Play casual matches! They only match you with players nearby and its a lot of fun. I regularly see the same people and its a lot of fun getting to know everyone and banter throughout the game (I only play the hostage gamemode as well).
The only issue I've had is the amount of bots. When I play I regularly get into matches where 19/20 players are all bots and they auto kick you the moment you join. Its very frustrating
> 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.
I feel like it should be up to valve to fix this no? It feels like it should be possible to require an email for everyone that wants to start a server and then boot all of the ones that cannot be bothered to reply to your messages to stop spamming the server browser.
They could also use the Minecraft approach, where you're free to join servers via IP/domain addresses from a simple UI instead of being obliged to trudge through the browser.
> This should be a warning sign to any game wanting to have community servers. This is not a feature you leave running in the background. It requires maintenance.
Which, to most game developers, looks like a great reason to not have community servers.
I play SvenCoop a lot and mostly just stick to a handful of servers. The amount of servers is such that discovering new ones is pretty easy. However it also makes it a bit vulnerable to your favourite server getting hit by a DDOS attack or protocol exploit (thankfully that one was eventually patched!).
So there are problems at both extremes.
I'm in the group of people looking forward to CS:Legacy. it is a fan-made project to revitalize the classic game, based on Valve's public 2013 SDK https://x.com/cslegacygame
Hmm... Servers with more than 10 players are common for different game modes, like deathmatch, scout vs scout, gun game, dueling servers, zombie modes etc. A server with 32 active players isn't automatically fake.
Welcome to 2025, where any channel of human attention will be tragedy-of-the-commons'd into dust to squeeze out some kind of profit. Settle in and watch the malthusian trap slowly shut.
16 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 42.3 ms ] threadThe only issue I've had is the amount of bots. When I play I regularly get into matches where 19/20 players are all bots and they auto kick you the moment you join. Its very frustrating
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941369 (460+ comments) Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
> I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers.
Which, to most game developers, looks like a great reason to not have community servers.
I don't have any solution for this.