I have a few general suggestions that I feel would make the competitive mode more enticing for people to play. Personally, I much prefer the more personal 5v5 version of Firefight. It allows for a lot of different, varied strategies and satisfying communication and coordination, which are the core values that bring me coming back and back to Insurgency.

• An introductory video for first time players. Before being placed into your first queue, you must watch a 60-90 second video explaining basic firefight rules and some 'pro' strats - holding a capture until friendlies are killed, counting kills and number of enemies alive as a team, map control importance.

• More than 5 players in a party. Say there are 7 people partied together, allow all 7 to queue for the same competitive match and balance the players normally across the two teams. Obviously the full party wouldn't be on the same team, but this could help the 5-stack problem that currently exists with the mode. This also has the potential of helping newer players learn the mode faster with a partially stacked team.

• Events featuring prizes. People have been complaining about the prices of cosmetic items. Having event prizes be large amounts of cosmetic credits/rare items would appease those players by incentivizing them to play in the events and form teams that would practice outside of the events in the hopes of winning the next.

• Letting players into a server with 6-8 players in queue. Once a certain amount of compatible players have entered the competitive queue, put them into a server and let them warm up while other players enter the queue. This would be similar to Ins: Source, the game wouldn't officially begin until the 10th player joins the server. If there is an issue about balance, the teams could be run through the auto-balance after the 10th arrives and the round resets.

• If the above isn't feasible, an alternative suggestion would be allowing players to queue for competitive mode while playing in another game. It could be restricted to the arcade mode if there are issues with players quitting mid-game and causing unbalanced teams in pvp.

Competition requires more attention and improvement at least at the level of other game modes. There were no changes in the competition since the release of the game. NWI must now improve it to make it popular. First of all, there should be a ranking table of all players playing in the competition mode, so that players know at what level they are different and how they are doing. The number of XP points received should be the highest in competition mode. A good addition, of course, would be exclusive cosmetics received only for playing in competitive mode. Another interesting proposition was the introduction of an additional game mode (bombs / VIPs)
The existence of Insurgency Sandstorm on tournament platforms such as faceit ( https://www.faceit.com ) would definitely increase popularity.

Hello both!

Thank you for sharing with us your suggestions regarding competitive mode! I'll pass them to the team!