I’ve never been that competitive when it comes to video games…well, not since I was in university. Of course, when it comes to competitive games, I give it my best, but I never was one for all-day grinding or eSports. Taking a video game that seriously never appealed to me. I understand if it’s your livelihood, but it’s beyond me why my fellow gamers practice so many hours a day for a game they get nothing in return. At least it seems that way, since most of those up at the top of the rankings are always bitching about something and never seem happy.
The one game that I was considered ‘good’ at was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Due to having the rank of ‘Distinguished Master Gaurdian’, I was considered a god in relation to novices. It was very embarrassing to be hyped up like that, considering DMG was only an average rank in the game if you were that into it. Below average if you got into a dick-measuring contest on the HLTV forums or Reddit. The thing is that the CS:GO matchmaking system isn’t the most reliable way of telling someone’s strength–the real CS:GO gamers played on third-party servers hosted by companies like ESEA or FACEIT. Compared to them, I was only a casual, and I was fine with that. I didn’t have it in me to train like they do–I was in my mid-20s now and had better things to do. Back in my days as a freshman and sophomore in university, I did take it a bit seriously. Seriously as in playing in deathmatch servers and 1v1 servers daily as to sharpen my shooting skills. But even then, that was accompanied by either a podcast or talking to online friends on Skype or TeamSpeak (Discord wasn’t in vogue yet).
During that time, I kept up with the pro scene as well. It was fun to watch professional matches–it was the only time I ever got into an ‘eSport’. I think out of all of the games out there that try to market themselves as eSports, CS:GO is the most viable choice. Unlike games like League of Legends or DOTA which rely on you to know how the game is played and what abilities, items, or characters are being used, CS:GO is something that your parents could watch and grasp the situation of what’s going on. Violent, but easier to comprehend than champions using unknown powers to capture checkpoints.
It’s relatively simple: two teams of five players, one being ‘Terrorists’, and the other being ‘Counter-Terrorists’, try to kill each other while one (the Terrorists) tries to plant the bomb, and the other (the Counter-Terrorists) tries to defend the bomb sites from said Terrorists. The first to 16 rounds wins, and if the game is tied after 30 rounds, then overtime is played (in most outcomes). Unlike Valorant, there aren’t any special abilities or ultimates that get used to potentially change the outcome of a round. All you had was your guns, ammo, grenades, and ‘gamesense’. Of course, any ‘professional video game’ was a hard sell to anyone who didn’t play them, but at least CS:GO was easier to digest than, say, Overwatch or Starcraft II. It was a fools errand to try to appeal to the masses with eSports alone, that being said. The competitive scene is only as strong as the player base wills it to be. Manufacturing one out of whole cloth may work in the short term, but seldom works out in the long run. A true eSport-worthy game is one that can survive without any influence from the developer of said game. CS:GO was a game that had a lot of support from the competitive side from Valve, but had even bigger support from external forces–forces that were there way before Valve decided to get in on the action. Before CS:GO, Valve was hands-off with it. Counter-Strike, despite it not having a major update since 2003, was a popular eSport up to the year after CS:GO came out. Counter Strike: Source had a brief time when it was popular in the competitive scene, but it never quite took off—the whole Championship Gaming Series farce was the only time it had any spotlight.
I had been out of the loop with CS:GO for the last few years since I had no one to play it with. The guys in university I played with, I haven’t talked to them in a while. They don’t play anymore anyways. CS:GO is a game that’s miserable to play solo. Unless you completely take a game over, the fate of the game often rests a lot more on if your teammates can do their part than if you can do yours. It’s a team game, but sometimes your teammates don’t care to play as one. Sometimes you and your teammates want to win, but can’t gel together as a team. Sometimes it was you. There are a million factors.
There were some features recently added to the game that made playing it slightly more fun. There was an option to play a short match, which ended up being only half the length of a typical CS:GO game. This made it less painful to play in case it was obvious from the first pistol round that your team isn’t going to win, albeit at the cost of matches being less climatic and rememberable. It was better than wasting half an hour on a game that was dead on arrival. I know I should have the spirit of ‘come on guys! we can do this!’ while playing, but it’s hard to motivate four people you don’t know–four people who for all intents and purposes could be purposely throwing the game, lack the skill at the moment to be able to contribute, or straight up could not give any less of a shit. That doesn’t even account for me, who was only knowledgeable about the game because I’ve played a lot of it. If I was that good at the game, then my complaints above wouldn’t matter. The fact of the matter is that I don’t care enough to improve my game above whatever skill level I’m at right now, and most likely won’t change that opinion for a while. I mean I haven’t played that much in the last few years anyway. I’ve only started up playing again in the last few weeks.
Needless to say, playing with friends made playing CS:GO a lot more enjoyable. Those who play online games know that losing with friends is a lot more enjoyable than losing with randoms. None of my friends played CS:GO anymore, but I was about to gain a new duo partner–and be further integrated into Michael’s world.
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This all started the night of the One Chip Incident. About thirty minutes after I went back to my room, I got a notification from Michael. One of the VTubers in the same group as him wanted to add me. For whatever reason I didn’t know why.
I told him that it was okay to send my Discord information to them. Considering I was inseparable from Michael at this point, it was only time before I came to know some of his coworkers.
About half a minute later, I got a message request from ‘Violet Bridgewater’. Coincidentally enough, she was the VTuber I had been gifted a membership to. Her message was just the Wumpus Wave sticker, which I replied to with one of my own.
Violet wanted to know how the whole ordeal went down. I guess Michael was too tore up internally to elaborate. Having no reason not to tell her, I typed an abridged version of today’s events, sans the whole gas station beatdown. After that, the conversation drifted towards somewhere I never thought it would go.
I had CS:GO open, despite not playing it. Nonetheless, ‘Playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’ appeared under my name on Discord, giving away that I was about to play. Was, that is, until I got into this conversation. It wasn’t everyday that you got to talk to someone this popular…okay it was for me. But unlike Michael–I mean Francis, I didn’t know much about Violet other than she was in the same group as him. Unlike Michael, who was undeniably crude at times, she was completely wholesome. In the short time that I’ve watched her streams, Violet didn’t curse once–she actually went out of her way not to curse, which I found hilarious.
She said that she was a fan of first person shooters, but never got into CS:GO. I, on the other hand, had spent plenty of time playing throughout the years. The game was a decade old at this point, so having a thousand-plus hours wasn’t as big as a deal as it seemed. To Violet though, I might as well been ‘s1mple’ when I told her I had the DMG rank. She had started playing ‘off-stream’ a few weeks ago and was ranked Silver 2.
I thought she would have some coworkers to play with, but I guess they would all rather play Valorant or Overwatch 2. Battle royales like Apex Legends and the Call of Duty one were all the rage too. I didn’t particularly like them though–they were too unpredictable... also I had no one to play with. I played Fortnite occasionally since it had a no-build mode, but that was only competitive in the spirit of the game. Again, I had no one to play with, but at least there, there were always kids that I could smoke. The one playing on their Switches at least.
Since she was beating around the bush, I straight up asked her if she wanted to play sometime. It would go without saying that I would have to make a new account–not just because I would need to conceal my identity in case I was ever ‘on-stream’, but also because the rank gap inbetween Silver 2 and DMG would make it impossible for us to find competitive games. I thought it was weird how easily she went along with this, but considering that I was ‘roomie-chan’ in her eyes, it made sense. Sort of.
To avoid it looking suspect, I thought others should be included as well. [“i think michael should play too. it would be weird for just us two to be playing imo”]
She replied [“we could”] and then immediately typed [“wait”] [“whos Michael?”].
Oh god, I forgot that he was ‘Francis’ to her [“sorry i meant francis. anyone else whose interested should come as well. we’re more guaranteed to win if we have a full squad”]
[“i dont think he would want to play…i can ask around, but no one plays csgo..”] Well shit, I was right. No wonder she’s asking me to play with her then. It’s a shame that nobody else in AnyClover EN will play CS:GO with her.
I thought once he considered that it would be a collab steam PLUS a ‘roomie-chan’ stream, he would reconsider. She would know more than me though since she’s known him for way longer. If it does go though, it goes without saying that I would be a silent operator if this was an on-stream event. Considering the players we would probably be playing against would be silvers, all you really had to do was have good crosshair placement and patience.
Making a new Steam account wouldn’t be hard–all I had to do was tie it to an email account. My university email account, which these days I only used in job applications, would suffice. CS:GO was a free game, so all I had to do was grind to where I would be able to play competitively. That would only take an hour or two. I had a feeling that Violet was more concerned about her rank rather than playing CS:GO on stream–meaning that playing only with her was only a concern on my end.
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As you might expect from a VTuber named ‘Violet’, her hair was purple–a bit lighter than what you get when you google ‘violet’, but stylistically it flowed better with the rest of her outfit, which was a purple dress, with green sleeves and a yellow part in the middle. The bottom of the dress– the ‘ball gown’ resembled a violet flower–quite clever in my opinion. Her hair also had light yellow parts that resembled pollen.
Violet seemed to have a carefree attitude. If I was in the marketing department of AnyClover, I would’ve tried to push the catchphrase “it’s like water under the bridge” onto her. Perhaps that’s too corny even for a VTuber…either way, she still exuded a child-like innocence that led me to believe that she lived a particularly sheltered life until this point. I wasn’t going to pry too much into her personal life since it wasn’t my business, but she had the air of someone who lived at least a rather privileged existence. At least she wasn’t pompous. I hate to use this word, but she was ‘pure’. She probably thought an Elf Bar was made by Keebler. Molly was the thing you threw in games that caught other things on fire. Coke was the drink…well, that one was actually true a century ago. You get the point. I thought it was her playing up a character at first, but she really didn’t know what an Elf Bar was. Good on her I guess since there’s no chance that those aren’t giving young women new forms of cancer.
As for the games she played, she was also a ‘variety streamer’. All of the VTubers in AnyClover were. She liked to play FPSes ranging from games I knew a lot about like CS:GO to Escape from Tarkov, which I’ve never played before. She was also a fan of fighting games like Street Fighter and Melty Blood and card games like Yu-Gi-Oh!. She liked to dance and sing, seeing that she did karaoke and Just Dance streams. Michael never did either of those to my knowledge. Probably too much physical exertion for him. Of course, there were also zatsudans and the ‘streamer bait’ games. Some things never change. As for the membership streams, they were along the lines the same as Michael’s–movie watchalongs and the like. The funny thing was that most of her karaoke streams were unarchived, which meant you either had to be there at the time or hope that someone clipped it. You weren’t supposed to do that, but you know that didn’t stop it from happening.
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Despite wanting Michael to play with us, he had no interest. Guess CS:GO is too good of a game for him to play. Grinding my new account to level two took no time. Only a few deathmatches and I was set. I had no competitive rank yet–I had to win ten matches before I was granted one.
Due to the way CS:GO worked, I could only get two wins a day on the new account, which really disappointed Violet. Two days in, and she had already gone up to Silver 3. I had four relatively easy wins on this account…it wasn’t that I was doing good, it was more that I was playing against total newbies or people on controllers. At least that’s what it felt like. The flip side was that sometimes there were ‘bots’ on our team, which made things more painful to watch when I wasn’t able to hit my shots.
Violet, despite forgetting how to plant the bomb half the time, had a decent shot. All she had to do to get out of silver was to improve her aim and learn crosshair placement. Communication, while important, didn’t really matter all that much at this rank. Even if you knew the right callouts, what was the chance that the other silvers knew them? And what was the chance they were even paying attention to comms in the first place?
My fears about this whole ordeal looking like a date were unfounded thankfully. Violet only called me when she wanted to game, and whenever we talked, the discussion was strictly business. Our chats weren’t flirtatious at all–in fact, I got the feeling that she wasn’t attracted to men a single bit. For better or worse, I wasn’t ‘tainting’ Violet–not that I gave a shit about that of stuff anyway. She’s an adult. Playing with her was fun since she was fully focused on the game. She didn’t know most callouts and still messed up many smoke lineups, but she still tried her best–which was all that mattered to me. I don’t mind people not being total ‘sweats’, but I hate being stuck in a ranked game with people who would rather be doing other things. Playing with Violet felt like how it did back in the day when CS:GO first came out. Back when there was fog in the game for some reason. Back when the maps had too many spaces to hide in and too much clutter around. Back when you had the round start music play before every round because you kept forgetting to turn it off. Back when you and your friends didn’t have a clue how to play the game and held the same angle every round, being able to because the people on the other team didn’t have a clue how to counter it.
These feelings were pure nostalgia–nostalgia for a time that still exists, but has passed me by. I can play on community servers if I wanted to right now. I could show Violet the world of Jailbreak, Zombie Mod, and the 32 v 32 community servers that still fill the community servers list, albeit heavily overshadowed by the competitive CS:GO scene. Hell, I could start playing Counter-Strike: Source if I wanted to go even further back in time (1.6 was before my time). The point was that playing CS:GO with Violet was the best time I’ve had playing CS:GO in years. And not just because I was pubstomping people playing on controllers–it was because she brought a childlike wonder when it came to games that I once had. It was nostalgic.
Looking at her YouTube channel, she had one stream where she played CS:GO. It was six months ago, a long time before I moved in here or even heard of her. Looking through the VOD, it was clear that she wasn’t used to shooting mechanics on a mouse and keyboard, with her moving her crosshair around unnecessarily. Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t ranked. One of the first things I got her to do was to lower her sensitivity—it’s cool to hit a flick, but it’s more important to have a steady hand and to be in control of your crosshair. It also didn’t help that she was constantly commentating while playing, which distracted her and made her play worse. Her ‘kawaii’-ness wasn’t enough to overshadow my natural disgust at such awful gameplay, but it was a tough fight I must admit. She had improved a lot in the few days we’ve been playing–improved to whatever this was. It helped that she talked way less when it was just us.
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It was a week later. Violet and I continued our semi-regular CS:GO gaming. Sometimes I had to close one night and open the next, which combined with her streaming during the night made it impossible to play. I didn’t mind though, since I wanted to do other things too. It wasn’t like we were dating, and my brain might trick itself into thinking I was if we kept playing every night. The lonely male mind tended to do stuff like that when you had nothing else going on…I found the solution to that was to simply talk to other people. Communication wasn’t my favorite thing to do, but sometimes you had to do it in order to feel human. Past me would’ve had all the time in the world, which I eventually found out was a bad thing. I bitched about my job daily, but it gave me a reason to go out and talk to people and be part of society. If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think I would talk to anyone. Sometimes I went out to bars by myself, just to chill out for a few hours. I lived near where I went to university, so I knew where the good places were. I haven’t done that in a while, however.
After the initial easy matches, the match difficulty rose sharply, then decreased until it settled at a high silver/low gold nova skill level. Still ‘low’ skill compared to those who take the game seriously, but way more people at this rank knew what ‘crosshair placement’ meant than at the low silvers.
I had won my tenth game and was anointed the rank of Gold Nova 3. I would be insulted if it wasn’t for the fact that this was a throwaway account I made specifically to play with Violet. We played about two games total with DMGs and above, and we got our shit pushed in both times. Violet had ranked up thrice in this time, and was now Silver 5, otherwise known as ‘Silver Elite’. There was hardly anything ‘elite’ about the ranking, but it was way better than being Silver 2.
With all of that in mind, I was aimlessly scrolling through my sites again. I didn’t have work tomorrow, so the world was my oyster…too bad I was wasting it skimming news stories and half-watching YouTube videos. The problem with doing something fun is that it takes more preparation than doing nothing, which I am very good at doing.
I got a ping from Discord–it was a message from Violet saying [“im going to stream csgo tomorrow!”]. Since I had been gifted a membership to her channel, I was already in the know of what she was doing. The membership was about to lapse–I had little interest in renewing, just as I had little interest in watching. I wished her good luck.
[“you better watch!”] was the message she quickly shot back. She should watch herself, if any of her superfans saw this, they would think that we were a couple! Not that I would care, but I can tell that Violet would be very hurt if her ‘schizos’ (a less affectionate term for ‘diehards’) were upset. I’m still pretty sure she’s gay also. A non-starter.
[“Don’t worry, I’ll watch.”] was all I said back. I wasn’t lying–I had a second monitor for a reason! She was going to start her stream at around 6 PM my time, which made it a perfect time for me. I could have it on while doing other stuff.
Thinking back to her first CS:GO stream, I had to admit it would interest me to compare tomorrow’s stream to that one. I was interested to see how much she improved on her own, and if she would be able to rank up on her own. Those watching would be able to easily see how much she has improved in the two weeks we have been playing.
Other than playing competitive matches, I’ve gotten her to start playing Deathmatches–while there are community-hosted Deathmatch servers, it’s completely okay for someone to play on ones hosted by Valve. There’s no real difference in my eyes, other than the skill ceiling on community servers might be higher. There was also stat tracking on some of those servers, but anyone who plays this game professionally will tell you that K/D means nothing in Deathmatch.
I also put her on to the ‘Aim Botz’ training map. It was essentially just target practice–I found it quite enjoyable to play. I used it to practice hitting headshots back when I played more, but I wanted Violet to use it so she could practice using different weapons, along with the standard aim training.
As for smoke lineups and all of that, there were a few videos I sent her based on the maps she liked to play. To be honest, this was a blind spot in my gameplay as well, so I used the opportunity to practice them as well. They rarely stuck in my memory, but it was worth trying for the tenth time to remember all the good smokes for a map like Mirage.
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A day later, right at 6 PM on the dot, I tuned into Violet’s stream. I had worked earlier, getting off at 3 PM–I worked a six-hour shift, my least favorite type of shift due to the fact that I got no official lunch break. It was a pain to go from 9 AM to 3 PM only eating a bag of Cheez-Its. Don’t get me wrong, I love Cheez-Its, but it wasn’t much of a lunch at all. All I can say is I’m glad I’m home now.
Eating leftover hibachi, I watched as Violet greeted everyone in the chat. There were many excited to see her ‘try out’ CS:GO again. This was the first time she had played it on stream in god knows how long. To my knowledge, it was the second time ever officially.
She had promised the chat that she was an ‘improved woman’ and that she wouldn’t ‘let them down’ unlike last time. There were a few wise guys cracking lame jokes in the chat, but the majority of the viewers were supportive. They wanted to see her play, even if she completely shat the bed. They were her cheerleaders. With my ‘training’ and the fact that she had improved in the last week, it was unquestionable that it would be an improvement on the last time she streamed. Unlike Michael, she didn’t meander for forty-five minutes and got the show on the road relatively quickly.
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To be completely honest, Violet’s CS:GO stream was a bit dull to watch. It was a silver game–she was the reason to watch it, and since I have had ample time to watch her play recently, it didn’t strike my interest to watch it with the utmost intensity.
The game I ‘watched’ was much more of a procession than a battle. The flip side to your teammates occasionally being braindead is that it’s your opponents who are the idiots. As long as your team has played the game before and you don’t act like a moron, the game settles itself out. Violet was on the good end this time, thankfully.
She had everyone in the game muted, which usually is a huge no-no, but since the game were so easy in the first place, communication wasn’t necessary. Everyone (who plays CS:GO) knows that at the silver level, communication is a luxury in the first place. It was understandable that she had voice chat muted, since CS:GO players tended to be the fastest to the draw when it came to saying slurs of a homophobic or racial kind. Even faster than COD players. Even playing with a full squad, a streamer would be smart to mute the other team, since there’s always one edgelord trying to provoke. She also had the mini-map covered with a picture of herself–she only had around 60% of it blocked, so it was still possible for her to be stream-sniped. The amount of time it would take to decipher where her teammates were would defeat the point of it, however. Her steam could’ve been on a thirty-second delay for all I know, which would make it futile to stream-snipe.
I only half-paid attention to the stream, spending my time browsing the Steam and PlayStation store. My attention was only returned to the stream whenever she had an ‘outburst’, which was usually her loudly saying things like “ha, take that!” after killing someone and “ouch, gosh darnit!” after being killed. A random took her AWP that she randomly dropped after buying it, prompting her to say “what the frick, give me it back!”. They didn’t. It was funny that she absolutely refused to curse at all. I had no idea how old she was, but being a ‘corpo tuber’, there was no way she was a minor. She could be older than me for all I know. She also didn’t curse while playing with me, which meant that this wasn’t a bit she was doing. Of course, she was probably embellishing it a bit for the stream, but she didn’t change that much when the cameras were off.
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Back in the main menu, she told chat “be right back” and went AFK for a few minutes. I was busy updating Gran Turismo 7 since I haven’t played it since I moved. I talked myself out of buying any games–honestly, the only games I ever really played a lot on my PS4 was Gran Turismo Sport and its successor…well, I did play Persona 5 and NieR: Automata on it. However, that was like half a decade ago at this point. I just wasn’t as into console gaming as I was in the past. PC gaming just has more to offer.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Thanks to the blazing-fast internet, my download was done in a jiffy. Applying the update was another matter. I know the PS4 was almost a decade old at this point, but it wasn’t that slow. Who knows why it took so long to apply updates.
Pressing the X button on my controller like it was going to make it finish updating faster, I got a Discord message. It read:
[“can u play a game rn???”]
It was Violet, who for some reason wanted me to play with her. I could see why she would want a duo buddy since solo-queue was russian roulette. It looked like she had decent teammates last game, but it made sense to play with people you knew because it brung a sense of familiarity. Also it was easier to laugh it off if the game went south. I thought it was a risky move to have me play with her, but it was her call. I wasn’t going to be able to talk to her due to confidentiality reasons, which might as well make me another stranger.
[“sure, but is that okay to play on stream?”]
[“yeah!!”]
That answer didn’t give me much confidence, but if she was okay with it, there wasn’t any reason to not play. Hell, maybe by time the game is over my PS4 will be done updating.
I got an invite from Violet, which I eventually clicked. She had unmuted at this point and was talking about how a ‘special guest’ was going to join real soon.
When ‘roommate’ joined her CS:GO party, she said “HEY” out loud like I was hard of hearing. Since I didn’t want to talk, I responded with ‘hello’ in the chat. She quickly realized that I couldn’t speak in-game, as she had it muted, and went to explain to chat who I was. She also explained that we had been playing some throughout the last week as ‘preparation’ for this stream. Once she said that I was “Francis’s roomie-chan”, everyone in the chat immediately recognized me. ‘Wow, the crossover of the century’ was said more than once…not exactly how I planned to make my second planned appearance on a stream, but nevertheless, here I am.
[“r u ready?”] she typed in the lobby chat.
[“yeah, let me mute your stream then I’ll be ready”] I knew it was kind of a rude thing to say to her, but hearing double was terrible in a game like CS:GO. I would have to go without hearing her for the game, which all things considered wasn’t that much of a loss. She didn’t give out much intel, and it gave me free rein to listen to the other three randoms we would be placed with. That is, if they spoke.
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Much to my dismay, we were on Dust 2. It wasn’t my least favorite map, or the map I was the worst at, but I’ve played it what seemed like a thousand times at this point. It was the staple of the Counter-Strike franchise. For more than 21 years now, it had been an official map, remaining unchanged–there were other official maps that were older, but Dust 2 was the only one that maintained the same layout throughout all that time.
de_inferno was first introduced in March 13th, 2001–the same day as de_dust2. Okay, technically it was the same age as Dust 2, but unlike it, it had gone through layout changes. In the original CS, it had a snipers nest at the bottom of ‘Mid’, a second-smaller pit on A site, and had a walkway instead of ‘Construction’. Inferno was my favorite map. I liked the aesthetic of it and it seemed that I always had my best games on there. That being said, playing on it was sometimes hell. If you started on the T-side and your teammates tended to stick around at the bottom of ‘Mid’/’Banana’ for too long, you had to hope they were good shots–otherwise, it was game over.
Visually, de_nuke looked completely different now than it did in the original CS. Owing to Half-Life taking place in a desert for most of the game, Nuke also took place there. Reusing assets is way easier than creating your own. It was one of the first defuse maps in the game, being added in late 1999 with the ‘Beta 4.0’ update which introduced the game mode that we all know and love. Funnily enough, the only other map of note added in that update was de_dust, Dust 2’s predecessor, and one-time popular map. Admittedly, Nuke’s layout had not changed that much. The two changes I could point out off the top of my head were that there was only one vent down from A to B now and that ‘Secret’ was the only way down from ‘Big Garage’. Nuke had gone through many makeovers–Dust 2 and Inferno had as well, but Nuke now looked nothing like Nuke at the launch of CS:GO, or the Nuke from previous iterations of Counter-Strike. A lot of that had to do with maps at the beginning of CS:GO being a direct port from CS:S–at least that’s what it looked like to me.
de_train retained roughly the same layout from CS to CS:GO, being introduced two days before Christmas in 1999. The biggest changes being the bomb plant locations, ‘‘T’ Heaven’ being removed, ‘‘CT’ Heaven’ being introduced, and the layout of ‘A main’ being changed. You could crouch under the trains in the original CS and CS:S, which added an extra layer of strategy and bullshittery to the map. It mostly was a nuisance to newbies like me who only played in 32v32 servers at the time. Fun fact: the area that was under the original ‘Heaven’, named ‘Hell’, is still called that to this day, even though the original ‘Heaven’ has been gone for almost a decade now. The train where the old A bomb site was was called ‘Old Bomb Train’, which was humorous to me because most of the CS:GO player base probably didn’t even play the game when it was where A site was.
Those three maps were my personal favorites–I was also a fan of de_cbble, but that map had been removed from both the Active and Reserve Map pool for some time now. A shame, since it was unique in its theme, and provided for some fun gameplay. It was a Counter-Strike map from another era though–from when maps were much larger in scale and were more complex. There had been a push ever since the CS:GO competitive scene had gotten big to ‘simplify’ the maps. That led to details being removed, spots that served no purpose gameplay-wise being erased, and all-around maps being ‘fine-tuned’ for 5v5 competitive play. In the past, while the CS 1.6 scene was big, Valve never really bothered with it. CS:S had a pro scene, but it was laughable compared to how big 1.6 was. It took until the release of CS:GO for Valve to actively encourage the growth of it. What it gained in the ‘pro scene’ came at the cost of the casual side taking a huge hit. Sure, you could still hop on and join a Jailbreak server, or a Zombie Survial one, but it wasn’t the main draw to the game anymore. Back when I was a young boy, I didn’t go on CS:S to go on ESEA and pupstomp ‘kids’. I went on there to play in a 64-man server and shoot the shit with other players. There was a lack of intensity that made it more fun to play. Competitive CS:GO is only really fun if you’re engaged, winning, or playing with friends. Casual mode…well, you could be more casual. The other game modes are designed to be fun, while the modern defuse mode is designed to be as competitive as possible.
Anyway, the point was that Dust 2 had remained the same in the 21 years it had been out. The only change I could think of was that it was now possible to snipe from ‘T Spawn’ to ‘Double Doors’. In the original CS, you had to drop to ‘Suicide’ to get a clear vantage point. Even if it got tiring at a point, Dust 2 was the perfect map for Counter-Strike. It’s simple design roughly resembled the kanji for ‘rice field’ (田). A 2x2 square that could be easily remembered by even the newest of Counter-Strike players. It was by far the most famous thing about the series. It was so iconic that there’s versions of it in virtually every game that lets you host custom maps. There are versions of the map you can play on Roblox or Minecraft. Any bootleg version of Counter-Strike is bound to have its own version of Dust 2. As someone who spent half of his life playing the game, playing Dust 2 was like hearing a good song for the thousand time—eventually it’s gonna get old.
image [https://i.imgur.com/e7Sm0Ml.png]
Overlay of de_dust2 with common callouts by me. I also added the green areas for where Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists spawn, red areas for where terrorists can plant the bomb, and shadded areas to indidcate walls or covered areas. While other Counter-Strike maps have changed drastically as the years, Dust 2 has stayed the same. This overlay could also be used for CS:S or even 1.6 (original CS). It’s the least ‘technical’ map there is–there’s a reason why it’s the most played map by new players.
Yes, I realize that this that this map is incomplete, missing boxes on both A and B site, among other areas, and isn’t a complete list of callouts. I wanted to only include the essentials for this. Let’s be honest, no one in a silver game is going to call out ‘Goose’ or ‘Fence’. I also realize that I should’ve just posted a callout map from the Internet, but I’d rather not risk violating some copyright rules for a silly reason. This overlay’s only use is to familiarize those who are not familiar with Counter-Strike.
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As I was loading into the map, I got a call from Violet on Discord. Guess she took me muting her stream personally.
When I joined, she said “Hey!” in a slightly quieter voice this time. I didn’t know what was her deal with trying to get me to talk–I responded with another [‘hey’] in the DM. She quickly replied with “You can talk you know!”
Uhh, I don’t think it is. She’s being haphazard right now. But, if she really thought it was okay, then I might as well respond. Respond in my own way.
“Hello chat,” my voice, sounding like a squeaker, must had radiated throughout the stream, because the chat immediately started spamming things like:
* [‘is roomie-chan a girl???’]
* [‘that is NOT Francis’s roomie.’]
* [‘he sounds so different from last time lol’]
I still had reservations about potentially revealing any more information about myself, but it seemed that the falsetto was working. It was a risky move on Violet’s part, because I did have a public-facing job. Even if my job was bottom of the barrel.
Violet herself laughed in a way I hadn’t heard before. “Hahaha, what kind of voice is that?” Chiding me for whatever reason. It’s the voice that’ll save your skin and my identity.
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Before we knew it, the game started. We started on the Counter-Terrorist side. Since she had everyone in-game muted, I was unofficially the middleman for her and the three randoms and vice versa.
Two of the randoms said “hey” as soon as the game started. I responded with a “good evening” in the same high-pitched voice I used on stream. I used a different key to talk in-game and on Discord, so Violet’s stream wouldn’t hear me talking to them.
There probably was little reason to make myself sound younger, but I was hedging my bets against potentially being matched with someone who was stream-sniping. In the games we played before this stream, I never thought about doing this, which might’ve been a problem if I spoke any more than basic callouts and intel. It wasn’t like Violet ever told her fans when she was playing CS:GO off-stream, so the chance of a fan dropping in was almost none. Now was different.
Violet and I were going B. Our two speaking randoms, who were also in a party together, went A. The final random, who had only said [“glhf”] in all chat, watched ‘Mid’ from ‘Double Doors’. Thankfully we didn’t have any issue choosing where we were going–those who have played competitive CS:GO know how territorial players can be about their preferred positions.
Violet, still not that used to positioning, usually would set up shop at ‘Back Plat’ or on ‘B Site’. They weren’t bad positions, but I had to remind her that she should switch it up so she didn’t become predictable. Giving her that advice made me vary my position round by round as well. In the past, I had occasionally fallen into the trap of being very predictable and going to the same place every round. It was okay as long the Terrorists never caught on or found a counter to it. But as soon as they did, that position had outlived its usefulness. The smart thing would be to move to a different position–but not all positions were as useful as others. Some spots, often labeled ‘gay spot’ by players that were killed from there, could catch your opponents by surprise. They would only be useful for that round however, since any player worth their salt would be very wary of that spot until the game finished. Spots like ‘Back Plat’, which Violet tended to favor when guarding B Site, were good spots because it was hard to be killed by if your opponents were peeking out of ‘Upper Tunnels’. They could only see your head, which meant that they had to hit that to kill you. That is, if you weren’t crouching in cover. Compare that to hiding in the right corner near the exit of ‘Upper Tunnels’. It was a spot that Terrorists often overlooked while executing a B site take, which made it easy for a Counter-Terrorist to hide in plain sight and surprise the Terrorists when the time came. The catch was that there was no cover in the corner, so as soon as you were spotted, you were a dead man walking if their shots didn’t whiff.
In lower ranks such as Silver, you could get away with playing in these spots more often–players in this rank often were limited in how they performed bomb site executions. They knew only basic smokes and flashes, if even that. They also could have a memory of a goldfish. And also be a shitty shot to top it all off. Those were the easiest kills. Any player that knew better would always pre-nade or pre-molly that spot as in order to prevent you from hiding there again, or pop-flash out so you had no time to turn around. It was a high-risk/high-reward scenario.
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The first ten rounds went as usual–we won pistol round, but were caught off guard by a second-round ‘Mid to B’ rush. The Terrorists took a gamble and bought upgraded pistols and armor instead of saving for next round, and killed our silent random who was watching Mid. While they did ping that there were Terrorists Mid, I had no idea that the whole team was there, and that they were coming at Violet and I like a herd of turds. I peeked out from ‘Window’ to try to spray them down with my MP9, but I made the critical mistake of forgetting that I was too far away to hit them accurately. Two P250 shots, one to the head and one to my chest, were all it took to kill me. I completely whiffed and now every Terrorist was on their way to overwhelm Violet on B Site.
The difficulty of having to make two separate callouts each time I wanted to made it hard to effectively tell everyone on my team information. I told Violet first, which caused her to hide in the back of B Plat. Then I told our two talking randoms on A. Both times I said it like a castrado. It was super annoying to do, but it is what it is. We lost that round pretty handly. Violet did manage to surprise them and kill two while they were planting. Good on her for making what could have been a terrible round only a bad round.
After that, we traded rounds almost every round–we were tied 5-5 at this point. In order to help our silent friend at mid, I sometimes hung around if I smelled even a small chance of the Terrorists doing the same thing they did on the second round. Our A hold was on lock when the Terrorists tried to go ‘A Long’. After being utterly humiliated twice trying to go on A that route, they decided to go through ‘Cat Walk’ instead, which proved to be a better choice for them. They knew how to smoke ‘XBox’, which blocked vision for those who were watching mid. Our Mid guy never called out smokes, so it was up to me to say ‘they smoked XBox, watch for Short A push’ using my squeaker voice. One could rush to A in order to stop the Short A push, but there was no telling if that was even what the Terrorists were doing. They could always fake it and go Long A, or even go through ‘Tunnels’ and go B. If I was at A and got fooled, it would take me a good 15 seconds to get back on B. By that time, if Violet didn’t manage to hold them back, the chances of retaking the site and winning the round were slim to none.
At the beginning of the eleventh round, our silent teammate randomly disconnected, which threw us into a timeout. The timeout was two minutes long, which gave us all time to rest. Violet and I had really nothing to talk about, so I let her talk to the chat during this intermission.
Thirty seconds into the timeout, I randomly got a question from ‘Coach McGuirk’, one of the randoms–“hey orange, is there a reason why purple hasn’t talked this whole game?”. By ‘Orange’ and ‘Purple’, he meant the colors we assigned to ourselves. I was ‘Orange’, and Violet was of course ‘Purple’. Coach McGuirk was ‘Red’ by the way. Way easier than saying his full name.
Not wanting to make things more complicated than they already were, I made up a lie.
“She’s my younger sister, her mic broke earlier today so she can’t talk…”
Surprisingly, McGuirk bought my lie, saying “uh huh, I see…I wasn’t trying to complain…I was just curious since you two are partied together…heh, you don’t always see two sisters playing together, glad no one’s been giving you grief…” Unlike the guy he named himself after, he didn’t go off on too long of a tangent.
“We let the shooting do the talking for us….” I had no idea why I said that, considering that I was only pretending to be Violet’s big sister as to not reveal my actual voice. It must have been passable enough since McGuirk, his party member ‘FraGG’, or the random, who was named ‘silver surfer’, hadn’t brought anything up.
“Hah, that’s what I like to hear” remarked McGuirk–the moment after that, our silent random rejoined. They had nothing else to say other than ‘sorry internet cut out for a sec’ in chat. After that, the game continued.
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After the continuation, we won eight rounds in a row–the last five on the Counter-Terrorist side, and the first three on the Terrorist side. It was now 13-5, with us only needing three more rounds to win for the game to be over.
Another timeout happened when a player on the other team disconnected. I wasn’t surprised honestly since they were complaining about our silent random ‘turning on hacks’ after they returned from their disconnect. It was true that they were doing way better than before the disconnect, but there wasn’t anything obvious by their playstyle to suggest that they were hacking. That being said, I hadn’t got the chance to properly spectate them since he came back, since I had only died twice in those eight rounds. On the Terrorist side, where we usually stuck together more often, there was nothing off about the way they moved. No sudden snaps or him spinning around. If they were hacking, they were doing a good job at making it not obvious.
Apparently, the hacking was so obvious to some on the other team that the player who disconnected a few seconds ago abandoned the game. They only got a 30-minute cooldown, suggesting that they weren’t always this flippant…who knows. After that, a surrender vote started on the other team, and the game ended like that. What an anti-climatic ending.
Violet, who had done fairly well, ranked up from Silver Elite to Silver Elite Master. She was now one step away from obtaining her first Gold Nova star, which would fully show that she wasn’t just any noob anymore–she was a noob with game sense.
She was jubilant that she ranked up. While silver rankings weren’t a huge deal, this was the first CS:GO steam she had done in a long time. The difference of skill showed, albeit still being at a beginner level, had stepped up dramatically. That wasn’t lost upon her fans, who I imagine were congratulating her in chat. Violet wasn’t that good at video games, even if she played them every day.
After we went back to the lobby, I congratulated her on her rank-up, then I told Violet that this was the only game I was going to play tonight. To be honest, I could play at least a few more, but the logistics of everything were a bit exhausting. Using two key binds to talk was one thing, but having to use a falsetto for thirty minutes straight was a completely different thing. It was a wonder that I didn’t either use the wrong key bind or use the wrong voice. Needless to say, it was too much work to want to do often. If I did this again, I would have to set up a voice changer for myself so everything would go smoother.
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Her stream ended not soon after that. It wasn’t that long of a stream. Sometimes streams were short like that. CS:GO was such an intense game that I understood if she wanted to stop for now. Sometimes Michael did that. Personally, I’d rather just have one big stream and play multiple games, but I knew that for clarity’s sake, they needed to do separate streams for each game.
I messaged Violet on Discord telling her good job again. She replied [“thanks! it was very hard but we won and i ranked up!! im a master now!!!”]. She seemed to be as ecstatic as she was on-stream. She had to be the only happy person playing CS:GO.
As for me personally, I wasn’t that keen on continuing to play CS:GO nearly every night as I had been for the last week. There was a reason why I didn’t play it that much anymore. Other than Violet, I didn’t have anyone else to play with, and I was only able to play with her on this alternative account I made a week ago. On my main, she would have to find three other people to party with in order for us to play together competitively. At the very least, she had another game she could stream weekly that wouldn’t get old. CS:GO was a weird example of a game that only got more popular with age. Back when I was most active, the player count never exceeded half a million–but now over a million people concurrently play it every day. It helped that CS:GO was a free game now, but its continuing popularity stunned me. Over the years, there have been many proclamations that ‘CS:GO is a dead game’. I thought it would take a hit when Valorant came out, but instead, both games flourished. I’m glad it didn’t take a hit, because I do not gel with Valorant at all. It wasn’t the worst game I’ve ever played, but I liked the movement and feeling of CS:GO more.
Curious, I asked Violet if it was really okay for her to tell the audience that we have been playing together, and to even go as far as to let me play a game with her. The reaction in chat was positive, but those in chat were her biggest supporters. They would almost be supportive no matter what she said or did. They’re fanatics, but not obsessive. What I was worried about was those who lurked but didn’t chat. The antisocial watchers. The ones that watch Violet every stream and are obsessed with her. The ones that had nothing else in life other than watching Violet stream. The ones that would have their world fall apart if she even hinted at having a boyfriend. The ones that called her a ‘whore’ for assumptions that only circulated on imageboards. I know they existed–VTuber culture and Idol culture are spitting images of each other. There were some companies that allowed their VTubers to date, but in this case, AnyClover was old-fashioned. Michael wasn’t allowed to publically date anyone. Not that it seemed that he wanted to. Any time he ever talked about anyone affectionately, it was a fictional woman from a game he was playing. I assumed it was the same for Violet, with her being excluded to only thirst over fictional characters publically. Not that she ever did that–she seemed to be asexual, for lack of a better word. If anything, she still was giving vibes of a ‘girl who loves girls’. That being said, someone like me though was real. Yes, I was part of the ‘Francis Lore’ at this point, but to be on speaking terms with other VTubers and play with them ‘offline’ was a completely different thing than being a reoccurring character on my roommate’s stream. Especially when the VTuber you’re playing with is quite possibly the most feminine and definitely the cutest VTuber of the group. Violet and I had no relations other than ‘CS:GO Duos’, but there were probably those who resented the fact that she even spoke to a man, even if it was one of her male genmates. How would they react to this? I only thought about this so much because I’ve spent many days arguing with people like this on imageboards. Mostly as a teen, but I still occasionally lurked on those sites. I knew 4chan had a ‘Virtual YouTubers’ board–I only went on it once, about a year ago, before I really ‘got’ why people watched them. As with every other 4chan board, most of the threads were either general threads or ‘rrats’ using the board as their soapbox to spew whatever nonsense they came up with today. About half of that nonsense was calling a female VTuber a whore. Why? I never found out, since the OP never went beyond bitching about the ‘drop of quality in content’, and then fans of said VTuber came in and told OP to kill himself. Those who’ve had the misfortune of going on imageboards know the routine.
I wasn’t worried about myself in particular. I’m fine. I’m not afraid of being harassed by anyone because 99% of my digital footprint was either long-since-deleted 4chan posts or posts on dead forums that would qualify as lost media at this point. I was known as ‘roomie-chan’ and ‘roommate’, they had nothing else to go off of other than my yelp, my shitty handwriting, and my voice pitched up. If anyone was after me, they would’ve confronted me at work already. I wasn’t that worried about Michael either, because he never seemed to be worried about it either. We lived in a place that was particularly hard to be stalked from. There were no areas where someone could park a white van and hide until the time was right. There were no places to hide. You were out in the open–even if we lived in a rural area, we had neighbors to every side of us. Neighbors that probably wouldn’t be too keen on a stranger camping out in their yard. It had to be one of the reasons why Michael moved here in the first place. It was Violet who I was concerned about. How could I not? Unlike Michael and I, I had no assurance that she would be safe from any insane fan. I had no idea what she looked like, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was south of a hundred pounds, barely tall enough to ride roller coasters, and had no way of defending herself. Maybe she lived with her family or had roommates of her own, but I had no idea. She seemed like a person that cared a lot about her audience. Her audience, at least the ones in chat, would be supportive of her no matter what, but there was always the possibility of her being barraged on social media about random shit. From sock-puppet accounts and various types of anti-social losers that don’t matter whatsoever, but still, hate is hate. It gets to people, especially when your career rides on pleasing your audience. While it was never explicit, Violet seemed to fall under the category of a ‘GFE’ (Girlfriend Experience) VTuber. Personally, I didn’t know how that worked. Sharing a fake girlfriend with thousands of others seemed like a miserable time, but I guess it was possible to pretend others weren’t there. That would require actively avoiding chat, something that’s impossible if the VTuber is actively talking with them. I guess stick to the ASMR streams? I don’t think Violet even did ASMR, but I knew she was easy bait for lonely men. I mean, how could she not be? She was a real sweetheart and overall a nice girl. Perfect for men (and women, but mainly men) who had not much going on in their lives and had little to zero luck with women in real life. As someone who hasn’t had much luck either, I empathized with ‘forever alone’ men to a certain extent, but they lose me when they start calling women that have had sex once a slut or whatever. While they could hide around ‘the fall of the west’ or wanting to ‘return to tradition’, it all boiled down to that they found it too hard to get laid. Sexual hangups. They were mad that they had no control over women, and went online to express those urges. Those who obsessed over VTubers like Violet to that point tended to be less ideologically motivated than, say, the Roman bust avatar people on Twitter, but they might as well be the same person when it comes to women. To them, anything as minor as ‘playing video games with a man’ was akin to going on the casting couch. Most of these people were paper tigers. They were fickle, bitter, angry people that hardly meant what they said. They were all talk, but talk can still get to people. And there’s no telling if one of them was actually so far gone as to dedicate their lives to making Violet’s life miserable because she ‘betrayed’ them. These were the thoughts that suddenly came rushing to my head.
[“idk. if it was my manager wouldve already told me.”]
It was a more levelheaded answer than I expected. The fact that she didn’t seem concerned at all did alleviate some of the fears I had. If she wasn’t worried, then I had no reason to be as well. Violet might be a ‘smol bean’, but she was also an adult that had free will. In reality, it was AnyClover’s call, and if they didn’t have her manager telling her to stop, then there wasn’t an issue.
The next message was even less diffusing:
[“also, u dont have to talk like that on stream. Unless if u want to. lol”]
Huh, so all that effort was for nothing. Okay. Guess I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.
Wanting to move on from a heavy topic, I changed the subject to a more important matter:
[“When are you going to play RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 on stream again?”]
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ON AN IMAGEBOARD THAT MANY BROWSE AND FEW CLAIM TO KNOW ABOUT…
THREAD: /anyEN/ - AnyClover EN General
Anonymous - No. 47963252
That game Violet just played with Francis’s roomie was strange. Safe to say that
roomie’s voice doesn’t actually sound like that.
Anonymous - No. 47963298
>>47963252 yeah it was weird. i dont like my tubers to play with men but it oddly
did not bother me. maybe because of whatever voice changer she used. dont want him on again but would rather have him than someone not affiliated with anyclover
Anonymous - No. 47963312
>current year
>watching AnyCoper
kek
Anonymous - No. 47963358
>>47963252 >>47963298 i was in the game with then…he pitched his voice up
so as to mask his real voice. i could tell he was faking it, but our retard
teammates couldnt tell. i was recording the game so i could start tracking him down, but his steam account is privated and he never broke character.i got bored and eventually started walling. csgo sucks
Anonymous - No. 47963399
>>47963312 If nijilive is so much better than AnyClover then why do you spend
all your time shitting up our thread? Kys
Anonymous - No. 47963486
>>47963358 Wait. He really used the same voice in game? That’s too good. You
have to admit that he outsmarted you. Why do you care about him in the first
place? If you’re worried about Violet’s virginity, then I have some bad news for you buddy. I already fucked her. She suck me good