How To Use Refrag As An IGL

When played at a decent level, Counter-Strike is a game of roles and responsibilities. In the last few months, we’ve taken you through how to use Refrag as an AWPer, an entry fragger, a support player, and an anchor. Today, we’re going to take a look at the leader. The shot caller. The boss in the server. Today, we’re going to look at how to use refrag as an IGL.

Every team needs someone at the helm. Someone to call the plays, manage emotions, and read the game. In Counter-Strike, that person is the in-game leader, or ‘IGL’. This is, understandably, the most complex role in the game. There are a multitude of different facets that go into in-game leading, whether they be calling set rounds, fine-tuning site executes, managing rotations, boosting morale, or many more.

Refrag is designed to be used by any player, in any role, for any situation. In this short article, we’re going to outline some of the ways that you can get the most out of Refrag in your role as an IGL.

Fine-Tune Utility & Strats

As an IGL, one of your most important tasks is ensuring that your strategies, set plays, and defaults are up to scratch. There’s nothing worse than a strat that’s great on paper, but is an unpolished mess when you try to run it in a game. Luckily for all the captains out there, Refrag makes honing your strats easier than ever.

With NADR, you can get your entire team into the same practice server. Once you’re all there, you can run through utility, overarching strategic theory, timings, spacing, and more. Together, you can craft strats that run like a well-oiled machine, guaranteeing fluidity and accuracy in the server.

You can force everyone to spectate you in the NADR server with the command ‘.observeme’, so you can run through your vision for the strats and speak directly to the entire squad, or you can let them run riot and work on their own set utility and figure out the timings of their moves. Either way, NADR is an incredibly valuable resource for an IGL looking to perfect their calling and teamplay in practice before games.

Learn From Your Losses

Of course, another of the key tasks for the in-game leader is demo reviewing. Much like in any competitive endeavour, losing in Counter-Strike is only bad until you learn from it. Every win is a confidence-boosting proof of concept, but every loss is a valuable learning experience from which you and your team can – and should – improve.

Restrat makes reviewing your demos easier, more intuitive, and more team-focused than ever before. Within your Refrag dashboard, you can navigate to a demo and load it up in one of two ways:

1. 2D Demo Review – you can watch a 2D replay of the entire game, with nade trajectories, timings, and rotates all clearly visible. If you’re looking to improve on your macro game, or want a rough overview of how your opponents reacted to a certain strategy, the 2D demo reviewer is a fantastic way to jump in, get the insight you need, and move on.
2. In-Game Demo – using Restrat, you can load into a Refrag server as normal, within CS2, and watch the demo as you usually would. However, Restrat has some key differences from the more typical ways of watching demos. You can load in with every member of your team, as if you were using NADR, for example, and you can all watch the same perspective, or different perspectives. You can physically run around within the demo playback, watching how certain utility and swings looked in real time.

Improve Your Teammates (And Yourself)

So, you’ve fine-tuned your strats and analyzed the moments in which they’ve gone wrong. What’s your next job? As IGL, you have some of the responsibility of keeping your players on track and improving land on your shoulders. One of the most efficient ways of doing this is to use Refrag’s routines to help each individual on your team improve at what they need to be doing most often.

There are two ways of doing this, although it’s often best to use both. Firstly, you can use Refrag Coach. Coach will analyze your actual games and generate a bespoke, custom training routine designed to target the areas in which you are lacking in your real in-game performance. If you can get your teammates to pay attention to their Coach routines and grind the areas where they are weakest, it’s a no-brainer that you’ll begin to see marked improvement from your individuals.

Alongside Coach’s auto-generated custom routines, you can build your own bespoke training routines within Refrag. With the breadth of different training modes, configurations, and difficulty settings, you can create a plethora of truly bespoke, linear training routines for anyone. This means that, if you’re so inclined, you can create a specific routine for each player in your team, focusing on the specifics of their roles and targeting their weaknesses in the long term. This, coupled with Coach’s constant analytics, means that every individual in your squad can be grinding targeted training at the click of a button, every time.

Of course, a crucial part of your list of IGL responsibilities is focusing on yourself, too. It’s an easy trap to fall into – spend so much time thinking about the game plan, strategy, and other members of your team that you wind up neglecting your own capacity to improve. If you’re looking for some serious Counter-Strike self-improvement, perhaps take a look at some key mental approaches to the game, or grind some utility. Although, after all that hard work, we won’t tell anyone if you just want to chill out and get some surfing in…