HLA Wingman Data
Our first 1,000 wingman matches
A year in review for our small, community-focused platform for CS2 and CS:GO Wingman.
How we got here
HLA started in mid-2025 as a Discord bot we ran for our friend group. For eight months, matches were private to our group and set up entirely through our Discord bot. Team creation, map voting, and match management all ran through bot messages, actions, and slash commands. It worked for us and we had a ton of fun, but we ultimately realized it was too complex to explain to other people how to use it.
In early 2026 we rebuilt the bot's features from the ground up on hla.gg, and on February 7th we posted about it on /r/cs2 for the first time. We got a few nice replies, but not many new users. Five days later we posted to the bigger subreddit, /r/GlobalOffensive, and our daily match volume went from nearly zero to consistent double digits by the end of that week. We shipped CS:GO support on March 6th, two days after Valve released CS:GO as a standalone game on Steam. We posted this announcement to reddit as well, which brought a smaller second wave of new players.
Cumulative matches over time
Source: HLA Wingman, first 1,000 matches.
Daily match volume
CS:GO support shipped March 6th, and the Sunday after was the platform's busiest day on record.
Source: HLA Wingman, first 1,000 matches.
The maps people played
HLA's map pool mixes Valve-made wingman maps and maps made by the community. We strive to include every quality, playable wingman map on the workshop and will continue to add new maps as they are published. Below you can find the most-played maps on our platform so far.
Top 15 maps by match count
Source: HLA Wingman, first 1,000 matches.
64 different maps have been played across the first 1,000 matches on our platform. Keep in mind, Valve keeps just 6 in active rotation.
29 of HLA's 64 played maps have been in that rotation at some point; the other 35 are workshop maps Valve has yet to include in a rotation.
All 64 maps by match count
Source: HLA Wingman, first 1,000 matches.
Who built the maps
The community maps in HLA's pool come from 68 different creators. 40 of them have had at least one map picked up by Valve for the official CS Wingman pool.
The 15 creators below are responsible for the most-played maps on our platform.
Rikuda
88matches4 maps
HomeFries
85matches4 maps
Andi
48matches2 maps
cheb
43matches2 maps
Art Verina
36matches1 map
MadsenFK
32matches2 maps
Yanzl
29matches2 maps
AlyxNevara
29matches3 maps
Malfuncti0n
27matches1 map
Porting CS:GO
CS:GO maps are playable on CS2 only if someone spends the time to port them over. 6 of HLA's 59 CS2 maps are ports. Another 3 are remakes, rebuilt by the original creators themselves rather than by a third party.
The porters here aren't the original creators, but without their work, these maps simply wouldn't be playable on CS2.
Shortdust
Ported by 🇺🇦Крабик🇺🇦22 matches
Lake
Ported by Washed and co.MarcusTheGamer19 matches
Rialto
Ported by 🇺🇦Крабик🇺🇦15 matches
Boyard
Ported by The nest sniper in 202515 matches
Chalice
Ported by SolEk from PENTAsmegma enjoyer13 matches
How people played
59% of HLA's matches are played 2v2, most commonly on Vertigo, Inferno, and Lake. The other 40% splits between 1v1, 3v3, and 4v4.
Matches by team size
Source: HLA Wingman, first 1,000 matches.
One in five matches is played 1v1, a user behavior that initially surprised us. The top 1v1 maps are Lake and Inferno; the single aim map we added is the third.
3v3 accounts for 15% of matches. We think this is mostly logistics: it's easier to get four people online than six. The top 3v3 maps are Splat, Rainfall, and Trash, none of which have ever been featured in a Valve rotation.
4v4 accounts for only 24 total matches, or 2.4%. But 17 of them were played as part of a series. Maginot and Palais lead with three plays each.
We hold the opinion that wingman's single-bombsite format has great potential for group sizes of 3 and 4, not just 2. We hope to see the use of these formats grow over the coming year.
Avg seconds per round
Source: HLA Wingman, completed matches with round data.
CS:GO vs CS2
So far, the two games have fairly isolated playerbases. Of the 323 players who've played at least one match on HLA, only 24 have played both games.
Players, by game
Source: HLA Wingman, 323 unique players, 721 CS2 matches and 279 CS:GO matches.
Each game also brings its own new players. CS:GO support shipped March 6, and for a few weeks roughly half of new players were arriving for CS:GO. That cooled off through April and May.
New players each week, by first game
Source: HLA Wingman, each player's first match as a signup proxy.
Platform stats
From click to first round
Source: HLA Wingman, 720 matches with full lifecycle data.
Since March, we've recorded which region each match was assigned to. Across those 623 matches, 59% happened in North America and 40% in Europe. North America peaks at 8 PM Eastern and Europe at 9 PM Central European, which puts their UTC peaks roughly five hours apart. The two halves of the day barely overlap. Of the 29 regions in the picker, 13 went unused, mostly in Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and Africa.
When North America and Europe play (UTC)
Source: HLA Wingman, 623 matches with region recorded (March onward).
The pattern of use varies a lot by region. Chicago hosted 132 matches across 36 different days. Stockholm hosted 101 matches in just 12 days, in two multi-day runs.
Matches per day: Chicago and Stockholm
Source: HLA Wingman, daily match counts for two regions from the first match in either to the most recent.
HLA has never run more than three matches at once. That peak lasted nine minutes one Sunday night in March. 94% of the time the platform is active, just one match is running. Seeing as the player base is slowly increasing, we expect this to change over the coming year.
Outliers
A year in
A year in, 323 people have played 1,000 matches through our platform, and over a hundred have joined our Discord. We've developed a small core of users who keep coming back and using the platform week after week.
When we started, we just wanted an easy way to play wingman together. Now we can offer that same experience to dozens of other friend groups so they can play Counter-Strike the way we love to. In year two we hope to see our community tournaments take off, and more people trying wingman with 3v3 and 4v4.
We hope to see you around.