Before we start, let's acknowledge the fact that you (the reader) may not consider me to be an expert at Counter-Strike. I've barely played the game (about ten matches lifetime) and I'm certainly not qualified to be a professional player, coach, analyst, or caster/commentator. That said, I am an avid fan of the game, and I've easily watched hundreds of hours of pro-level gameplay (about half of Eventvods' CSGO VOD library, just for starters). That doesn't mean you should agree with me (and I didn't write this to convince anybody of any particular point, anyway), but it does break my opinions out of the "oh look, someone watched two games and thinks they know everything" tier. That's all I'm sayin'. :)
When I say "the role of the coach" here, I'm not talking about a coach's overall role in the team organization. This essay is specifically about the in-game role, as far as how/if the coach is allowed to interact with the players:
Recently (by which I mean over the past few years), the world of professional Counter-Strike has been forced to come to terms with the fact that cheating is a very real, very concrete thing...even at LAN events, the ostensible "sacred ground" of high-level CSGO. From individual players' getting physically pulled off their LAN rigs to the spectator cam coaching bug scandal there's no denying it: cheating is in CSGO and it's not just one or two bad eggs.
My point in saying this isn't to call anybody out, per se. What I'm trying to demonstrate here is that CSGO's coaching rules aren't some kind of meanie-head edicts handed out because Valve gets its jollies from making the lives of the people who play the game worse; they're a direct response to a real situation in the real world where the community has, unfortunately, confirmed that it absolutely can and will cheat if given the chance.
Currently (unless things have changed since I last checked, which is possible), CSGO coaches are allowed to sit behind their players on the LAN stage as long as they don't do anything that could be a signal to the players (mostly this means staying quiet, but I suppose large enough physical movements would also be a no-no). Generally, I imagine the idea is that this has two advantages for the team:
A lot of people in the community are against these new coach interaction rules; they want the coaches to be able to "be human" with their teams, and argue that it's hard on emotionally-invested coaches to have to just sit and watch while their players are going through a tough time, or not be able to cheer when the team does something spectacular. For my part, I agree; these are sucky situations that suck, for exactly the reasons given.
This Tweet from Zonic (nitter) (who was the coach of Astralis' CSGO team at the time) contains this information from the tournament organizers of the 2021 PGL Major in Stockholm:
Valve has instructed us to have stricter rules for coaches. NO touching the players except for timeout. NO shouting at all. Coaches can not even say "nice". They have to be quiet or we will have to tell coaches to leave the tournament area.
Zonic's Tweet, and the bulk of the replies to it, pretty much cover the indignant community reaction to a rule change that looks, on the surface, to be mean-spirited and arbitrary at worst and nonsensical at best.
HOWEVER.
The simple fact of the matter is that if you want to eliminate coach cheating, you have to eliminate everything that could be a signal. For example, consider the following yells from a coach at the end of a round:
| What the coach says | What the real message is |
|---|---|
| Yeah! | Rush B next time |
| Yeah baby! | Rush A next time |
| Wooooo! | Eco round next time |
Now, do I think this type of "coded messaging" has been done? Not specifically, no. What about coded messages from chair shakes, shoulder squeezes, or back slaps? No, not that either, specifically. I'm just saying that if you're going to acknowledge that coach cheating is a thing that has happened before, and could happen again, that is one way it could happen.
I know we're talking about CSGO here, but just to give a "contrasting example", let's take a quick look at another esport that Valve runs tournaments for (and they actually run The International directly, as opposed to simply "overseeing" the CSGO majors that are run by other organizations like Blast, ESL, Faceit, PGL, etc.).
The coaching interaction rule at The International is simple: once the game proper starts, there is none. Here's the relevant section of the ESL tournament rules:
The coach is only allowed to communicate with the players until the end of the drafting phase of the match. After the drafting phase is concluded, the coach is not allowed to further communicate or interact with the players in any way until after the match has concluded. Furthermore, the coach is not allowed to be present around the players after the drafting phase has concluded, until the end of the match.
The "drafting phase", for those unfamiliar with DOTA 2, is a character pick/ban phase that's loosely equivalent to CSGO's map pick/ban phase (although I'd say it's definitely more significant in DOTA 2). There's probably some benefit from having the coach's expertise during that phase, but it's not a "quick reactions, real time" part of the game as esports generally understands things; having an extra person there who can "focus on the information without having to have hands on keyboard and mouse" isn't going to help during the draft.
Then, once the draft is over, the coach has to leave the entire player area; this is much stricter than even the new CSGO rules, where the coaches are allowed to be in the player area, they just have to keep quiet so as to not potentially signal the players. In DOTA 2, the coaches physically can't signal the players because they're not allowed to be anywhere near them until the match is over.
Who could ever possibly know WTF Valve is ever thinking for anything, but it's possible that they're trying to let CSGO be as "human" as possible while still taking every reasonable precaution against cheating (but not going as far as they do with DOTA 2).
If you really wanted to bring the hammer down, while still keeping the actual rules the same, I suppose you could do the following:
Basically, this would bring CSGO in parallel with DOTA 2's coach interaction rules, while still allowing for voice interaction during timeouts. Potentially you could also say they can go out and be with the players if they want, but during a 30-second timeout I'm not sure how feasible that would really be. It's an option, though, and maybe worth having if all you want to do as a coach is go out and deliver some hype to your players.
This is where I wax poetic on what I think might work for the best in the long term, even if it means upheaval in the short term. When it comes to "professional esport tournament rules", I try to stick to this guiding principle:
There should be as much similarity between casual, competitive, and professional CSGO as possible.
Or, to put it more colloquially: "As it is in the PUGs, so shall it be on LAN".
Now, Valve themselves have already kicked that squarely in the teeth with their ridiculous "casual mode", but...there can still be hope for "professional" versus "garden-variety competitive" games. To be concise, let's just lump everything that's not a professional offline LAN event into a single "online" bucket.
For me, what this means is that we start from scratch and ask "What exists in reasonable online play, and how can we mesh that with what we want for LAN play?" Obviously that's a huge question overall, but right now we're just talking about coaching.
The first argument might be that well over 99% of online games are played without any coach at all; does that mean we get rid of coaches for professional play entirely? I mean, technically that's a valid equivalency, but in practical terms I'm pretty sure that's not what the community wants (it's certainly not what I would prefer). So we're keeping the coaches...whew!
The easiest way to make a rule enforceable is to not make it in the first place. It's not practical to have any restrictions against coaching for online play because you simply have no way of knowing what third-party voice chat (Mumble, Discord, etc.) the players and their hypothetical coach are using. So, in practical terms (and I'm guessing in the rules for a lot of actual tournaments as well) there simply aren't any coach interaction rules when it comes to online play.
Based on my guiding principle of "LAN play should mirror online play as much as possible," to me that means that LAN play should also have unrestricted coach interaction. BOOM, there's the bombshell!
I honestly believe that unrestricted coach interaction could be good for the game, but there's no denying it would usher in huge changes to the meta. The IGL role would evaporate overnight; any serious, competitive CSGO team would become, essentially, a six-person squad (certainly all the professional teams, who already have coaches).
In the interests of intellectual honesty, I will now present the reasons I can imagine someone else would have for saying this is a bad idea:
I actually think that "all aim, no brain" point may have a tiny bit of traction, but nowhere near as much as a lot of people claim. Remember, four of the five teammates are already taking their orders from an IGL, and they're not "mind controlled". The only reason I think it might be slightly different is that perhaps some teams would be more likely to implicitly trust an IGL who wasn't playing, since their full attention is on the minimap and team tactics. But again, the game already has legendary IGLs who will frag your face off while simultaneously living rent-free in the other team's heads.
As for the "god-tier current IGLs will be less legendary" point...I do have to concede that. I suppose a hypothetical IGL could be so god-tier that even an in-game coach can't out-IGL them, but I can't in good conscience not concede that there's a cross-section of current IGLs who would just become "excellent players" afterward (and not eventually rise even higher as players).
So that's the "here's why I don't agree, or at least don't agree enough, with your counter-arguments" section. Now, on to my actual arguments for the change:
To put it more generally, I think that having a sixth player ('cause that's what it'd really be at that point) acting as a dedicated IGL could raise the strategic and tactical standard of CSGO even higher than it's already gone. Would the game be different? Yes, of course...but I'm not opposed to evolving the game if it's for the better.