Lost my rank for the first time because Rush is bad and I am bad.

I was demoted to Gold Nova II because I was trying to believe in @csgo_dev. I’m trying to believe that the CS:GO dev team knew what they were doing adding in missions for horrible community maps, like this one: 1

cs_rush

This map is called Rush. It’s made by some guy named invalid nick. It’s a beautiful looking map—a fair assessment to make when solely considering the aesthetics of the environment. It runs well enough on my machine, too. No major slow downs or graphical errors that I could see during my time that I spent on the map.

However, this map is where some of the worst games that I’ve ever played in CS:GO have happened. This is thanks to a Operation Breakout mission that I felt compelled to complete. I got that mission at random, sure, but I thought that the fact that this mission was possible meant that Valve had every confidence in the matchmaking system to put me up against players that would actually know the map and how to play on it.

It took me five matches on the map to finally find a team that could actually compete reasonably well and go on to win.

The first attempt, my team was completely stomped on by self-admitted smurf-accounts from players who were “double AK” and higher ranked. The second attempt saw a griefer on our team attempt to make our ears bleed with random sound effects being pumped through.

The other games were games that I felt we could have won if a few more things had gone right for us and/or were different.

  • There are eight buildings were the hostages could spawn in at… and they only spawn into three, as far as I can tell. The front hostage either spawns into front hut or generator hut, but count any time the hostage spawns into the generator hut as a random act of God because it’s only happened once or twice. The back hostage always spawns into the left-most house. And it doesn’t matter if try to camp the CTs out because…
  • If you don’t have snipers watching from the opposite river bank, winning is just about impossible. You need at least three snipers to cover all of the angles of attack properly. One sniping straight down river, one looking back and forth between CT’s river house and the middle hill and the third sniping from the left-side of the river bank towards the truck in the junkyard. The other two players can do whatever, as long as they’re semi-competent.2
  • Rushing for ambush towards anywhere but the middle wall isn’t viable because CT’s have vision on all of the decent ambush spots before Ts have a chance to occupy them. Therefore, as long as you lock down the middle, everything else should be fine, as long s your snipers don’t mess up their shots.
  • The AWPers on T will love this map because of the long sight lines that can be achieved to cover wide swaths of routes. From the opposite river bank, so many CT routes can be fired upon. From the right position, a sniper from the opposite river bank hut porch can easily fire into the defilade hellhole that is the alley shortcut to middle.

Basically, if you don’t have a good eco strategy and a couple of good snipers, you’re fucked if you even try to play this map. And, if I’ve heard things correctly, I’ve heard rumors that Valve is mandating some of these new maps (like Rush) are to be played in tournaments? HAHAHA, THAT’S A GOOD ONE, VALVO. TELL ME ANOTHER JOKE, PLEASE.


  1. A tweet I sent earlier the evening that shall not be mentioned again. 
  2. This is the scenario in which the team I randomly was matched with won a match on Rush.