ESEA, a known third-party matchmaking service and tournament organizer in CS:GO, is pushing back the start of its next competitive season to wait for the worldwide release of CS2, according to one of its admins.
The news was first spotted by HLTV’s vertical Dust2.us. Each ESEA season includes tournaments for different levels of competition—Open, Intermediate, Main, Advanced, and ESL Challenger League (ECL). Smaller and grassroots teams can theoretically grind all the way from Open to ECL, in which they can qualify for the almighty ESL Pro League, a circuit featuring almost every top CS team in the world.
The reason behind the delay, according to the ESEA admin, is that ESEA doesn’t want to switch from CS:GO to CS2 in the middle of season 46 to avoid “integrity issues.” Season 46 was set to kick off in July, but for now, ESEA will wait for CS2‘s release and do some testing beforehand. “Odds of the season taking place on early/mid July is extremely low,” the admin said.
This is somewhat in line with what ESL has said about using CS2 at IEM Cologne, one of the most prestigious tournaments in CS esports, in July. ESL is “cautiously optimistic” about having IEM Cologne played on CS2, but that will only happen if the game is in a good competitive state.
Related: ESL says CS2 could debut at IEM Cologne: ‘We remain cautiously optimistic’
For now, it remains unclear when CS2 will be in good enough shape to be played in professional tournaments. Valve announced that the official release will take place sometime this summer, but the game is still pretty much incomplete at the moment and the developers have been focused on fixing bugs players are finding in the beta version of Mirage.
