Huge Playerbase
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive which is also known as CS:GO is a highly competitive first person shooter game, it is only available to be played on PC and MAC. To play CS:GO you need to have Steam downloaded onto your computer. It is an incredibly popular game. On Steam stats the game has 258,882 current players with a peak of 624,035 players in the past 24 hours, this is the second most popular game on Steam after Dota 2. CS:GO is by far the most popular first person shooter on the PC platform, if you compare to latest edition of Call of Duty which is Black Ops 3 which has only 8,527 current players with a peak of 20,062 in the past 24 hours.
Massive Tournaments
CS:GO has a huge competitive scene, with prize pools reaching over $250,000. It isn't the highest prize pool of games compared to Dota 2 which had a prize pool of $18,000,000. The latest tournament had over 700,000 people watching it in game and on the popular streaming service known as Twitch.
Cheater Proof
CS:GO has many skill levels, there is a casual mode where people can just play and have fun and there is a competitive mode which people can play once they have reached rank 3 from playing casual mode. Valve do this to prevent hackers and smurts from being able to go straight into competitive games and ruin it for everyone else, Getting to rank 3 will take a long time for new players and hackers will be banned by the time they reach it by the highly secure Valve Anti Cheat (VAC) system.
Ranking System
CS:GO competitive has 18 in-game ranks ranging from Silver 1 to Global Elite, reaching the top rank in CS:GO is something many people will never achieve as only 0.7% of the people who play the game have a high enough skill level to reach this rank. On the competitive game mode players play
play on teams of 5 versus 5 and people will usually play with 4 friends to have the best experience, the game is plagued by Russians and having to rely on team mates that can't speak to same language as you or help out usually ends up in a bad experience for everyone. CS:GO uses highly accurate servers, the servers use hit scan just like Call of Duty but the servers on CS:GO update 4 times more often.
Spray Patterns
CS:GO for new players may be a frustrating experience but generally the more often you play the better you will get, each gun in the game has a unique spray pattern/recoil pattern. If you just hold down the fire button the gun's recoil will throw your aim off completely and your bullets won't hit where your crosshair is, but if you learn the spray pattern you can counter the recoil on the weapons and your bullets will hit where you are aiming. Players who can learn the spray patterns will generally have higher skill levels and will rank up faster online.
