I used to be do the whole CAL thing with Counter-Strike, but it just takes up too much time.

I hated 1.6 at first, but after a week or two I got used to... well I had to since I was competing in CAL at the time. My burst sprays didn't work at all at first so I became a mad aug whore for a while... the bursting and spraying came back over the months so now I'm back to colt/ak. I find that hitbox registration is better with 1.6 now... it was horrible before if you kept your interp at 0.1 so you had to change it to 0.05 or lower to NOT interp (unlike 1.5). Now, it's just auto-set to 1/cl_updaterate or something I think, which although was laggy earlier in 1.6 is actually both accurate and smooth now. The shield is complete garbage but any half-decent pub will ban it, and no one ever uses it in scrims.

Anyway, I don't play CS much anymore because just to stay competitive it takes over your life, LOL. And having moved back to the west coast now, where there are no good pubs, everytime I pub I get banned so there's not much point anymore. You don't really lose any skills by taking a break from the game I find, but you won't continue to improve without putting a lot of time into it. I've always said that if I ever stopped improving I'd stop playing, and since I don't have enough time to put into it to improve anymore I guess that's now the case.

Maybe when CS for HL2 comes out I'll get sucked back into it, but for now I'll just spend my spare time on herps ;P