ESL Pro League S18 to be the Final CS:GO Tournament Ever
After months of anticipation, on September 27th, Valve officially launched Counter-Strike 2. Unexpectedly with the launch of CS2, Valve has decided to shut down CS:GO completely. With Valve pulling the plug on the official CS:GO servers, ESL Pro League S18 will be the final Tier-1 CS:GO tournament.
Counter-Strike 2 replaces Counter-Strike: Global Offensive:
The latest edition of Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike 2 isn’t launched as an official version but as an update to CS:GO. This is the first time since the genesis of Counter-Strike when a ‘sequel’ replaced a game completely.
Before the CS:GO - CS2 transition, multiple iterations of the Counter-Strike have run parallel, most notably, CS:Source and CS1.6. But with Valve planning to centralize its Counter-Strike esports scene, it was expected for them to enforce CS2.
Valve has already announced the Counter-Strike 2 Major for 2024 and multiple TOs(tournament organizers) have since decided to switch to CS2 early. Earlier this week, ESL had polled the players about an early switch to CS2 for the final stages of EPL S18 playoffs. They later clarified that they’d stick with CS:GO for the rest of the tournament.
Complications with still running CS:GO:
With CS:GO shutting down the official servers, ESL Pro Leagues S18 had to suffer complications during the final playoffs game of 27th September. The unexpected shut down of the servers led to a delay during the Complexity-Monte series. ESL quickly moved to solve the issue.
The issues returned the next day leading to another delay in competition. With CS:GO servers officially down, it’d be a hard task to maintain a CS:GO tournament.
Especially since CS2 is still being worked on at amazing speeds, every patch might need a reinstalling of clients throughout the systems at a tournament. Thus it’d be easier for TOs to just switch to CS2 for all the future tournaments.
Tournament Organisers switching to CS2:
With the Challenges faced, ESL has already announced they’d be switching to MR12 and CS2 on the official twitter. This includes the upcoming IEM Sydney starting 16th October.
Additional tournaments switching to CS2 include the upcoming Roobet Cup 2023, Thunderpick World Championship 2023, CS2 Asia Championship 2023 and the final set of Blast Premier tournaments.
With the game already out and future Tier 1 tournaments switching to CS2, it won’t be a surprise if other TOs decide to switch too. The only confirmed CS:GO tournament is the Blast Premier European and American showdown. With its proximity to IEM Sydney, pros are requesting Blast to switch too.
As it stands, the ESL Pro League S18 will be the last CS:GO tournament and will feature the final tier-1 game. With IEM Sydney just a few weeks away, we are officially witnessing the dawn of a new Counter-Strike esports era.
Read more:
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Featured Image Source: ESL