DeKay: Removing Coaches Would Permanently Damage Professional CS:GO

Insider and journalist of DBLTAP Jarek "DeKay" Lewis shared his thoughts about a possible ban of all coaches on the background of the scandal with the coaching bug abuse. In his opinion, Valve is able to completely ban the work of coaches, which will reduce the tactical preparation of the teams and will cause irreparable damage to the professional scene.

Valve has a real incentive to remove coaches, as that would eliminate any chance for them to harm the integrity of the game. A decision like that comes at a heavy cost, though, which isn't apparent on the surface. Take a look at how one-dimensional and vanilla team strategy was in the early years of CS:GO; it looks atrocious in comparison to today. Teams forgot to take timeouts, tilted into oblivion, and struggled to adapt their play when it would benefit them the most. Modern strategy is a work of art, thanks to the coaches who stand behind the players on stage.

It might be correct to argue that Valve doesn’t care about the level of professional play, but it is a large part of what fuels the game's player base. People will feel much less compelled to jump into the game if viewership declines as a result of time traveling to an era where coaches have no real input. The effect will snowball and cause even more prospective stars to jump ship to Valorant, which is only just getting off the ground. Keeping coaches around is imperative for the health of professional play and the game itself.

A happy medium exists for coaches to still have an impact on the game while limiting their input in the earliest stages of tournaments. Remove the ability for coaches to join the server for online play, but still allow them to participate in offline tournaments. This would still allow coaches to have a strategic purpose that would only come into full effect at the highest level of play. While a decision like this isn’t perfect for everyone, it is a compromise that makes sense from every perspective.

Recall that during the investigation of the Commission for Integrity in eSports at least 15 coaches who used a bug have been identified. It is expected that the first results of the audit of all demos from 2016 will be published in the near future. Earlier, ESIC allowed all coaches to voluntarily confess by September 13, which should mitigate the penalty. Only ex-mentors of NiP Faruk "pita" Pita, Allan "Rejin" Petersen from mousesports, as well as Slaava "Twista" Räsänen, who worked for ENCE, have done so publicly.