s1mple blasts Valve over Ancient map balance at Antwerp Major

Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev doesn’t hate Ancient, but it’s fair to say that he hates how Valve has handled the newest map in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s active duty rotation.

Natus Vincere secured a 3-0 finish in the PGL Antwerp Major’s Legends Stage by taking a 2-1 victory over Ninjas in Pyjamas. This moves Na`Vi forward to the Champions Stage playoffs and sets the team up with a minimum top-eight placement. It was a great day for s1mple, but that doesn’t mean he was happy when discussing the state of CSGO during a visit to the analyst desk.

“When you start CT, it’s easy,” s1mple said when discussing Ancient.

When pressed on this, he was sharply critical of Valve for the developer’s handling of the map and how lopsided it currently is..

“Valve doesn’t know how to fix this map. They don’t do anything. If you remember they changed it like five times in a few months, but they never changed the A site,” s1mple said. “I mean they did some small changes on the A site on Ancient, but overall they don’t care about this map.”

s1mple, fresh off an epic Twitter blowout, honed in on the difficulties with planting the bomb for the T side. He says that CTs have a number of strong angles they can hold the site from along with some very powerful smokes. This makes it difficult to overtake the A site and almost as tough to do anything once there.

Is Ancient T-sided or CT-sided?

At present, Ancient is likely the most CT-sided map in all of CSGO.

As of this writing, the CT side has won 56% of rounds on Ancient in the PGL Antwerp Major compared with 44% for the T side. The numbers seen in the PGL Antwerp Major aren’t an aberration, either. To date, Ancient’s CT-T winrate is 56.7-43.3 in favor of the CT side.

To put those statistics in perspective, that difference between sides actually exceeds the lifetime totals of both Train and Nuke, two maps that have historically been regarded as being heavily CT-sided in CSGO.

There’s no question that Ancient is the most lopsided map in CSGO right now. But is that a bad thing? From both a gameplay flavor and competitive drama perspective, there’s some value in having maps that skew in one direction. The real balancing act for Valve is maintaining a map that allows for multiple viable strategies for both sides.