There’s an ongoing debate in the Counter-Strike community regarding the duration of competitive matches. Some people prefer the way CS:GO currently works—30 rounds maximum—while other players see the positives in a potential change to 24 rounds maximum. And there’s one statistic to back this up.
Numbers from Valve’s official ranked matchmaking for CS:GO show that 40 percent of the competitive games between January and July 2023 were played in what’s called Short mode, which has 16 rounds maximum and one team must score nine rounds to win the game. These numbers were gathered by the dedicated third-party website csgostats.gg.
Before csgostats.gg brought this statistic to light, the overall perception was that Short matches weren’t that popular. But now, we know that a good chunk of the player base prefers to play 16 rounds maximum rather than 30.
The Short mode for competitive CS:GO was introduced during Operation Riptide in September 2021 and Valve kept this mode enabled after the operation concluded.
The debate over which competitive setting is best started on Aug. 15 after the data miner Aquarius found out that Valve set competitive matchmaking in CS2, Premier included, to 24 rounds maximum—which is colloquially known as the MR12 setting used at the beginning Counter-Strike: 1.6 and most notably in VALORANT nowadays.
Related: Leaks suggest CS2’s ranked mode may be taking inspiration from VALORANT
I can only speak for myself, but nowadays, I prefer playing a CS:GO match that lasts approximately half an hour rather than committing up to one hour or a bit more to just one competitive match.
We’ll likely get confirmation on Valve’s plans for CS2 after the competitive mode gets added back to the beta. Valve disabled it in the Aug. 15 update.
