Aussie's have what seems to be a natural love of sporting endeavours; our passion is unrivaled in games such as rugby, AFL, cricket, and many other tributary sports. A cominality amongst most sports is downtime - from the last day in September to early march for the AFL and rugby league, aswell as a sharp downwards spike in matches of importance during winter for cricketers or swimmers.

You wouldn't expect the trend to prolong itself when musing over Counter-Strike, being such an accesible platform and no recovery time or injuries to deal with, save for the occasional RSI (repetitive stress injury). Oddly enough then, there's an evident downward swing at certain points during the calendar year of gaming, most notably, the pitfall immediately proceeding a nationals. We speaks with some of Australia's foremost gamers to find the answer - and hopefully a cure - to the gaming equivalent of the flu season.

On the road to a more secure and permanent community, DICE sought the opinions on a solution from a few Australian CS figure-heads: Melbourne's favorite son Dave 'davestr1zl', one of Sydney's finest in Luke 'lukeft', our favorite import Preben 'Oops', Mike 'apoc' fresh from his WCG victory, and our very own George 'Jesus of CS' Beedee.

How can we combat the inactivity in Australian gaming that inevitably occurs right after a nationals? What's a teams motivation to continue practising?

lukeft don't think it's inactivity just after nationals. even befor natioanls it's the same teams warring each night. to combat the dying community in general we need more people (Fresh faces from other games or whatever). this would lead to more people willing to run comps, leagues - sites like cybergamer would probably pick up a permanent cs 1.6 league with prizes. to get more, new people in the community, need one of two things. either a feature article on how to become a part of the community with examples of pro/competitive cs - movies, demos, pics, etc and how to war or cspromod to be good/successful and merge 1.6 and source. feature article would be posted around to various gaming sites - ga, cg, etc, etc. no idea if this would work but yeah lol, the main prob is the lack of people/fresh faces, which is to be expected with a 10+ year old game.

beedee I don't think that question can be answered simply. The underlying issue is that there's no stable online leagues that teams can participate in, and a disconnection between the public gamers and competitive players. The GameArena ladder was a perfect example of this - it provided players a complete transition from pub servers to competitive play as well as create public awareness via their partnership with Bigpond. So this means even if were a online league or ladder, new (pub) teams would never know about it. But without going into further detail, the only way I can see a team being motivated after a national competition is the guarantee more competitions to come - the more notice the better.

Oops Arrange local lans, online cups (with prizes, if possible) would probably help  with the activity on the teams. Maybe a big byoc lan in melbourne / sydney.

davestr1zl In my opinion there isnt any one single reason why this always happens (and it does always happen), but rather its a combination of a number of different factors. I suppose there are a few major reasons that could be pinpointed; based off both my previous experience aswell as assumptions. The first of these would be the obvious one that the majority of teams and players simply need a well-earned break. Before each nationals it is obvious that most teams practise as hard as possible for weeks or even months before the event (as can be seen in #scrim each night prior to nationals), and as such after the event is done most people would simply like to have a bit of down-time after their weeks of practise. This also generally rings true for event organisers and admins who want a break and as such dont run any competitions for a while afterwards.

The second reason, which in a way is also linked to the first, would be that after each national the next 'big' event always seems so far away (and, especially in recent times, is often even in doubt of happening at all), so there is seemingly nothing to motivate people to practise as hard as they could as there is nothing to 'work for'. This reason is both a combination of the scene in australia with a supposed lack of 'big' competitions, but also (and in my opinion more importantly) with the mindset in the majority of top players who only seem willing to play for money and prizes and are seemingly unwilling or unnable to play simply for the enjoyment of the game and self satisfaction of improvement or results.

The third reason i suppose is true not only for national events but after the majority of lan competitions big or small, and also relates to the incredibly negative mindset of players mentioned in the second reason. It is that alot of players/teams are 'disappointed' in their results at the previous competition leading to roster changes, team deaths, or even people quitting the game (usually temporarily), as they are unnable to work out their problems (if their even were any) and simply choose to pick up new players or kill the team. This incredibly counter-productive act would be most apparent after nationals though as it is australia-wide and not simply restricted to local states, therefore leading to this 'inactivity and lack of motivation' that always occurs. I'm sure there are a number of other minor reasons but i believe what i listed above would be the major 3 - but if i were to sum up the sole reason in but a few words (minus the minor break i spoke of which i think is well deserved) it would be that the mentality and mindsets of the majority of australian players is terrible.

Unfortunately, the virus that is inactivity affects some moreso than others; namely SQL and their upcoming WCG campaign. At a time when they should receive as much support and practise as possible, the downwards trend does them no favors.

DICE spoke with Apoc to guage his reactions below.

How was last weekends WCG.au finals for you? Can only imagine it must have been an enjoyable weekend.

Apoc The actual weekend turned out to be a lot better than expected! Some bad experience at Beyond Cafe didn't give me a lot of confidence that it would be a good event.  Jim and the boys did an awesome job to make everything run smoothly. On actually winning the event, it was the happiest i've been to win a nationals. After constant 2nds it was awesome to finally win again:)

Do you find it hard to find practise amongst Australian teams, both in general and prior to a major competition?

Apoc In the weeks leading up to national qualifiers, it is fairly easy to find good prac versus the other top tier teams. You can usually organise to play another team on the full rotation of maps if you pre-organise. As for trying to prepair for an international competition, my last experience wasn't so good. Most Australian teams tend to stop playing CS after a major competition, ourselves included (when we lose). Our best chance is to get some solid practise against Parallax leading up to China. 2007 was bad as we drew the NZ team in our group, so basically would spend most nights on irc, with no luck

Do you see practice as the most important preparation leading up to a competition?

Apoc It's really debatable. I mean, for Kode5 we put a lot of preparation to try and win the event, and we played amazing CS for 90% of the event. At WCG, we just kept things real simple. We prac'd for 2 weeks before the event, 1 week bootcamping at Sam's (Zpr) place. I think just playing together on a LAN environment constantly helps a lot more than any other sort of strats etc. Then you just leave it up to how you play on the day!

We wish SQL all the best during their international endeavours, and reminds everyone to help SQL practise as much as possible!