Shorter CS2 ranked matches might be a great idea, according to data from CS:GO

I wouldn't mind it.

Two players shooting each other on Ancient in Counter-Strike 2.
Screenshot by Dot Esports

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.

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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.

Author
Image of Leonardo Biazzi
Leonardo Biazzi
Staff writer and CS:GO lead. Leonardo has been passionate about games since he was a kid and graduated in Journalism in 2018. Before Leonardo joined Dot Esports in 2019, he worked for Brazilian outlet Globo Esporte. Leonardo also worked for HLTV.org between 2020 and 2021 as a senior writer, until he returned to Dot Esports and became part of the staff team.