When you think of a sport, what is more important, luck or skill? Almost all of you will say skill. You don't win the FIFA World Cup by kicking and hoping the ball will cross the goal. It takes skill for a hockey player to skate down the ice, keeping control over the puck and out of the hands of the opponent. The same logic should apply to esports. CS:GO has a built-in mechanic known as first-shot inaccuracy. This, in theory, should encourage a more diverse style of play, keeping people from taking long-range duels with only a rifle. The most commonly used weapon on the Terrorist side, the AK-47, suffers greatly from this mechanic. Many of you who frequent this sub will see the Oddshots of pro players missing shots they 100% should've hit. Some say lag, some say movement. Truth is, lag or movement aren't involved at all. I decided to warm up today on a map known as Aim_Botz. I wanted headshots, so I flicked my gun to a bot's head and fired. It missed. I was aware that inaccuracy was an issue, but I never experienced it that badly. So, I opened up a new notepad document to just jot down the results of a test. I stood directly in the center of the map, completely still. I then would aim my gun at the enemy's head, make sure it wasn't off by a small amount, and fired. What you would expect would be 400 headshots for the 400 test bot kills. Out of the 400 kills I got, 23 were bodyshots, taking an average of 3.21 bullets to kill each of those 23. This is after firing, waiting a whole 1 second, and firing again to ensure no missed shots due to firing too fast. The first shot would miss the head and land on the body, as would the next shots. There were actually 74 shots that hit, but weren't headshots. 74 shots is a huge number, but that's not all. If I bodyshot an enemy then killed them with a headshot, the number grows. 45 enemies died as result of 1-2 bodyshots and then a headshot to finish them off. Since there were 63 shots fired with the kill being a headshot, that means there were an average of 1.4 shots that hit, but weren't headshots with the resulting kill being a headshot. If a shot missed without hitting the enemy bot (no blood), I called it a missed shot. When I totaled up all of the missed shots, I as shocked. 233 missed shots. Not moving. Not flicking and firing as fast as possible. Not spraying. Carefully moving to the bot's head, lining up the shot as to be on the center of the head, and firing. Though I wasn't recording distance to the enemy, I noticed many of the missed shots were at longer distances. Though, I did not activate the long-range mode on the map. This means all of the bots were at a relatively short distance, but still near the walls of the map. Not all shots missed were long range, however. I noticed some shots missing at short range, even some at the shortest range possible. These, however, were a much smaller percentage of the shots missed, as I didn't see it happen very often.

So, how many shots did it take for me to kill all 400 bots? It took me 747 shots to kill 400 bots. 74 bodyshots only, 63 bodyshots that didn't result in the kill, 233 missed shots, and 377 headshots that resulted in a kill (even non-1 taps). For a game that requires many hours of improving your skill, a lot of luck gets mixed into the end result. I'm quite surprised to see a game mechanic influence CS:GO so much as this does.

I highly encourage any readers to do the same test and share your results. Download the aim_botz map from the workshop, play offline with bots (no going on friend's or community servers), and log every shot, taking great care to aim for the head. Make sure you keep your hands off the WASD keys once you're in the center of the map with your AK-47. Remember the gaps of time to ensure you're not firing too fast. It might take a while, but it (hopefully) will be worth it in the end. Let's hope we can get Valve's attention on this so something can be done.