No agent skins will be used at BLAST.tv Paris Major

Skins are one of the most interesting aspects of CS:GO. They make a player’s experience customizable from a visual standpoint but do not provide a real advantage, except perhaps a boost in confidence. Or at least, that should be the case.

In the case of agent skins, however, it was discovered no long after they were introduced in 2019 that some gave a real advantage to the person that was using them. In some cases, the hitbox was smaller than usual. In others, the skin offered the player a bit of camouflage on certain maps and against certain background colors.

This is not supposed to happen.

The problem and its improvised solution

When a game is unfair by bad design, it makes professional players feel like they’re being cheated. After four years, despite Valve’s best efforts, CS:GO agent skins are still problematic. Understanding the issue, the participants of BLAST.tv Paris Major have agreed not to use them.

There’s nothing in the rules of the tournament that says you can’t use an agent skin. But when everyone agrees not to use such skins because they can give an unfair advantage, that unwritten agreement becomes a rule. Breaking it would instantly turn you into an outcast.

There’s a lot of pressure on players to conform with the rules and in this particular case, that’s a good thing. It can be really difficult to stop players from abusing something that’s part of the game.

Agreeing not to do what you’re theoretically allowed to do isn’t pleasant, especially if you’ve found a way to exploit the problem to create an advantage for yourself. But CS:GO teams and players seem to be very principled in this case. The game has already been plagued by enough scandals and nobody wants to harm its reputation even further.

Right now, CS:GO’s player base is growing rapidly. It will soon hit the 1 million average concurrent players mark and everyone seems to have forgotten about the integrity issues related to the spectator bug and lots of other problems from the past.

At a tournament of this importance, doing something fishy would be a huge mistake. Players or even entire organizations would suffer severe reputational consequences if someone decided to start using agent skins to obtain an unfair advantage against the verbal agreement that the players seem to have reached ahead of the tournament.

Header: BLAST