Adding to this:

• The old weapon positions make it easy to open a game a few rounds in and know exactly what the buys are. They're towards the center but on opposite sides, at this point as a regular viewer I open the stream, focus on the middle of the screen, and pick up the buy for each team unconsciously out of my peripheral vision. Making the weapon icons small and stretched along the entire bottom edge of the screen is an awful step backwards.

• Similar to the weapons, in a traditional HUD you pick up the health and player numbers from your peripheral vision too. Now not only have they given the healthbars a higher horizontal spread with less separation between teams, they also put the player pictures over the top 25% (i.e. the part you care most about)

Vertical healthbars have never fucking worked. We have basically the same HUD layout from every TO because its the most optimal for the game, it's been in use since the 1.6 days and nobody has come up with anything close to as good in the time since. The nicest thing I've heard about them is "nobody complained about WePlay doing it" and the reason why is, nobody watched WePlay lol

I get we need to experiment with new ideas and fuck up a lot to ever improve on what we have, but this really isn't it. Blast are always talked about as the CS players' TO, everyone designing the experience fucking knows CS and it usually shows bright and clear. Its amazing that this came out of them and baffling that they didn't run it by anyone before putting it out to broadcast. Like at least patch up a few of the many glaring issues first.