Valve are back at it again with their poorly researched changes that nobody wants and could potentially hurt the game.

This time they’re restricting the amount of communication the coaches can have with their team during a game to during warmup, half-time, or during one of four 30 second timeouts. This is surely going to increase the amount of timeouts we see in a game, produce a lower level of Counter Strike and impact on the vast amount of teams who use a coach as an ingame leader. This news hits the hardest for Na`Vi who have only recently swapped their previous ingame leader for s1mple.

ESL have decided to implement the rule into their offline events, which will be in place for ESL One New York. Whereas FACEIT and ECS have taken a different approach.

For the record, FACEIT/ECS have no plans to change the coaching situation at our standalone events.

— James Bardolph (@jamesbardolph) 17 August 2016

“With unrestricted communication with their players, coaches can currently function as a sixth player, and not solely as a source of guidance or training. Activities such as keeping track of the economy, calling plays, and general situational awareness are important components of CS gameplay. If a person is performing these actions, we consider them a player.

Since the goal of our events is to identify the best five-player CS teams that exhibit the best combination of all CS skills, the current participation of coaches in the game is not compatible with that goal. To address this problem, future Valve sponsored events will enforce the following coaching rules:

• During a match, the coach may only communicate with the players during warmup, half-time, or during one of four 30 second timeouts that the coach or player can call.

Obviously, third party events can use whatever rules they want but if you want to align your events with ours then we recommend using this coaching rule.
Ido Magal”