Did the CS2 Devs Tease a New Premier Tiebreaker?

An X post by the Counter-Strike devs has created a buzz that CS2’s Premier game mode may be getting a new tiebreaker, but the post may not be all it seems.

Valve devs reply to CS2 Premier complaint

The original Valve dev message came from a reply to a post by Counter-Strike content creator aquaismissing. The streamer complained, “Whoever at Valve thought that having a Tie as an outcome in Premier is a good idea needs to be fired and pursue a different career path, game design is not your thing.”

aqua added, “ah yes let me spend 45 minutes playing a back and forth for -30 +30 game, nice investment of my time,” taking aim at the unrewarading Elo outcome of draws in CS2’s Premier mode.

The Valve devs replied to aqua’s complaint with the following message, outlining a theoretical new tiebreaker for Premier contests. The official Counter-Strike X account replied to the post with the following message:

“Thoughts?

In the event of a 15:15 tie in Premier, teams move to a shootout. In the shootout:

• Players face off in 1v1 arenas based on their position on the scoreboard. This means top frag faces top frag, 2nd faces 2nd, bottom frag versus bottom frag, and so on.
• The shootout order is randomized, so your top fragger may not have their shootout (versus the other team’s top fragger) until the 5th and penultimate round.
• Players on each team spectate their teammate during these 1v1 arenas.
• First team to win 3/5 shootouts (1v1 arenas) wins the match.”

New CS2 Premier Tiebreaker?

So will the outlined method be the new way of tiebreaking a 15-15 Premier series? Probably not.

First of all, the tweet has now been deleted by the admin, removed without a trace, so the devs don’t exactly seem committed to it as a solution.

Secondly, this isn’t the first time such a tweet has been shared by the devs, and the reason why they’re tweeting about tiebreakers doesn’t come down to in-game reasons but something completely outside of the game.

Specifically, the World Cup is happening. Featuring as it does Penalty Kicks in the event that teams cannot be separated by the 90 minutes of normal time and the 30 minutes of extra time, Valve’s tweets around World Cups generally parody penalty kicks in some way.

In the same way that penalty kicks do not recreate the dynamics of the team-game of football, 1v1 arenas do not recreate the teamwork involved in winning a round of Counter-Strike.

So Valve reducing Counter-Strike to a series of 1v1 contests isn’t exactly on-brand for Valve’s values and how they generally see the game.

In the end, the post might not be a sincere attempt at inventing a new tiebreaker, but a parody of the world’s most popular sporting tournament. Valve devs, never change.

Would you like to see a new tiebreaker in Premier? You can discuss that and more on our Discord server

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