NAF: "There's no point in playing Counter-Strike if you're playing in North America"

In an interview with Nicholas "Taffy" Taifalos of esports.gg, Liquid's Keith "NAF" Markovic gave a dismal assessment of the future of the North American Counter-Strike 2 scene, saying that he believes there is "no point in playing Counter-Strike if you're playing in North America," heading into 2025.

NAF's statement comes ahead of changes to the global Counter-Strike 2 landscape with the introduction of the Valve Ranking System (VRS), which many believe will negatively affect the prospects and opportunities of teams competing in North America. Recently Complexity's general manager, Graham "messioso" Pitt stated that he wants to avoid Complexity playing in North America next year, viewing it as a high-risk, low-reward exercise to play in the region due to potentially losing points to regional rivals for little gain.

However, NAF's comments are the bleakest assessment yet of the state of the NA CS2 scene heading into the new year, with NAF also mentioning into the interview that he believes "[players] literally have zero chance to really improve or get into the tier-one scene," and that his advise for any aspiring pros would be to "go play VALORANT, or try your best to get into European Counter-Strike."

In a later section of the interview, NAF did concede that grassroots efforts from the likes of Fragadelphia and Complexity/Mythic's NA Revival Series did have the chance of improving the state of the scene, noting however that "nobody wants to really like help the scene too much," and that overall not enough is being done to set the NA region up for success to allow players to pursue the dream of going pro.

NAF's conclusion that the NA scene is close to a lost cause comes amidst Liquid's own recent troubles abroad, with the team recently bombing out of the BLAST Premier World Finals after poor showing against G2 and Vitality. Meanwhile, many of the next generation of the NA scene — M80, BOSS, and Wildcard — are gearing up for the Perfect World Shanghai Major Americas RMR, with many of the players on these teams aiming to make their first Major.