As some of you regular CS Twitter.. ehm “experts”.. may have seen recently, a community figure named 2Eggs went down in flames at the hand of Valve developer Ido Magal. We decided it would be a good idea to talk to someone who’s regularly worked with this person - Source 2’s leaky information pipe, and TLDR supporter since inception: Nors3.
Now if you've been living in quarantine and under a rock, here's a quick rundown of who this 2Eggs guy is:
He started off as someone who found exploits for CS:GO and got himself a big bag of cash from the devs for reporting said exploits. He gained more and more traction in the scene and developed some nifty software for finding cheaters. He also made a CS:GO update bot - to help relieve the F5 spamming redditors that have the dev blog as their homepage - in collaboration with Nors3. But as it turns out, the man is not who he seems to be and gets himself tangled in his web of lies, and ends up getting exposed by Valve themselves after a shady VAC-ban.
We wanted to get an inside peek at working with 2Eggs and also took the opportunity to catch up on some other topics and Nors3’s perspective on CS:GO and VALORANT.
To start off, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you and how did you get started in the Counter-Strike scene?
I’m just a guy who's passionate about gaming, especially CS:GO. I’m nothing more, this is my hobby and has been part of my life ever since I was little. I started playing Counter-Strike when I was a child. I didn’t even have Steam back in those days so I used a No-Steam version, just having fun for countless hours with friends, on random servers and in local LANs.
I fell in love with the game and I’m still in love with it. So because of that, and because I wanted to improve my English, I started a Twitter account 3 years ago. I started talking about CS:GO updates, leaks, cool things about the game and much more. The account gained traction slowly with personalities, and to this day I'm still shocked, it especially gained a lot of popularity with [the release of] Panorama.
You’ve developed a few “products” like the Steam Update Bot - for the people that don’t know them, can you give us a bit of a run through of your creations?
I didn’t develop a special bot by myself, I just invested in it. I don’t have time to create many of the things I would want to, because I have a full-time job so I decided to give money to people to create it. Anyway I’m not an expert in programming, so it’s better to give money to that type of projects, for people who really know what they’re doing.
A lot of people may also know you from your cooperation with 2Eggs, who recently got into some drama. For the folks that aren’t completely up to date, can we get a rerun of the events that went down?
I got to know about 2Eggs many months ago when he got notorious for reporting exploits in CSGO. He got paid a really big amount of money by Valve on HackerOne for finding bugs. So after that we started talking and built a relationship that became more strong as days went by. I didn't know anything about his past until a few days ago, and I pretty much believed in what he said to me privately - the fact I defended him makes me feel bad.
He built relationships not only with me, but with legit businesses like FACEIT or Perfect World. Everything exploded in the past days when he got exposed by some people and in the end, by Ido Magal, the project lead of CS:GO with his first message on his account after 11 years. He's a compulsive liar and a mentally unstable person. That's it, but I wrote a longer version about the events in a post on Telegram.
Even though he did some bad things, a lot of people - including you - came out after the “drama” to say 2Eggs wasn’t really a bad person. Do you believe that after everything that happened he still has a chance to come back to the scene, given some time?
I didn’t say he wasn’t a bad person. Based on his acts towards a lot of people, including me, he was. Many lies and made up things for many months make him a bad person to me, I hope he can be a better person in the future. He should seek professional help, everyone deserves a second opportunity but given the fact his details are public, I don’t think he’ll return to the CSGO scene in the near future.
We saw people like Ryan from RushBMedia also come in after the fact explaining the situation and showing us the facts. Do you think that the fact that Valve intervened has made the severity of the situation bigger, or could anyone have exposed him with the same effect?
As I said days before it happened, only Valve could clear up the situation, I didn’t expect them to do it in this way but I’m glad it happened in the end.
Now on a completely different note, at the start of this year you created a new esports organisation in the Iberian region: Dogmination. How has that project been going and has it changed your view on other, bigger esports orgs?
The project is growing wonderfully. Even though I had some offers to buy spots and assets or collaborate with other clubs or people, I wanted to do everything by myself. I’m learning new things about the environment you couldn’t know if you aren’t an insider.
I want to be serious with the players and help the growth of the local scene and for now, they’re really happy with the club and me. I’m learning new things every month and I’m trying to get the best ideas of both the football and esports scene and implement them at my club’s level. For now, aside from qualifiers, we compete in the second division of LVP and our goal is to get the first division spot and also get an ESEA Intermediate spot. We’re currently in the first position in both leagues.
And what do you think about the current Spanish/Portuguese scene; apart from Movistar and Mixwell, the scene hasn’t really made a big impact internationally. Do you think there is potential for growth?
The Iberian scene is at the best state in CS:GO ever. We still miss the CS 1.6 days with x6tence competing at the top. Currently Movistar Riders is competing usually in really high level tournaments and that's something we hadn't been able to achieve in over 10 years.
As far as the Iberian scene goes, I still think that - with the exception of Movistar - that Portuguese teams are much better and their level is higher. They put many hours into the game and they sacrifice themselves a lot. There is a gap for growth but players should be ashamed of the poor results they achieve with the current quality of environment they have, a level which some other countries could only dream of.
We’ve also seen you talk about VALORANT and it’s anti-cheat before. What are your opinions on the game from a “programming” point of view and do you think it’s a CSGO killer?
Vanguard Anti-Cheat is a really bad piece of software and I hope Riot Games improves it in the near future. In its current state Riot basically wants you to have a computer only for VALORANT and not even the craziest fans would do that.
As for VALORANT itself, I think it will have success. They’ve put everything into it outside of the gameplay to achieve success and have a lot of ideas that will probably work. Personally, it’s not for me, it doesn’t appeal to me and I see Counter-Strike as a much better option but both games can co-exist.
We can imagine that right now your mind might be somewhere else, but are there any future projects you are working on which you can give us a bit of a sneak peek into?
Every week I have new things in mind, for example right now I want to make a private poll for Tier 1-2 players about the state of CS:GO’s matchmaking. I wanted to do it for quite some time but recently a dev asked publicly for feedback on it. I hope in the future CS:GO’s matchmaking becomes a real thing for pro and semi-pro players.
I also wanted to create a big CS:GO forum with different languages but that project is paused at this moment.
Before I let you got, I have to ask -do you have any Source 2 leaks for us?
I can't say anything that I haven't already mentioned, I don’t think I can give you anything new since the last time I talked about it. It’s still happening but Valve developers have been a bit silent recently, no new leaks nor communication, and given the fact they’ve been working at home, the release could be further away.
That's all on 2Eggs for now. And now, we're going to go back to giving you a quick and easy rundown of the Counter-Strike news. Catch us next time, when we’ll explain why 5G is the reason you’re still in Silver.
