For three days in Paris, Counter-Strike looked the way it hasn't looked in twenty years. Sixty-four teams showed up for the Esports World Cup's open LAN qualifier to fight over just four slots into the main bracket, where 28 more were already waiting. Add it up and you get a LAN event with nearly a hundred teams in one place — one shared hall, tables shoulder to shoulder, and s1mple

No press release. No developer post. Not a line in the patch notes. But on the night of August 6, panic broke out across Chinese farming chats and X filled up with screenshots of dead accounts. That's what a CS2 ban wave usually looks like: Valve says nothing, and the scale has to be reconstructed from other people's complaints and third-party tracker counts.It was a big one. The size isn't

On July 16, Valve kicked off its second Call to Arms-ory and named three directions: the Fairy Tales weapon collection and two sticker sets, Cryptids and Pop Art. We've already covered the skins, so now it's the stickers' turn. We'll start with Pop Art and come back to Cryptids in a separate piece, because the two themes are far too different to shove into one roundup.Going in, Pop Art looked

VALVE has rolled out another themed Workshop contest, and this time the prompt is about as rich as they come: fairy tales. These are the events we enjoy most. When hundreds of submissions share a common thread, it's immediately clear who just slapped a "magical" palette on their gun and who actually sat down and built a story.One thing you'll notice right away: the theme says Fairy Tales, but nobody's