. Shoot someone in the knee to slow him down. Then again: Incidents are known where people basically jogged around happily with two broken legs, because the muscles were able to keep the leg stabilized. Because of movies, and because most people are worthless dumbass pussies, many people on the other hand, faint even when a shot misses them.

Fun fact

2/3 of the time the police in the US shoots, the suspects are unarmed, about 1/3 the time they are innocent. Go figure.

But the real way bullets kill is blood loss. Blood is the elementary juice of life. About 8% of someone's weight or volume is blood, makes about 6.4 liters for an 80 kilo male. Losing one quarter can cause fainting, although this is unlikely to happen under the influence of adrenaline. Losing half of the blood - or more - usually means death.

More than 80% of police officers that are slain, are killed before they can draw their weapon.

It cannot be too hard to get some halfway decent data - nothing complicated, just a basic terminal ballistics system in place, that calculates how big the wound is, how much blood was lost, and how much damage to vital organs was done. Why is 99% of the calculation power nowadays used on fucking useless glitz? I want fucking terminal ballistics in place, complete with blood pressure simulation and vital organs! NOW!1

Fun fact

In the real world, the 5.56mm round basically doesn't penetrate fly shit, because the lightweight supersonic bullet explodes (fragments) the first chance it gets to cause maximum damage - and as such it does much more damage than e.g. the .338 Lapua. The FBI for example recommends to use handguns, rather than 5.56mm rifles, to be used against suspects behind cover. In Sovjet Russia, the 5.56mm round penetrates 6 feet of concrete, while notorious penetrators like the 9mm or the shotgun buckshot don't penetrate a delicate pair of naughty underwear, and the .338 lapua kills you with a shot to your left hand.