strike counting struggles

18/10/2024

with the release of cs2, i decided to lock in and start practicing competitively.
i had a couple of friends irl that joined a team who started leaning on me as a 5th, so i was lucky enough to have people playing "real cs" in my lobbies. i felt extremely invested and started focusing entirely on it in place of the old games i was playing. hell, i even got my girlfriend and close friend into it and we played it at least once a week.

this being said, i got my first proper laptop since i started a course recently. having some basic knowledge of modern laptops since i used to work at best buy, i grabbed a decent asus laptop on a good sale.

this purchase effectively killed my career,

playing cs2 on that laptop felt great when it was running windows 11. however, i'm stubborn! i already installed endeavouros on my laptop and daily drived that over windows 11, and ended up installing windows 10 over it. while it feels far better and lets me use my computer without flashy spyware being shoved down my throat, this meant i can't get any of the drivers i need to make my laptop run well. and the cherry on top, this laptop has a i9-13980HX that is always thermal throttling! :')

as times gone on, cs2's performance has only gotten worse. i don't know what they're doing in the code, but the stuttering and jittering framerate has gotten to a point where it's completely unplayable.
now thankfully, there's always ol' trusty cs source. i've come back to it quite often just to waste some time bhopping around and donking heads. however, the server list is in a dire state.

as of recent, the list of viable servers in north america are:

very promising, innit?

the latam servers have been extremely chill though. it's been fun learning all the maps in their old state, before all the updates that modernized them. it feels insane seeing the headglitch spots on maps like dust 2! at some point i'll probably make a proper clip comp and post it on 'ere.