One of the hardest things to do when leaving the primordial ooze of the pub, is to leave behind the emphasis placed on personal score. Like it or not, competitive CS players are obsessed with their frag to death numbers. When you are playing in a pub, winning is when you have a great ratio, and the only reason to look at the team scores is to determine when the next map will be played.
The scoreboard obsession can be linked to some of the biggest mistakes that players can make. Let me give you an example. Say you are on the offensive side of de_nuke. Your team sets up a strat of rushing the upper site, assigning you to watch the ramp room flank. Your team rushes upper every single round, and gets shut down completely, leaving you by yourself in the lobby area. Now you proceed in the upper site, trying to clutch the round 1 on 3/4.
While you are able to pick up a few frags a round on the weakened upper site players, you aren't able to get the bomb planted, and don't win any of the rounds. After the scrim, you look at the scoreboard, happy to see that although your team lost the half 15-0, you had more than twice as many frags as your closest teammate.
After the scrim, you head back into vent, and are shocked to hear everyone ragging on you, calling you a baiter. You thought you were going to be praised for being the only one who could get any frags, but instead you receive criticism. Here is why:
One of the jobs of watching the flank is to support your teammates when things get rough and they need help executing on the bombsite. What you could have done was smoke and flash ramp in the beginning of the round and at least delay the flank for a little while, and help your team get entry frags on inner. Your score might not have been as high as it was but you would have won more rounds and possibly the scrim.
That is what separates a good player from an average player: the ability to sacrifice personal glory for the good of the team. A perfect example of this would be a ramp rush on nuke. You have the best spawn and are leading the rush. You throw your flashes and get blinded while running up towards the ramp room. It is your job to keep running forward and use any kind of trick you can do, to draw fire for your teammates behind you who aren't blind. If you stop running forward because you are scared and let other teammates go first, you just baited your team and made a very poor play. Fear should not exist in the offense when you are rushing. A lot of players have the mentality of staying alive as long as possible, regardless of the situation. If there is one thing you get out of this article let it be this: if you die in Counter-Strike you will not die in real life. I'm going to repeat that because it seems like a lot of players play as if they will. If you die in Counter-Strike you will not die in real life!
When your numbers are even, trading deaths with the defense heavily favors the offense in Counter-Strike. When you turn a 5v5 into a 4v4 or a 3v3, you can see how the balance of power shifts to the offense. The defense will have to be spread thin and certain spots will become vulnerable to an offensive attack. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there so a teammate can pick up an easy frag. The worst that can happen is you die and your team will have an advantage to win the round. The best that can happen is you will not die and your team will have an advantage to win the round. I have seen teams fail on the Dust2 catwalk time and time again. Your team inches up and gets to the stairs on cat, you throw your flashes and take the stairs. Then what happens? Everyone is too scared to make a charge to the bomb site and is grouping up around that tall box taking strafing pot shots trying to make a pick. At least 80% of the time this round ends in disaster for the offense. If someone had taken charge and rushed toward the site the offense would have had a very decent chance at winning that round. Sure he may have died but his team would have gained all that territory and be in a great position to take out those defenders.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in counter-strike there are passive players and aggressive players. This is needed and if the team leader doesn't realize the difference between his players it is also going to be disastrous because the passive players are going to wind up negatively baiting the aggressive players just based on their play styles. One of the best traits you can find in a cs player is the ability to make that switch from passive to aggressive at key moments.
Not all baiting is negative. Turning negative baiting into positive baiting will lead to a huge performance increase for your team. The difference between the two is what you do when your teammate puts his life on the line. If your teammate is taking a bombsite or taking a corner so he can draw fire and you are not there to capitalize on the opening they are giving you, you are doing the wrong thing. A positive action on that same situation would be if your teammate ran across or jumped across a crossfire giving you an opening to make that entry frag and you took it. That is an example of positive baiting.
Here is something that you can try if your team is really showing signs of fear on the offensive. The object is to get your team comfortable with dying and take the fear out of them, and making sure everyone is playing with the same level of aggression. What you want to do is have every single person go wherever they want but they can never stop running forward for the entire round until the bomb is planted. Basically they have to keep rushing as hard as they can every single round of the half.
At the beginning they are going to get dominated because they don't really know how to rush. If they did know how, then they wouldn't be afraid of going first. Second, they will see the worst thing that happens is they will die but this can kind of be fun if you treat it like a game. As the rounds go on they will get a feel for the timing and learn some good flashes to throw and possibly even start getting some entry frags. You will still lose the round because this is the most ludicrous offensive strat I can imagine, but your players will genuinely start to lose some of their fear. I recommend staying at this stage of the exercise until you can see everyone is comfortable with leading a rush.
Stage 2 of this exercise is to take that new found aggression and try to incorporate some team work. Continue to treat this like a game, only this time you are 5 men rushing whichever way you spawn. Use the same rules as before: everyone runs the whole way, no stopping for anything, even if you're blind. Spend as much time as you need until you can see that everyone is really rushing their hearts out.
Stage 3 of this exercise is to take your new rushing ability and apply it to situations. This is how your team will learn to sneak rush. Still part of the rushing game, all you are going to do this time is start your all out mega rush from a lot closer to the bombsites. For example, walk all the way into B tunnels on dust2. When everyone is ready start the rushing game, same rules as before. You can do this anywhere on any map.
The final stage of this exercise is to take step 3 and develop it into an effective sneak rush. Have everyone walk B tunnel again, but this time you are going to walk into the site until someone on defense spots you. Then it’s your green light again for the all out super rush, same rules as before. It’s amazing how fearless people can become when they are just playing a game like the rush game. Guess what? Counter-Strike is also just a game and you should have that same mentality all the time. The best trait you can have in CS is to be a passive and careful player but to know when it is time to turn on the switch inside you and become an animal and let out that aggression.
If you find that no matter what you say and do, your teammates still refuse to change, and would rather bait you than work as a team, it may be best to move on. Some people can readily pick up the concept of baiting, and adjust their play accordingly to fix the problem and make sure their actions represent what is best for the team, rather than for themselves. Others, however, will never be able to shed the pressure of having to have the best score in the server, worried that anyone watching will think they are a bad player. They will need to be replaced or you may need to change teams.
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