ESEA brings back Coach slot to League matches

Last week, ESEA announced that it would be bringing back the coaching feature, alongside a new automated forfeit feature that allows teams to save time by not needing to contact an admin in case their opponents fail to show up.

Although the automated forfeits save time, the coaching feature will be saving the sanity of many CS2 players who have asked Valve to add the feature to the game since its release, but the developer has seemingly chosen not to do so.

Dust2.us contacted EFG Senior Software Engineer Robin "sLi" Lidbetter who, although he is not the author of the code, was able to explain how it works, and how the ESEA team was able to implement it despite CS2 not providing the tools for it.

From a player's perspective in-game, the coach functionality will be the same as it was in CS:GO.

The main difference players will notice now that ESEA League is on the FACEIT platform [is that] everything about a match state/setup is determined in the matchroom, so players with the coach role on their league roster (and therefore in the matchroom) will automatically be assigned the coach role (no ".coach" in-game as was used previously).

Most of the game logic/features that are built on top of the engine have not changed much from CS:GO to CS2. We have used existing game features and added the missing functionality required for coaching with the server plugin in a way that should continue to work with future game updates. Thanks to the game integrations team who did the vast majority of the work to make coaches in ESEA League (CS2) a reality.

Although sLi said there are close to no changes from coaching in CS:GO to CS2, he also noted that there will be a HUD difference, as coaches will now appear on the scoreboard as T or CT instead of as spectators.

This is required to ensure coaches are not sent more information than they should have (eg. only their team's X-Ray, radar info, etc.). Alive player counts will always be correct (coaches will always appear dead). This is not ideal, but it is a good trade-off to enable coaching until (hopefully) Valve releases coaching natively again.

Due to the feature only launching yesterday there has not been much feedback to the change yet, however as a long-requested feature by CS players, it will hopefully be received well, especially by coaches who had to take a step back in online matches following the release of CS2.