[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.

[beckthompson]

of course! But there isn't much else to do so I'm just giving a solution that works for me

[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?

[beckthompson]

I'm pretty sure the bots are farming "Drops" which they'll sell for money. Every week you get a free case (or skin I think) which the bots are taking advantage of

[Aeolun]

Just another variation of Eternal September?

[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.

[beckthompson]

Yeah that would be an issue... It's pretty common in like the middle of a week day and I'm in a pretty populated area

[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?

[rtldg]

Yes. People make software to control accounts (botting) and to farm experience in CS2. They'll later sell the accounts or use them for spamming reports against real players and other such things. So they fill up a Valve-ran casual server so real players cannot join and report the bots to Valve.