Exploring the tragedy of the Counter-Strike 2 server browser

[beckthompson]

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

[leftyspook]

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.

[homebrewer]

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?

[bakugo]

> 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.

[bot403]

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.

[colejohnson66]

An all bot server kicking the only human player?

[Aeolun]

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.

[shaokind]

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.

[comex]

> 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 don't have any solution for this.

[ryandrake]

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.

[password4321]

Related recent discussion 1 week ago, with a 200+ comment initial sub-thread on how the server browser was a key part of the "good old days":

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.

[rimunroe]

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)

[xeonmc]

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.

[diath]

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

[shaokind]

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

[Bulbasaur2015]

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

[jamesu]

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.

[matheusmoreira]

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

[protoster]

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.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

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.

[shaokind]

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

[RGamma]

FWIW there's https://cs2browser.net