One thing that is exciting about Counter-Strike and eSports in general is the speed at which the “meta” changes. The “meta” refers to the connom strategy that is employed at a specific time. To accompany this very general definition, I will provide an analogy to a standard sport such as American football: Before the forward pass was declared legal (very early on in football’s lifespan), all teams could do was run the ball, and some teams found effective strategies by which to run the ball. The other teams copied these strategies and adapted them to fit their own scheme. These general strategies is what is referred to as the “meta”. Once the rules were adapted to include the forward pass, over time, teams began to settle on another common strategy. This cycle is continuously happening: a rule changes and/or a team is innovative in some way, other teams see that change as advantageous and adapt it to fit their own strategy, and then it becomes a common strategy that everyone is aware of.
Counter-Strike is an interesting case study in the evolution of a “meta”-game because changes happen to the most fundamental building blocks of the game: the maps. In traditional sports, this might be equivalent to the size of the playing field changing somewhat regularly. Some strategies that may exist on the old version of the game are completely invalidated by these changes in the new version of the game. Because each map is generally changed independent of other maps, each map has a unique history, in terms of strategies employed on that particular map and how the past changes have affected the way the map is played.
This article allows you to visually observe and see how the “sidedness” (T vs CT) has changed over time on each map in the current map pool. These graphs are made with Plotly, which is a cool library that allows for the graphs to be interactive. All data for these plots comes from HLTV.org. My hope is that these plots can give the viewer a sense of appreciation for the vast differences in the maps within the game itself.