Valve recently added Dust to the active map pool. They replaced Cobblestone which will be undergoing significant changes as a map. Cobblestone which was released after CSGO came up in 2013, has already seen several structural changes. The map used to be quite different from its present version.
As bsl stated, there is no right time, but forcing people to adjust to it now feels awkward and gives players a bad taste as you’re leaving people with little to no time to practice the map.
We’re going into an Intel Grand Slam event with teams having less than two weeks of practice on the map. We’re talking a potential to get one step closer to a MILLION dollars and we’re saying, “Sorry guys there is no right time.” Logically it feels flawed.
MDL announced Monday (4/23) at 6 PDT that they decided to use Dust2 to follow other tournament organizers to keep things fair for all teams. The problem I personally have with this is other leagues and qualifiers (StarSeries, ECS, EPL) are still continuing to use Cobble for their regular season (4/26 for EPL, 5/12 for ECS), while using Dust2 for LAN Finals which are more than a month away for some.
This gives us thirteen days between when the announcement hit and when we leave for LAN, along with the map never being tested in a competitive environment before. This feels like a really bad choice to introduce it now. I understand that they want to try to make things fair for other teams as other tournament organizers may be using Dust2, but it’s the old adage of the blind leading the blind here.
If Valve makes another bad choice with how weapons function, will TOs just embrace it even if it iss not the right choice? Obviously a step needed to happen in order to get the map to the right place, but this isn’t it in my opinion.
Source: Dust2.us