State of CS:GO Random Teams

I felt this was important to state as Steams new privacy policy that went in to affect on April 11th greatly affects how we build teams, specifically for CS:GO.

When I stepped in to oversee tournaments.. 5 years ago? Our tournaments were fairly disorganized. They ran OK, but the way we sorted teams was flat-out terrible. They were true randoms. True randoms, as it was, isn't a good choice for a competitive environment where you may end up playing with 4 or 5 other people you don't know when there are sometimes pretty serious prizes on the line. Serious prizes deserves a serious method of sorting teams. That has always been my logic. We also still want to encourage participation in tournaments by everyone, regardless of skill level.

Over the years, we've been working to be able to control what we're able to control to keep teams fair. I'm sure many of you remember being called up as we would take rankings and battle.net ID's. Last fall we implemented a system that allows me to ask you for information that I can dump in to a spreadsheet and not have to call anyone up (assuming it's accurate).

In a game like CS:GO, what we've started to do was pretty elaborate in terms of team setup. I spent 3 hours on CS:GO team setup last event, and that was with most of my processes automated. Effectively, every single player was assigned a "score" based on several variables that included everything from rank, hours played, K:D ratio, accuracy, and several other factors. I also tagged players that tended to be AWPers for example, to ensure no one team wound up with two epic snipers. It's not a perfect system, but it's a much better system than we've had.

On April 11th, all of that went out the window. Unless your profile is public on Steam, I cannot use either statistic websites (I'm still trying to find one that may have cached, since it's a recent change) that pull stats or use the Steam API to pull statistical information.

While we're pretty sure that high ranking players are going to be pretty good, it's the ones that don't play competitively, mislead us by providing false information, or might not play CS:GO much that will be incredibly muddy. We're going to do our best to try to be fair, but admittedly, it was just made much more difficult.

It's unreasonable for us to ask our event participants to set their Steam accounts to be public, but I do ask that everyone is truthful when it comes to filling out the information during registration, including skill level and competitive rankings achieved. It'll help continue to create a fair and level playing field.

As stated, we'll do the best we can, and we'll continue to evolve our processes and brainstorm to try to find a solution to continue to try to make teams as fair as they can be.

Our other tournaments will not be impacted by the Steam privacy policy.

Thanks!