This game is frustrating and not fun, and the quoted "high skill required to play" is extremely misunderstood. The game only emphasizes a handful of skills, and in extremely specific ways, with no room for expansion or depth.

For example, spray patterns, which are designed to prevent moving while firing, are preset instead of random. The main reason for this is that preset spray patterns require more skill than random ones. By making these "skill based" (and I use that term lightly - it's more like rote learning than actual skill, and literally everyone can do it with the right muscle memory), they have effectively allowed players to fire in full-auto with significantly more accuracy than the weapons are designed to have, because they solved a memory puzzle (congrats). These kinds of awkward design decisions for the sake of "skill" exist throughout the game, and serve to seriously negatively effect the experience for everyone. For skilled players, they are annoying extra steps that everyone has to take to compete, with no way to strategise with them to outplay their opponent, making them ultimately pointless compared to the random ones. In low-skill cases they turn fights that someone with bad positioning and bad aim doesn't deseve to win, but they do because they played the memory game.

I guess my point is that a large portion of the skills in this game seem to be effectively there for the sake of "making the game high skill", without actual thought put into how they improve the depth of the game, or how they improve the strategy, instead being simple mechanical actions players have to learn and memorise that provide them no real advantage once all players start to use the same memorization techniques. Another element of this is the mechanic where weapon accuracy resets INSTANTLY upon stopping movement. Instead of encouraging good positioning or implementing risk-reward movement strategies during firefights, the game relies on forcing players to memorize the "move, release movement key, fire, press movement key" style of play. There is no way to use this particular skill to outplay your opponent, as everyone is using it and there's no depth or interaction with it, it's simple clockwork. What is the point of having these sorts of mechanics if they cancel themselves out once every player in a game starts to use them, which happens as early as the Gold Nova ranks? Skill-based gameplay is supposed to open options and allow players to intelligently outplay each other or take advantage of certain situations and take risks for potential benefits, rather than just being a practiced technique everyone memorizes and then awkwardly uses because it's the technical best thing to do in every situation, with no real way to use those skills intelligently.

Many of the mechanics also work against themselves. Weapon prices are supposed to be a natural counterbalance to the usefulness of a particular weapon, for balance reasons. However this is a game where the cheaper weapons are borderline useless, so the normal strategy is to save for a round and then for the next round buy the absolute best (an AK/M4 or the AWP). This encourages an extremely one-dimensional approach to purchasing weapons, as rather than encouraging a wide variety of weapons to be used, and influencing balance through pricing, instead we just see teams throwing away a round or two to get the "good" guns. This completely circumvents the entire point of having differently priced guns, and makes the vast majority of the weapons in the game completely unnecessary. At the same time, undue emphasis is placed on money, to the point where a good or bad economy can make or break a game for a team. These two mechanics exist in conflict with each other, and in both cases is detrimental to gameplay. A system that seems to have been designed to balance weapon usage has instead resulted in only a small handful of weapons ever being used, and teams having to effectively throw rounds because they lost the previous, making every defeat twice as damaging and effectively punishing people even more than usual for having a bad round. The other big problem with the economy is the pistol rounds. The economy is so important to CS that winning or losing a pistol round can often decide victory for the next 2-3 rounds. While efforts have been made in a recent patch to address this, the issue remains. This "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" approach to the economy effectively means that even small victories - such as winning the pistol round by only a tiny margin (such as 1 remaining teammate on 15 health) can still have a HUGE effect on the game, often times more significant than larger victories can have later in the game, which is extremely unbalanced.

The game is also extremely slow a lot of the time, relying on camping certain positions and holding sites in very specific, predictable ways every round, especially as the CTs. There is no depth to this system other than whereabouts within the site you decide to camp, and there's no incentive to use creative strategies such as rushes or stacking, especially as the CTs, as the time to rotate is far too long and retaking a site often means a loss. So we see the same "3 people go A, 2 go B" or "2 go A, 1 mid, 2 B" strategy game in and game out, and it's extremely boring and monotonous. Movement based strategies such as ambushes are heavily penalized as well, mainly because of the AWP which effectively punishes peaking and any sort of movement.

There are other issues as well. The AWP is extremely frustrating to fight against because of the way it's designed, as it's inherent anti-peeker design means that in almost all cases it results in a "turn a corner, die instantly" style of play. This is especially prevalent in competitive matchmaking, where often an entire team can be wielding AWPs, resulting in a very slow game where everyone is so afraid of peeking a corner that they just stand around and don't progress at all. When they do, it's effectively random who dies or not based on if they got lucky and went around the corner the AWP user wasn't watching. This can be somewhat mitigated with smoke grenades and flashbangs, but throwing them slows the gameplay down even further. The maps also seem to be designed around very specific AWP spots and very specific grenade spots, which effectively serve to counter each other, resulting in the same round playing out, often a couple of times per match, as the AWPer camps the same spot, and we nade the same spot.

My overall point is, while some skilled play is definitely possible, even with the AWP, this is not representative of the general experience, and there is so much other cruft to put up with even in good rounds - the economy when everyone is buying the same guns that only serves to punish the losers - the long wait at each site in the same positions waiting for the enemies to come - the borderline useless spray-pattern system, that the bad MASSIVELY outweighs the good. There are plenty of other high skill games, and a few other high-skill shooters. Almost all of them encourage a wider variety of skills than this game, and almost all of them require less simple rote learning and muscle memory, instead encouraging strategy and adapting to the playstyle of your opponents, something barely present in CS:GO. This game's popularity seems to come from it's inherent gameplay style, something not replicated elsewhere (and for good reason), and it's perceived prestige as a high-skill shooter for intelligent people, rather than it's overall game design.

If you are someone who values varied, interesting and deep gameplay experiences, avoid this game at all costs. If you're looking for something that requires immense amounts of skill, and will reward unusual and intelligent tactics, will force you to legitimately out-think your opponent, and where victory is based on strategy rather than muscle memory, go play Dota 2.