Solo Queue Teammate Archetypes, from Least Annoying to Russian

CS:GO is a team game, and there’s nothing more fun than being part of a well-oiled and coordinated quintet on the matchmaking servers. That said, we don’t always get the opportunity to play under these ideal circumstances, and if you’ve spent some time queueing alone, you’ll probably find most of these personality types quite familiar…

The Stormtrooper

Some people just can’t aim no matter how hard they try. They may just have a bad day, learning new strats in MM (please don’t do that) or could simply be awful at the game. Whichever the case may be, they tend to reach a critical mass of whiffs where you truly start to wish for a bot instead, or at least someone that survives for more than twenty seconds in the round. Unfortunately, they often queue together with a friend, making it impossible to get rid of them.

The Fake Nice Guy

Hey guys, let’s focus, let’s win – something along these lines is their opening statement, usually with a fairly high-pitched tone, and you might be deceived into thinking you’ve got a good teammate to work with. Unfortunately, they tend to fall silent after an unlucky pistol round or a when a few clutches go the wrong way, sometimes going as far as starting to propose votekicks on whoever they consider responsible for ruining their perfectly good game.

The Lone Wolf

These folks don’t give a crap about you but at least they’re nice enough not to pretend they do. They often have voice_enable 0 on a bind and just go off on their own to get some frags. Luckily, they tend to be decent shots, or else they wouldn’t be getting much out of the game – but that rarely compensates for the fact that they never drop, hardly ever call and just seem to be somewhere far away all the time.

The Non-Stop Lurker

Likely a distant relative of The Lone Wolf, there are the people who seem to be pathologically scared of trying to entry and there’s only a picture of a lettuce in their dictionary where the term “re-frag” should be. No matter where the rest of the team is, you can be sure he’ll be as far away from the spot as possible, and he’ll be the last one to go down in most rounds, regularly blaming the rest of the team for failing to create space for his brilliant strategy. Thankfully, they tend to drop the bomb like a hot potato at the beginning of the round, but there’s a special place in hell for those who go off with the thing and get themselves killed twenty seconds in on the other side of the map.

The Whiner

You’ve lost the pistol round? Expect the ‘gg’ in the public chat. You’ve lost the first gun round? Prepare to play 4v5. These players are responsible for approximately 87.3% of all votekick attempts, 92.3% of surrender calls and 99.9% of abuse directed towards one’s own teammates on voice comms.

Mr. VAC

Likely a cousin of The Whiner, except for the fact that he’s fixated on the opposing force rather than his teammates. While he won’t call his comrades absolute trash, he’s so convinced of his awesomeness that the only logical explanation for getting killed in his mind is that the enemy just toggled their hacks. According to expert interviews with parents, their first word tends to be “reported”.

Dr. AFK

This is the guy who seems to have so many more important things to do than Counter-Strike that you wonder why he queued for MM in the first place. Regularly too late for the start of the round – sometimes flat-out timing out from the server – and often entirely missing out on the window to buy a weapon, expect to spectate him often running into a lost bomb site with a lone USP-S and to Kevlar only to go down two seconds after returning to the game. At least he will be able to drop you the following round.

The Wannabe IGL

Usually the worst player on the team, they tend to find solace in the fact that pro in-game leaders also tend to lag behind in the fragging department. Unfortunately, spamming callouts and not shutting up after dying in the round don’t make a karrigan or a gla1ve out of you, and the only thing these players tend to achieve is a swift voice comm block rather than any sort of coordination.

The Russian

Baba Yaga, the bogeymen of CS:GO matchmaking. This category could very well include some of the previous ones as well at the same time but I wouldn't be able to tell because I can't read Cyrillic. Speaking as someone who lives in a country where my MM experience is chock-full of these fine people, it’s not even the cyka blyat rush B memesters that are the most annoying. No, the Russians who make my blood boil are the ones that immediately go Russki, yes?, treating it as a given that everyone on the server will be fluent in their language. Often, not even a cursory effort is made to communicate with those that are of non-Russian ilk, apart from loud raging into low-quality microphones. It’s no surprise that their hunting grounds tend to be fertile ground for The Lone Wolf – truly, the circle of life in alive and well in matchmaking as well.