Developer(s) confirm that they believe the M4A1-S/M4A4 are currently balanced; no plans to currently implement armor penetration nerf

That doesn't demonstrate skill more, because the maps have innate advantages that favor a side more. It's literally not skillful.

no? there's a skill to getting 5+ rounds on a map like nuke/inferno when you're at a major disadvantage. It takes good trade fragging, good reads and good strats. maps with huge CT advantages don't just give the CTs 16k every round, they give the CTs advantages in terms of positioning and rotations which mean that they take specific skills. by removing CT sided maps you end up screwing over people with the skills to play well on T side of CT sided maps.

Look at nuke. There's very little room for T side creativity because of how awful the map design is.

no? nuke forced teams to be creative because of how the map worked. teams that were creative and knew how to trade frag well often times were rewarded. there's a reason that if you did the research, nuke was a 10-5~ map among the top 6 teams in the world. It's nowhere near as CT sided as people like to claim and you can find many examples of teams bringing up 6+ rounds on T side while under pressure. A great example would be TSM vs NIP on nuke, here.

An inferior team can beat a more skilled team if they get CT side first and RNG their way through the pistol rounds.

if they get T first they can still RNG their way through pistol rounds and get an advantage. it still doesn't guarantee a win. a superior team should be winning pistols more often than not (even though pistol rounds are fucked in general), and they should be especially more likely to win a force buy on the 2nd round when on CT side of a map like nuke.

the problem with bringing up pistol rounds on nuke is that they're not a unique problem. if you play a 50/50 map and the Ts win pistol round, you're already putting the game in a weird scenario to begin with. if the Ts are lets say.. 40% to win a gun round, and they get to first gun round with the ability to buy up even if they lose.. that already fucks up the map. it turns the map even more T sided than it should be simply because one team won a pistol round and a couple of anti-ecos with SMGs. obviously the solution could be to "balance the map to make it 50/50 anyways" but as you've already said, pistol rounds are an RNG fest to begin with.

every map has problems no matter the balance, and the idea that maps being ct side "stifles creativity" is ridiculous at best. all you have to do is watch teams play t side nuke/inferno and then watch teams play t side dust2 to see that the ct sided maps have much more teams doing creative and weird plays to try to mitigate those disadvantages

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