Exploring the Tragedy of the Counter-Strike 2 Server Browser

An all bot server kicking the only human player?

I recently looked at 1.6 servers for the first time in maybe 10 years. There are tons of active servers out there now, far more than there were ten years ago, and they're filled to the brim with bots, which definitely was not the norm back then. You used to see just a few active servers filled with real players, and the rest were simply empty, with either zero or just a couple of players who knew each other.

What changed? Was this lunacy adopted from CS2?

That really is not a solution.

Third party servers used to host plenty of non-standard gamemodes that Valve does not provide. Retakes, mentioned in the blogpost, is one of those modes.

> They only match you with players nearby and its a lot of fun

Must be great if you happen to live near one of the limited server locations with a high number of players queueing for casual.

I don't, and casual matchmaking is completely unusable for me: it almost always puts me into matches with low player counts that never fill up, and if I leave and requeue, it's almost guaranteed to put me back into the same exact match I just left, over and over again, because there are no others to join. I once left and rejoined the same match 10 times in a row before giving up and closing the game.

I don't even bother trying to play CS anymore, even though it was once one of my favorite games. Everything I loved about it is gone in favor of 5v5 competitive matchmaking and gambling.

Ai has gone sentient now but just plays video games. And it doesn't want to play with a slow-moving slow-reacting human. It prefers to play against other bots.

As someone pointed out (and I should’ve mentioned earlier in the article): yes, Valve have a system for registering servers with Steam IDs.

But there’s two problems: they haven’t done any enforcement action ever, and server owners have access to massive amounts of burner accounts.

edit: I've now updated the article to mention that in the main body of the text.

Has anything changed in CS2? You could always just `connect host:port` in the console in Counter-Strike.

One thing that has nicely developed there is a set of submission-only websites for viewing servers.

The person who used to run the server network I was describing replied to me, but alas I think they didn’t see my reply[1]. This is one of the few times I wish HN notified you of replies. Maybe I’ll run into them again in another decade or two.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44953109 (of course, rACEmic might just not be interested in reconnecting, which is obviously okay)

When developing anything (including games, but really anything that accepts user-generated content), the developer MUST ask and address in their design: “What possible ways will this be used to make spam?” Humans suck, and always eventually turn every unmoderated resource on the Internet into spam. I wish we could edit this shitty gene out of human nature, but we can’t.

Why would someone DDoS a Sven Coop server of all things? Is there anything to gain by doing that?

Not what I meant to convey, I need to adjust some wording there!