The AWP, an almighty weapon in Counter-Strike throughout the decades, is harder to use in CS2 due to how peeker’s advantage works. While a lot of AWPers have already voiced their concerns with this, dev1ce finds himself enjoying the direction Valve has taken.
Though riflers did have a great impact in CS:GO, the strat-books over the past few years were essentially built around the primary sniper of the team—which is one of the reasons why s1mple and ZywOo dominated the Best Player of the Year award in the last five years. CS2, however, poses a serious threat to that meta as Valve trimmed the number of rounds in regulation from 30 to 24, which makes it difficult to afford the AWP in every full buy, and the peeker’s advantage has noticeably increased.
Dev1ce himself was one of the greatest AWPers throughout CS:GO and taught many players how the weapon should be used during Astralis’ prime years between 2017 and 2019. We’d expect the Dane to dislike the current state of CS2, but on the contrary, he’s enjoying the challenge.
“I like the direction of the game and where it’s headed with the AWP, that it’s not as OP as it was in CS:GO,” dev1ce said in an interview with HLTV on Nov. 7. “I feel like the challenge has been really nice and hopefully there’s a little bit of difference with the LAN ping and stuff like that to how the AWPing feels when you look at the peaker’s advantage and interpolation and stuff like that. … I think I’ve learned some game mechanics that’s going to help me.”
We haven’t seen much of dev1ce in CS2 yet as Astralis didn’t play at IEM Sydney in October, but we’ll see what the Dane has to show later today at the CS Asia Championships 2023, the first LAN tournament he’s attending in the new game. Astralis will face Lynn Vision in the first round of Group A today at 11:30pm CT.
