I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore. You either have to rely on forming small parties with people you've stumbled upon one by one, or you have to seek out people from some much larger area like Reddit or Discord. It takes a lot of the serendipity out of the experience. Without a small community it becomes much harder to ensure you're not playing with people who make the game less fun by whatever metric you care about.
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
Like all AAA media in the age of supposedly social media, games became hostile to self-organizing communities that sustain themselves, because they want a push model for consumption where the producers decide what you see, when, and whom with. It commodifies media into generic content, emphasizes short lived novelty, naturally structures around subscription (and increasingly fragmented and numerous ones), and as a bonus keeps all of your activity observable so you also do the labor of saleable data creation for them.
Nearly all my worthwhile experiences in multiplayer games were related to permanent server communities (CS clan servers, 2fort2furious, SWG emulator servers, ridiculous minecraft servers that were effectively collaborative volumetric databases for external design tools).
I've lurked on HN for years, but I had to create an account just to respond to your post. I operated these servers – perhaps my handle is still familiar. I remember you for sure! I'm touched that you and so many others still have fond memories of that time.
It was such a gratifying experience to build out that server network and the accompanying integrations that attracted so many and built such a great community. I miss the days in college when I had time to work on stuff like that just for the love of it. I hope you are doing well!
This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.
But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.
Honestly, this is partially why I actually love a lot of what's on Hackernews. This site still seems to have a big proportion of old school geeks within it's population, and it feels like one of the only places left for good discussion that i've found on tech.
1) People interacted, they truly did. Dramas, friendship, everything. Where? Quakenet, Forums. Every clan had their channel, some easily reached 1000+ people.
2) People genuinely played together in teams: CS, Day of Defeat, you name it. You had your clan and spammed #5on5 on quakenet.
3) Those clans actually met in lan! At Smau Italian Lan Party 2002 there were more than 60 Counter Strike teams from *Italy alone*. And it was a bring your own computer event[1].
I know it's part nostalgia but I legit think it is borderline impossible to have anywhere near the same level of interactions with people today. Reddit is just not a good substitute for legacy threaded forums. Discussions die fast, they don't even have the material time to develop meaningfully.
In the late 1990s, living in South Korea during the fallout of the IMF financial crisis, my friends and I discovered PC bangs. These gaming havens offered titles like Rainbow Six, MechWarrior 2, and the legendary StarCraft. As a teenager, those moments were unforgettable—sitting in a buzzing PC bang, immersed in epic battles, sparked a lifelong passion for computer networks that I still pursue today.
In the 2000s, I helped establish CyberCafe, a PC bang in Oakland, California, where a diverse crowd came together to play StarCraft and Counter-Strike. It was a vibrant community hub, filled with shared excitement.
I wish PC bangs would make a comeback. Despite our powerful home setups and fast internet, gaming solo in your room can’t match the electric atmosphere of playing alongside others in a match, surrounded by camaraderie and competition.
PC Bangs in Korea are so awesome. I wish we had some where I live. The atmosphere is hard to describe. They are easy to miss. If you happen to get to Korea (gz as this whole country is just tantalizing) don't skip on the PC Bang experience!
There are lots of computer clubs throughout the world. Especially in CIS region. In Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, where I live, there are 182 computer clubs, with average 20-30 pcs. From low cost to luxury options, culture of going to computer clubs with your friends is still strong here
The thing with sites like reddit, HN and the like is that they don't promote "identity" like IRC, forums and others. Like, I'm replying to you, we are being "social" , but mostly we will interact in this thread and call it a day. There's no push to form community or some longer term interaction.
In the late 90s early 2000s I was very into a game called Tactics Arena Online, and we had several great communities.
Yeah, exactly this. No idea exactly what happened but people at some point seem to have stopped accepting other people having different views or perspectives. With basically every community there was invariably some sort of oddballs.
I remember a BBS with this guy called 'Nihilist' who was a total insufferable asshole that'd make glory days Linus look like the world's most gentle man. But as is the nature with community, you learned more about him over time - and he was a guy in his 20s dying of some sort of a muscular deterioration issue, and him acting that way was just how he coped. Everybody loved him, hated him, mourned when he passed, and the community was somehow genuinely a worse place without him.
For another example I'm sure some here are familiar with, Flipcode had this one dude, extremely knowledgeable, who'd basically snipe into conversations, give amazing advice in a rather curt borderline hostile fashion (was it all caps? I think it was, but that was a long time ago), and then disappear. But he was such an important part of that already large community that I'm certain somebody else can fill in the blanks I'm leaving here.
But now when anybody does something as mild as saying the quite part out loud on dumb things, of which there are many in modern times (probably owing to this exact issue), it's like 'zomg burn the witch'! Basically a prerequisite of community requires accepting people for who they are. In modern times today that statement is basically a euphemism for sexual/LGB stuff, but obviously that's a negligibly small part of the diversity and richness of personalities, even if those personalities, or their opinions, may not always be the most pleasant or politically correct.
I’ve been seeking out classic phpbb-style forums more and more for community. I just stopped browsing Reddit a few weeks ago after realizing there was nothing I’d truly miss: no characters that I’d come to know, and no reason to maintain a relationship with anyone there in particular. Regarding “identity,” I actually feel that Reddit (and of course Facebook) rely on it too much: maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).
> maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).
One of the few things Google+ actually got right (admittedly after a good deal of pressure from the community) was the ability to set up simple one-way pseudonyms. It meant you could talk about business or mental health without it being forever chained to your real name.
Whoever can recreate this community feeling is going to be rich. Why did people spend so much time in specific phpbb forums? Maybe the problem is that there are too many communities out there now and so people just give up because you're in all of them and you're part of none of them at the same time?
Discord is centralized, heavily censored, and surveilled, so it can’t serve this purpose for many communities (such as most of the ones in which I participate).
Indeed, I think the size of the internet these days is partly the problem. The community in GameSpy and Zone were super small from my memory. We had crappy websites that tracked singles and team ladders. Then Steam came along.
Communities don't scale. This is the reason why nobody has done and why you couldn't get rich forming communities. Communities are handcrafted to accommodate the unique personalities of the people involved. Communities involve activities where a handful of people can socialize and bond. A service with a million users can never become a community because our social/grouping instincts don't work on that scale. A community should always be a few dozens of core people, with maybe a larger number of non-core people participating occasionally.
If their goal is becoming rich, then this is doomed from the very start. How would it be monetized? Ads? Great, then you have no incentive to actually build a healthy community. Signup fee? Not going to work, way too much of a barrier.
All the like/share/upvote stuff makes the internet much less authentic. Imagine going to a party where everyone offers a thumbs up/thumbs down whenever you finish a sentence. Do you anticipate making any close friends at this party?
Ironically, I've replied to several people using physical thumbs up/down recently. This can be caused by several variations on voice not being viable at the moment:
* sore throat
* eating
* having another conversation
* context demands silence (often requires the question to be nonverbal somehow, but not e.g. if the context is "sleeping baby right next to me")
That was an innocent and wonderful time for many of us, but there was a dark side to it, especially as this haven for nerds went mainstream. I have a good friend who was basically groomed/seduced in ann online game and raped by a 35 year old man when she was 13.
It just sucks on so many levels that we can’t have nice things because many among us are beasts.
LAN parties were welcoming on so many levels. Never played DnD? Come join. One time I recall was an isle of misogynist folk who haven't showered in days playing WoW.
The smell... no comment and in one case I recall at one LAN where a delivery woman was scared to walk down the isles to deliver so she asked me nicely if I could. No problem, pizza is here boys.
But within reason, they kept to themselves and were there to game. You kind of respected that and they respected you as you were there too to do the same.
Outside of all that they were highly intellectual and I recall talking for hours about other highly intellectual topics: psychics, space mathematics, game characters. I didn't approve of their extremist views and you could tell something went wrong somewhere with their psyche but there was a mutual respect. Unfortunately I was too young (20's) to grasp the true vibe.
I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend and felt completely cold shouldered. No one was really welcoming and it was very alpha gatekeepery.
Granted the audience were clique, everyone seemed to knew each other and the mean age would be 40-something but the attitude from some left me astonished compared to attitudes of some of the worse LAN gamers.
If I can hang out with folk who are of such and yet unable to hang with those who are not, I couldn't figure what I was doing wrong. It left me sour for my first major goth event, a sub-culture I've enjoyed since 17; 36 now kind of makes me want to hand in the towel.
Maybe I was craving wanting the LAN I once I enjoyed in my teens, but it was worse than that. It felt horrible being there by myself unable to connect with others. I left a day early. Yet all there for the same reason, music.
I do believe gaming has a power to bring others together but online games now just feel half arsed and are more released for money rather than fun.
Two different sects, yet the one you'd expect to be the worse turned to be more warm. It's weird to think that, but shrug. I really don't know what to think and has left me really perplexed.
> I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend
> the mean age would be 40-something
At least in Germany the "black" scene has a serious "recruitment" problem. It's basically the same set of people for decades now with very little additions to the pool.
It strange to me that I am amongst the youngest attendeds at concerts and "disco" events at 40.
seconding this.. went to Mera Luna a weekish ago (going there yearly) and in my early 40s I felt like such a child compared to many other festival goers even though it was like my 16th or so time.
"At least in Germany the "black" scene has a serious "recruitment" problem."
I mean, if that is the general attitude
"I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend and felt completely cold shouldered. No one was really welcoming and it was very alpha gatekeepery."
Counter-strike was my introduction to how the Internet and TCP/IP worked. I built my first PC to play it. I learned linux to run servers for it. It inspired me and my friends to learn C to try and make our own mod. I made a website for my clan, self hosted it, and registered a domain for it.
The community was incredible, partly because of the server browser, as you point out. There was also a massive IRC community around it that was way more cohesive than what exists today. So CS was also my on ramp to IRC and the technology communities there.
I don't play a lot of games any more. Every now and then I'll try something. I have the GPU anyway and everything works great on Linux now. I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.
Counter-Strike was my introduction to actual programming! I learned to write AMX mods to help make administering our servers (banning cheaters and whatnot) mid-match possible without having to interrupt playing to open the console.
> I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.
Absolutely. I talk all the time about how I miss server browsers. Perhaps similar to the self hosting movement, we will see a similar movement in gaming to reclaim multiplayer games. The fact that a game can "die" and become unsupported now if it fails to find an audience at launch is crazy - just let people run their own servers if they want!
We also don't need content roadmaps for these games if you give the community modding and map tools.
There's a difference between being toxic within a community. The community can self correct, it can ban people.
And if you don't like a community, you can leave at any time.
Compared to being toxic anonymously. Unless you get banned by an algorithm, your free to just suck.
However, I was in one CS clan where a girl gave out her real number to a random guy. Within minutes she was getting spam calls and other not great stuff.
I miss my CS clan though. There was some tension and arguments, but that's inherent to any structure with people.
Funny enough one of my mates couldn't believe I wasn't white over voice chat. It was like being in this magic world where race didn't matter.
Good times.
Edit: If someone wants to start an open source realistic-ish multiplayer FPS I'm so down.
Invite only community servers. If you suck and cheat we will figure it out and ban you. None of this kernel level anti cheat junk.
Realistically, we would need to raise like 10 million so we could work full time on it and buy quality art. Outside of that it's just a pipe dream.
If someone who actually knows how to run a business, wants to start this up I would gladly work at half of my corporate rate.
If I was a billionaire I literally would do nothing but fund to open source video game projects. And then maybe pull a Red Hat and monetize it somehow.
The other grossly understated downside of lacking server browsers is how the player nowadays relies on the system to match him with the "best match" they can get. This opens the door to all sorts of skinner box manipulations, such as the game shoving you into teams where the probability of you winning is low, only to put you into a match where the probability of winning is high.
The ability to introduce randomization of reward around a layer of "skill issue" and plausible deniability for the matchmaker. Elo/bronze hell exists because even the worst players can just swing up and down their rank, whereas if you didn't had any other choice but play with whoever is in your local server (or LAN part, but I digress) then the only solution for you is to observe and adjust.
I'm from Greece and, we used to have lots of LAN arenas before fast internet connections became accessible. I'd get my face pushed by skilled people, and while I'd feel bad about it, the fact that I was playing with my friends and enjoyed myself made it all tolerable. Eventually I gave up feeling bad having negative k/d ratios, and could finally spectate and learn from others. The result was me becoming good enough to join my local CS clan. We never became best in the country, but I have really fond memories both from chilling as friends and highlights from matches.
In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.
Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics.
Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure.
Which of course, internally run servers tend to be built with a set image that gets cloned each time more are needed, making each one indistinguishable and fungible. The only problem becomes assigning the players accross servers depending on which ones have available capacity, which is where matchmaking comes in.
> In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.
I don't think anyone is confused about why this happened. It's obvious why a game company which is trying to make money in an extremely competitive field would prefer it. Having a good reason doesn't mean that there isn't reason to mourn the loss of what came before. Some things have improved! We should celebrate that gaming is more accessible now. It's been a long time since I've been kicked from a competitive shooter mid-match because a server crashed.
> Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
I don't run a business. I'd rather have a game with small communities of players which peters out over a few years than a game with millions of players for a decade+. Toward the end of a game's life player run servers allow the game to last potentially forever. The problem of games alienating newcomers is still a problem with matchmaking systems. Your community's average skill goes up over time once the rate of new players joining slows down.
> Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Games have handled this before with "official" servers or ones run by tournament hosts. I actually had fewer trouble with hacks on heavily moderated small servers because so many people knew each other and would catch onto cheaters quickly. Services like VAC help block repeat cheaters from joining in the future. I like having access to mods and to sometimes join a server and find something completely unexpected. I don't care much about competitive play, though I do like a fair number of e-sports-y games. I never had trouble finding vanilla CS servers back in the day.
>"Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics."
This just isn't true. The average TF2 player had 3K hours long before any official matchmaking was introduced, and UGC (TF2) and FACEIT (CSGO) were their own renditions of community-hosted competitive servers - and were done with great success.
> Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
This sentence applied to community moderated servers and server browsers in general is just FUD. These communites are often the exact opposite and take on the roll of getting new players up to speed and properly integrated into the existing community, they absolutely increase player retention.
Also, I find it really ironic that you can come to this conclusion and then talk about pandering to the "competitive" crowd in the same response. Pandering to the try hards has done more damage to the fun/community aspects of gaming than hackers ever could.
I remember people being GLUED to their favorite servers due to community reasons. In Italy we used to have hundreds, of which at least few dozen popular open community-driven servers.
Actually, server hosting CS instances was a thing, so each provider had their own to show they had the most performing, so you played for free, and to get the best thing people in the same country gathered around the same set of servers.
I to this day remember countless of player nicknames from these times, oddly, I don't remember some of my school teammates from the time.
SBMM on official servers for those who want to just jump into a game and are there for the game loop, alongside whatever other features the official servers might have enabled, like progression or item drops.
Alongside those, the ability to self-host servers for those who crave more of a community aspect and even things like custom modes or mods.
Since my hand eye coordination sucks, I’d hate playing without SBMM and being in games where I get stomped every time, especially when it comes to competitive shooters - playing CS or Valorant without ranks would be suffering.
On the other hand, discovering that even games like Enlisted have community servers running a zombie mod, or the endless modes of the Arma series is immensely cool. Or just the ability to have a more chill custom server if the main game’s population is toxic.
Sometimes you get wildcards like SPT-AKI where the modders give you more control over the game than the devs ever would. Either way, having any sort of control is better than giving it all up to a company that sees you as a bag of money to be squeezed.
I don't really buy it. First of all you can easily have both. Second, even if you think community servers are an issue, the concepts of server rooms with the server being on the standard company platform is totally feasible.
As for server uptime, if anything I think communities manage to provide excellent service and servers. Because the people running the infrastructure actually play with that infrastructure and know if something is wrong pretty quickly.
As for player retention, I played Dota in the Warcraft 3 days and it was the most played game on the planet while having horrible matchmaking on a terrible server system. And players continue playing.
And communities and particular matchup and games increase retention. I used to always play particular types of matches and rule-sets on servers I knew had a configuration and mod-set that I liked. One of the reason this doesn't exist anymore is part of the reason playing is less fun.
And again, you can have ranked match making primary servers as well if you feel like it.
> Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure.
You can still have hosted rooms on dedicated infrastructure, or have both.
Similar story, running modded COD4 dedicated servers largely got me into programming.
It's depressing the modern COD lobbies - chucked in with skill matched randoms on a small range of gamemodes, comms kept to a minimum so no one gets offended.
Then don't get me started how 50% of playtime is spent loading / in lobbies so eye balls on store can be maximised - I'll pass.
> I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers.
I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later. It was so easy to find a server to play on, playing the levels/mods you wanted to play.
Before that, I spent a lot of time (and money from my dad's credit card) on DWANGO. For those not familiar with DWANGO, you dialed in to their servers and then it acted like you were on a LAN. You could play games like Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, etc against other people. There was a main chat room to talk about what games you wanted to play.
It was also a much nicer place to play, partly because you had to pay _per minute_ in each game. The price wasn't anything crazy, if I recall, but it definitely kept people focused on the game.
Also met some good people and ended up working on a gaming site with one (MeccaWorld.com, on the off chance someone remembers that - I ran the Quake section) and started a company with them a decade or so later.
Does not ranked matchmaking make for more competitive matches, a bit like if you play ranked in lichess it matches with someone of your own level, and you have a real chance of improving your own level over a period of time.
There is seems to be lot of negativity against ranked ladders in the gaming community, but isn't that what would be best system to play with people of your own skill level.
Even disregarding the other comment, not necessarily.
For anything but 1-vs-1, individual skill gets smeared into the non-enemy (ally for team games, or everyone for a free-for-all) average.
Remember that cooperation isn't an individual skill (unless the meta is complete, I guess); it relies on knowing your specific partners.
And besides ... it's perfectly normal for a task-oriented group to have people at a variety of skill levels. If anything, homogeneity is what's strange. This does change what interesting interactions happen, but by no means prevents them.
>For anything but 1-vs-1, individual skill gets smeared into the non-enemy (ally for team games, or everyone for a free-for-all) average.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, CS is a 5v5 game yes, but at low rank it's a lot more depedent on individual skills. I love community game servers but a lot of time those are for fooling around and not much the competitive skills.
I have so many memories as a kid have so much fun on these servers. You guys had the rogue with almost complete invisibility. I played dust2 WC3 mod so much, hiding in weird corners with a knife waiting for someone to walk around the corner hoping it wasn’t whatever class had 300hp.
I owe much of my career in tech to counter strike. I learned to manage servers hosting clan websites, security and programming making the sites and “borrowing” designs from Clan Templates or whatever the company was that had the awesome animated flash headers. I remember learning about IDORs and SQL injection, before I even knew what it was called.
I learned 3d modeling with MilkShape for custom skins and models. Made dozens of surf maps and a few KZ. The AMX Mod community was so helpful learning to program. I think it was Small to write mods.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. That was a pivotal moment in my life. I learned how to control a computer and found my passion.
I also miss this. I used to be an admin of a popular Spanish community for Garry's Mod, TTT specifically. The whole community existed because we had our own server(s), and then added a BBS forum. It's impossible to do that anymore, afaik.
Im also chiming in to say i remember these servers.
Frankly, i never liked the mod very much and only advanced a few levels. But i distinctly remember trying to kill enemies with some sort of lighting bolt move.
Can't recall if I played on your servers, but I know I played an unreasonable amount of CS 1.6, including on a bunch of WC3 servers when I wasn't playing on ESEA.
If you happen to remember someone going by `nJs` - hi!
Thought I'd throw this out there, but server browsers are still around in CS2. There are a large number of servers populated around the clock with everything from surf maps, bhop, to even old custom maps from 1.6.
Haha I remember almost crying when I was 12 because I couldn’t get a single kill in ET. Crazy that no one makes a modern ET clone, such a unique gameplay, it would be an instant hit, just add some buzzwords „mission based tactical shooter with classes and progression“
Also, there were multiple tournament websites out there: ESL and another one I don't remember the name anymore, that hosted tournaments all time.
I remember lan tournaments in Italy with more than 60+ Counter Strike teams like Smau 2002, and you had to bring your own computer nonetheless.
It was really a golden age for gaming I swear.
People that didn't live that think that gaming is better now are severely mistaken.
Playing online videogames today is a solo experience, 20+ years ago it was the very opposite, even if you played alone you met people on the same hosted servers you liked, on forums, on IRC, in lan.
Lousiana Anti-Scripting Group - LAG was my family away from home while living in this distant country. The rules were extremely strict to allow for their kids to also play on the server which was run by a few, including a Nam vet, Phantom. Fun times.
I have close friends from a TF2 community server that's been dead for over a decade now, but I can't think of anyone I've met via random matchmaking since.
Game servers are the perfect digital third space, it starts off with random players but as you log in each night, you see more and more familiar faces pop up and before you know it you're all regulars popping in to chat while playing a few rounds, learning more about your new friends and praying to god that you've got the godlike Finnish sniper player on your team.
By comparison, modern matchmaking-lead multiplayer feels gentrified and - for lack of a better term - soulless. You're blindly shuffled between random players each game, and there's no way to properly build a connection with players or a community out of it. There's a vacuous and temporary nature to it all that just feels cold.
Edit: also the fact that things like skins & sprays - player controlled ways of expressing themselves - have been neatly packaged by gamedevs and sold back to players at a premium. It feels completely antithetical to the player-led nature of what such games used to be.
It's not a discord problem it's an online culture problem. People now are addicted to trying to find things to be upset about and put people on blast for - make an off coloured joke in the old days and you may suddenly find your new best friend, now it's being clipped and shared on twitter and some one is calling your boss to try and get you fired.
I loved that time too, as well as the time before it when we used to run text-based MMOs until Origin, Everquest, and Blizzard stole the technology and put a 3D UI on it :-)
I absolutely hated server browsers. Spending ages waiting for slots to free up on decent servers. Trying a new server only to find it had 100 shitty mods installed. Servers where the admins randomly kicked or banned people, or blatantly cheated
I did as well! @rimunroe I don't remember my handle, but you took me down a nice little path on memory lane.
The Warcraft mod was a little goofy, but as a younger kid who couldn't appreciate the hardcore competitive scene I liked the variety and silliness it brought.
I spent way too much time finding custom skins online to keep things interesting. Good times.
I was involved with the Quake/HL modding community in the late 90s and I fully agree! I hate matchmaking, but I get it too... but nothing compares to finding that dedicated server and joining regularly until you notice other regulars, and then you have friends... Shout out to #PVK and #Mastersword, great mods that had awesome dedicated server based communities.
Something that wasn't mentioned in the article is that Counter-Strike spawned the creation of the most iconic FPS map ever: de_dust2. If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.
I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.
Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.
But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.
I feel like halo was never really big outside the US, I would guess unreal tournament, quake, DoD, CoD, battlefield, all were quite popular in the whole west
Halo was defiantly big outside of the US. I was prime age for gaming when Halo came out and Halo was the most talked about game and everybody loved it.
The X-Box was less common as the first X-Box never really sold all that well. But Halo came out for the PC as well and many people played it.
There have been days where 40M people played Fortnite on a single day. I'm kinda out of the gaming world a bit, but I did not believe when my nephew mentioned it, but it checked out. Given the age range of people who still actively play it, I'm not sure if they've even heard of de_dust2.
My absolute favorite was always fy_pool_party_v2 I think it was called. Such a perfect map. Every position had a number of elite advantages but also drawbacks.
The most fun one I've used is that it is my home environment in VR. In 3D it is a weird feeling to walk around and see how all the old sight lines are. I still duck a bit walking past mid doors :)
I also liked de_dust more because a well executed T rush to site A was as fun as it got on random servers before voice chat. Was awesome when it all came together and everybody worked together.
I vividly remember the thrill of taking out the entire T rush to site B myself in about two seconds during a clan match (not that high level ;)). It was like dominoes falling down in a neat row. It was quite unexpected to rush to site B; the other four of my team were already at site A.
Yes. I miss how wildly creative shooters used to be. In just UT[2K4] you had the translocator, the shock rifle (with a hidden third firing mode), and movement like wall jumping.
I really don't like how modern games are played on just a handful of fixed maps where players go through the same memorized motions thousands of times. The way we used to play Quake back in the day was that we had hundreds of maps and played one after the other maybe for few rounds at most. We were coming back only to very few bizarre and fun ones. Game involved finding yourself out in your new environment. It engaged spatial intelligence.
Give me any team vs team games that are played on procedurally generated maps.
I have a (knowingly irrational) dislike for Counter Strike because it fragmented what was previously an essentially single 'Quake / Quake 2" community, making the free-for-all adrenaline frag fests that I most enjoyed less populated, specifically at LANs.
I got my fun from balls out running and firing rockets and rails in the chaos of free for all, and CS offered what was essentially the 'we're all campers' version, which wasn't fun at all (for me, at the time).
I didn't want to simulate anything, I want(ed) chaos, instant respawn, lightning reflexes, constant motion. Maybe I do have ADHD.
CS has stood the test of time though, so respect for that.
You sound like me. I disliked CS because of how slow and campy it was compared to Quake and we always had this banter in my friend group about Quake vs CS vs Unreal Tournament and which game requires more skill. I ended up playing for one of the best clans in Sweden and competed for a few years until Q3 eventually died.
I did try playing CS more serious for some time but I just couldn't stand it and I never had the patience. Got to respect that.
I still get a buzz watching the old Q2 / Q3 frag videos.
I was never that good, but have scored a handful of ridiculous flick rails over the time. I think Rocket Arena 3 was peak for me. I'm nearly 20 years out of practice now though. Feels like I'm getting closer to picking up some light hardcore PC gaming again though ;)
My niece is looking forward to having a crack at Portal 2 in the near future (yes, it's old, but it came up somehow or other recently, and she knows it from memes), so I'm aiming to enjoy that together. Gotta refresh myself through Portal 1 first.
Playing Q3:RA3 felt like being dropped into a world full of crackheads with rail guns and telepathy. I still don't know if they were cheating or insanely talented.
For us the combination of WoW and WC3, then later LoL, are what ruined the thriving LAN centre scene across Ireland. There were 12 or so actual GAMETHEWORLD centres, then other wee franchised ones. WoW especially just didn't lend itself to LAN gaming, absolutely sucked the life out of the centres.
I started with CS: Source and quickly got into 1.6 because of the more expansive funmaps and modding scene. It was like the Wild West (or literally as was the case with de_westwood) - Nipper's penchant for glitchy drivable vehicles, ridiculously huge maps with teleports galore and weird music, fy_iceworld, gun game... it was so wonderfully weird. The fact that the core of the game stayed the same for so many years without DLC meant that people got good at it on their own merit without worrying about dropping money on upgrades or grinding long hours to get drops or whatever.
Maybe I'm old but I feel as though there's still a place for shooters of this nature. Every time I hear about new seasons dropping for some ultra-popular game I lose interest; I've no desire to keep up with the evolution of a game coordinated by a billion-dollar company to extract money from my wallet after I already paid for it.
But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.
Modding and mapping were what made CS great in my opinion. Since CS:GO, Valve has been quietly killing that scene by making it harder and harder for people to find these game modes.
But to be honest, I think it's an artifact of our (or at least my) generation. I've played CS for thousands of hours, same with l4d and cod2/4, and I don't _need_ a battle pass, seasons, constant updates etc. Though when chatting with my ~14 year younger cousin about this some months ago, he said it'd be "boring to play a game that doesn't get updates". So.. different times :)
Mostly AA and indie game titles. The simulator scene is still going strong with dedicated servers (like squad, arma, farming simulator, the hunter etc etc).
Larger titles swapped over to more control in order to extract more money from the players, but also control the experience.
There is however some AAA titles every now and then which support hosting your own servers. But they're quite few these days
These days? Not many. I’m sure there are some but probably one of the most popular that I’m aware of is Minecraft. There are quite a few custom server implementations alongside the official Java one.
I don't think it's just "different times" as you put it. Those kids have had their brains ruined by companies' profit-maximization schemes. It makes me really angry (at these companies) and sad (for the kids) that they have been the victims of such a thing. Every generation before them could just enjoy things without needing endless novelty and updates, but they have apparently been robbed of that.
Quietly? They monopolized the modding community. There is a universe where gamers could sell their weapon skins, but now only Valve sells their own skins. They killed modders.
Actually that's a really good point on the skins aspect. But I think the community might be in a better shape if the dedicated servers were easier to find.
When CS:Go came out, one of the younger guys on my team got into it, and invited me to come play some rounds at a LAN cafe. A lot of the skills were rusty, but the muscle memory was still there from playing the original starting from beta 0.7. He was stunned, not realizing that I had many more years of practice playing what was essentially the same game.
I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.
I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.
Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
Likewise for Dota 2 players. Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price. A friend of mine I used to play with had a $500 item. Getting rid of them may fund your game purchases for a bit.
There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a value of your inventory. Just make sure your privacy settings for your inventory are set to "public": https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings (though I'd recommend changing it back to private after you use one of the tools, since scammers will try and target you if you have public high value items).
> Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price
"Back in my day" you brought your own skins, maps, and mods to your clan's Quake 2 server and they'd be automatically copied-into other players' q2base profile directories when they connected: free and fast. Making skins in a cracked copy of Photoshop 5.5 or PaintShopPro (don't forget to save to PCX!) was trivial and because nothing really mattered no-one could possibly get angry at anything.
...but now you're telling me that if I want to add custom skins to CounterStrike I have to pay other people hugely inflated sums for the privilege of something that was still free and open to all only yesteryear? And we're surprised at how toxic the "gamer" community has become over the past 15 years since tradable lootboxes, cosmetics, and microtransactions became the norm?
However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
I have two tips:
Sell hardware and then you can get real cash. For example, use the Steam Wallet balance to buy Steam Deck Docks which you ship directly from Steam to your customer on eBay.
> However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
but, you weren't playing the game as a job to make money, you were playing to have fun (hopefully?) so arguably the extra surprise money is a bonus.
for me, playing a game in order to make real world money would turn it into an awful grind and sap all the joy out of it
Coming from UT/CS and a bunch of other games where skins were simple mods I hate that skins cost so much real world money and so I refuse to spend a cent in protest.
Game with cool mechanics and a universe to play it in, that is worth $$$. Making your shirt green is not worth $... it is worth a colour-wheel implementation.
Good times. I think my first CS was 1.0 beta. I played thousands of hours of this game, even seriously considered going pro back in the day, haha. Well, i was actually on that route, not just considering it - i was actually doing it. Clan wars, tournaments, lan parties...yeah, it was great.
Though looking back, I think they killed the joy for me with version 1.6 where the guns started firing all over the place and precision became more of a random thing than anything else, unlike previous versions.
I never understood the newer versions, like Condition Zero, Source and others. They look nothing like the original CS and played differently as well.
My first experience with CS was in early grade school back when it was just a Half-Life mod along with Team Fortress Classic - both broadly available in internet cafes.
Connection speed an ping was absolutely terrible back then, so I didn't really get into it.
I grew up with CS1.6 and spent what must be thousands of hours on it before I turned 18. But I can't stand what Valve did to modern versions of CS. The reason? Gambling. So much fucking gambling everywhere. Other games have lootboxes, I hate them, but they are usually "contained" in the sense that you do not see them in every context surrounding the game. But because CS skins can be traded between players, there is now an entire third party ecosystem for skin trading and worse, skin gambling. Lootboxes inside lootboxes. And now it feels like every CS YouTuber, streamer and even teams at lower tiers is sponsored by a skin casino. I remember dropping into a stream of a professional player only to watch him throw $500 (God knows where the money comes from) away playing what is basically a CS skin roulette. WTF.
And there is also the typical sports gambling shit. HLTV the main news source of the pro CS scene is full of gambling ads. Higher tier tournaments often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds between matches. And as you would expect in a scene with rampant gambling there is match fixing. The serious media and the authorities will not look into it because esports is not serious stuff, but people know it’s there. Whenever you see a tier 2 team throw a most winnable match in the weirdest fashion you can see a stream of Twitch chat messages calling it rigged. People know but nothing will be done against it. Check out Richard Lewis if you want more information on that.
I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS. But all we got is Valorant and its kernel spyware (oops I mean anticheat). Guess I should just keep player CS1.6 until I die shrug
Hate it all you want, but it's the sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today. Without skins, Valve would have shut the door on the game (and quite possibly the company entirely).
Yeah... selling games other than CS. The reason CS is still under active development is because the market economy rakes in huge amounts of money. Some analysts have added up figure for the numbers of case keys sold, and those alone sell $1 billion / year. Plus they take cut of all of the other market transactions.
Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins. They have their own problems (usually around FOMO), but nowhere near the literal gambling that is CS.
> Valve would have shut the door on the game
In terms of not having any developers on it, sure, not impossible.
> (and quite possibly the company entirely)
Ahahahaha come on man, even without CS, Valve is one of the most profitable companies of all time.
Arms Deal came out in 2013 [0]. 1.6 came out in 2000, so that is 13 years (not considering CSS came out in 2004, and CS:GO was in 2012, without any monetization).
Fortnite is coming onto 8 years old now. The idea of it being around for 5 years longer is not particularly alien.
e: Actually, I should really be focusing on the time from Arms Deal to the present, which is 12 years. So, Fortnite has even less time to catch up to CS' current lifespan with gambling.
Uhm, wow. Most winnable matches often enough end when the drugs wear off for hundreds of reasons.
You are looking at it from the wrong angle. From what I have seen, it's rarely a whole team that fucks up while winning. Also: often enough: they don't seem to be aware of the pattern that just occurred in their brains (are not, as far as I learned from Paul E.). I believe these kids are put on drugs without consent.
I have no proof, of course.
I noticed it first in soccer back in '16, I think. Which surprised me because it was not boxing or wrestling or the UFC, where such things are the standard.
Why does the gambling side affect you? Just don't care what your gun or your body armor looks like, and you can play the game normally. As far as I understand it, at least the way it was the last time I played like 7 years ago, the loot boxes didn't give you special powers in the game, they were just skins
As someone with 10,000+ hours in CSGO/CS2, I think your argument is weak clearly is coming from someone who is a boomer.
CS is one of, if not, the least egregious "loot cases" systems in the gaming industry. Every case you open, gives you a reward, which can be sold. Each case you open has fixed odds and is not manipulated by the gaming companies to psychologically torment you. You get no benefit from using skins or stickers on your gun. It is purely cosmetic. Compared to other games which rely on pay2win mechanics, CSGO/CS2's systems are great.
I think skins are one of the best parts of CS. It blows my mind you can have skins worth thousands of dollars, trade them between friends like collectables, sell them for real life money and make your inventory look cool.
I agree the third party skin gambling sites aren't good, although the whole base concept, within Steam and a handful of trusted selling sites are perfectly fine.
Your gripe with the eSports side of this is also stupid. Have you watched / seen any sport on the planet? Gambling is apart of sports and sports culture, its one of the main revenue streams. Gambling helps grassroot sports and helps get kids into sports.
The whole "often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds" is rubbish. At most ESL, Blast, PGL events, the most that is even talked about odds is a brief mention of the odds, no breakdowns, no match betting options, etc. It's very, very tame. I likely have hours watching CS than I do playing too.
CS eSports is in a weird place because the funding comes from two main places in 2025, Saudi sportswashing and gambling. There used to be tons of VC, although that dried up when eSports didn't take off exactly how everyone expected it to.
CS was one of the more safe investments are the game has been around for effectively two decades and has always had a competitive scene, dating back to early 2000s. CS is one of the most enjoyable and easy to watch eSports so its pretty enticing for viewers (and advertisers) although the marketablility of CS is hard due to bombs, guns and terrorists.
eSports needs a pay per view option otherwise the funding is always going to come from sketchy places, but the average eSports fan does not care enough to pay because they are too cheap to pay for stuff, or too young to have the funding to do so. Unlike traditional sport.
You are seemingly fine with killing gambling, so might as well kill all tier 2 and 3 scenes, including local scenes. They are mostly funded by gambling and even so, people throw matches because they get like 1k a month for being a tier 2 pro. People need to live and throwing gets more than their wage.
Your final point is Twitch chat messages saying stupid shit about match-fixing, I am not sure why this is even relevant. Studying twitch chat is like studying The Onion, not sure why you would.
Richard Lewis has talked extensively about everything I've said above.
I've played years of KZ and HNS after years of playing competitive CS on local communities (old PGL in romania!). I got over 6k hours in steam CS1.6 + many more on "non-steam". That game shaped me. I even learned the basics of programming while modding a KZ plugin: https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=130417
Nowadays I code for a living, but for sure this is the game that started the spark for me.
It was a great time and I feel that I can always run this game and get back to that childhood feeling.
Minh “Gooseman” Le, one of CS’s creators, was a fan of AQ2. Counter-Strike (first released in June 1999 as a Half-Life mod) built on AQ2’s ideas but refined them with better hitboxes, buy menus, maps, and more tactical pacing.
AQ2 is often described as “the bridge between Quake and Counter-Strike”.
Action Quake had quite different gameplay mechanics that made it difficult to get into.
The movements were very fast and similar to Quake.
Most of the weapons had very specific ranges (sniper rifles were useless at close range, shotguns were useless at long range).
Each shot could cause bleeding, which had to be stopped with a tourniquet. Bleeding reduced your health bar and left a trail of blood behind you.
Headshots weren't really emphasised.
So as a beginner, you'd arrive on the map, take one or two shots from long range, then bleed to death or get finished off with a shotgun within the first 15 seconds.
Counter Strike was much more accessible.
TS was severely underrated. I think it was inspired by Action HL, which of course I can only imagine was inspired by Action Quake. There were so many good ones though, like Natural Selection, Sven Coop, Firearms. It was incredible the quality of mods that were available, all for free
I loved aq2 so much, just an incredible mod with so many gaming moments seared in my memories.
Leaping off the cliff on "cliff" straight through the hatch in the cable car breaking my legs but right next to my opponent and blasting him with the double barrelled shotgun as they turned round. Classic .
Recently I stumbled upon an online port of CS 1.6, called play-cs.com.
It's just great - exactly the same game and works very smooth in a browser.
I played it briefly for a few months and was happy I was able to get into the top rankings overall.
Just sharing it here if anyone wants to try it out.
Dude i love play-cs, I feel like there is a slight lag in the browser compared to the native app that I was playing on Windows back in the day... maybe i gotta switch over to Chrome from FF.
I’m glad Valve never sold out with Counter Strike. The game still has that raw brutal aesthetic that works so well with the gameplay. It’s a big part of the reason the game feels the way it does.
Other games have lots of wacky skins and stuff but the Counter Strike games never had that and hopefully never will. Some of the unofficial servers are pretty wacky which is fine as they are unofficial.
The same Valve that one day decided to put ads in spawn on de_dust2? :) They pretty much refused to fix anything related to Counter-Strike until they realized they could use it to sell the equivalent of hats.
I'd argue that the only reason Steam survived when it came out was because Valve forced people to use to play Counter-Strike. They've done better in the past 15 years though, I'll give them that!
Fun story: when they added skin lootboxes to CSGO they intended to make the dull, serious looking skins rare ones and the flashy wacky ones common. It quickly turned out that the players like flashy skins more and now the wackiness and silliness of a skin is positively correlated with its rarity and price.
Instead they are a transparent system that enables literal children to get addicted to gambling and valve takes a cut of every payout and they are well aware of this.
CS is not a billion dollar game. CS is a fairly unprofitable game with a giant tumor of a marketplace attached, a significant point of which is being a faux currency that escapes most currency controls
"Fairly unprofitable [if you ignore all the parts that generate revenue.]"
I will admit that gambling $0.16 in skins on pro matches when I was 15 was a lot of fun. Maybe I'm lucky to have gotten away (relatively) unscathed, but I do have a little nostalgia for those days.
The CS2 Skin market-cap is above $5 Billion itself. The eSport scene is massive and one of the largest in the industry. The game is almost always the most played game on Steam.
Not sure where you are getting your idea that CS isn't a billion dollar game.
Honestly, I’ll take what CS2 is giving any day of the week over the Bevis and Butthead/Nikki Minaj/Terminator anime laser skins that call of duty has been putting out lately. At least they stick to the standardized models.
It is worse than the typical lootbox scheme because the entire CS ecosystem is now saturated with marketing of third party skin trading sites and casinos. And at the end of the day it is still gambling. Just because you can resell your skins (and let Valve take a cut in the process) does not make it ethical.
Being able to resell them makes it infinitely better in my mind than not being able to having money wasted permanently see other most other games with gambling mechanics like gacha...
I was looking forward towards the Classic Offensive mod but then Valve DMCA'd it just a few days before the release. Awful move considering that not only they've okayed it before but also completely ignored the developers when they were trying to contact them. 8 years of development for nothing.
Valve gets away with murder for some reason even though the "gAMeR" community loves to get the pitchforks out for several minor controversies per month.
Valve explicitly says you cannot use that version of the Source SDK to make games on Steam, yet Classic Offensive did just that and subsequently got blocked for it.
Play by the rules and you can public just about anything you want mod-wise for Source.
There is no company that comes close to allowing the sheer content and modability than Valve.
They literally give you a full SDK, near full editor tools for both Source 1 and Source 2. Ability to publish games using some of these tools and for free, host the Steam Workshop and its likely PB's of modded content.
I don't see Activision given rights and modability to CoD Games, they DMCA instantly.
I don't see EA/Dice letting people use the Frostbite engine.
Ahh, I started playing CS back in 2004. I go back to it every year for a few weeks / months, but the latest iteration (CS2) leaves some things to be desired from the 'community server' perspective.
No good surf ("TDM") style games anymore, seems like that game mode has mainly died in favour of the timed surf game-mode.
So now I stick to the 'vanilla' game much more, but without a group of friends that plays regularly, it's a bit of a frustrating experience at times.
Yeah I dabbled with the “competitive” play in 1.6 back in the day when it was finding matches on irc but most of my fun came from the communities I played with consistently. Maybe you can find these in some form but it’s not what most people are talking about these days if they say they “play counter strike”. I don’t really like the seriousness of ranked play so I never got back into it.
Yeah, I started playing it on vacation in a German lan cafe.
Came back to Canada and asked EB games for a copy but they didn’t know what counter strike was, and I didn’t understand that it was a mod for half life
I have fond memories of CS, but I have more memories of the cheats making it miserable to play. Perhaps it was a good thing, as it drove me to find more mods and alternative games. Q3:RA and Q3:UT became my happy place, as well as DoD and others. I played newer games but they never felt as fun.
Even today I sometimes yearn for those good old days of CS 1.6. CS was never the same again after that. Until 2022 I played it. Then on Apple Silicon macs somehow I never got it work, besides I doubt anyone would be playing 1.6 anymore. I did try in browser couple of times but the links I got were riddled with popups and I am sure malware. Thanks for all the shots, CS.
Among og, de_aztec was my favourite map, but somehow ended up playing de_inferno and villa piranesi the most.
But the real fun was the go bonkers world of custom and modded maps.
I had a mild addiction to this game about 7 or so years ago. Purely casual but lots of hours. I found it sort of a stress relief.
On the upside it gave me all sorts of free items as in-game 'drops'. I ignored them all at the time as didn't care about buying keys or cosmetics. Last year I saw that they'll worth a bunch of money now (!) and had about $1500 if sold on the steam marketplace. I got a Steam Deck with money from some of them, and it's basically my C:S 401k for steam games. What a weird world.
God I miss playing CS all night long in a LAN house with my friends, and then exiting at 06:00 and going all of us to a type of Brazilian bakery (padaria) to eat freshly-baked bread with butter and a cup of coffee…
> At the end of June, Le was asked to join a handful of professional gamers onstage for a round of Counter-Strike at a game conference in Austin, Texas.
Conference isn't really the right term here: it's more equivalent to a sports tournament (it was the BLAST Austin Major, with a $1.2 million prize pool). Also, round is confusing given the dual usage, he played for an entire showmatch.
So many great memories growing up playing this game decades ago, but you can still pick it up and have a blast. Counterstrike is a great example of a simplistic concept executed flawlessly, in a way that a lot of modern games choose not to match. It's the video game equivalent of soccer or beer pong, you can pick it up in 10 minutes and play forever.
Beta 5.2 was when I had the best time with Counter-Strike. de_dust with a Colt was fun. Never forget the AWP snipers lurking near the big front door in cs_assault. There were some weird maps like cs_siege — I think it had some sort of a moving vehicle there somewhere in a tunnel.
I used to be an admin in CAL (Cyber Athlete League), wrote my own mIRC scripts for support desk tickets and had a janky PHP interface for managing scores. Good times!
I started playing CS:GO back in 2013 and it was a lot of fun. I played nothing except de_dust_2 and sometimes mirage. It was a big leap from BF and CoD.
I used to do homework while waiting for the next round to start. Homework, round, homework, round. The game was perfect for a few minutes of excitement than enough time to solve the next math problem.
I don’t know but it was less intimidating than trying to focus JUST on the homework. It’s always made me wonder if there are kinds of multitasking that actually work to overcome the when to work feels intimidating.
It’s survived a generation and I really enjoy playing it with my kids. Even though they can run circles around me with their reaction times, I still can win on strats sometimes. Good times.
Timely, I was just wondering yesterday (as I was launching the BF6 beta) if there was a current FPS with a mod scene like we had for Half Life and BF 1942.
The conclusion I came to is that this is due to the availability of game engines and game distribution, which have made modding pointless. Why expend countless hours building a game mode for someone else's game, in a world where that has copyright implications, when you can just build your own game?
Modding is a lot more approachable than making a whole new game. The only issue is most games aren't moddable. Some people still try to mod games that don't support modding and that's where you're likely to run into copyright issues.
Even if you get by the legal implications, you still have to deal with building a sandcastle on a surface that wasn't designed for it. Yes, that has always been the case to varying degrees, but I think it can make a big difference, too. Factorio has a good modding scene, and it's in part because it was wholly and intentionally embraced by the developers in their engine design.
I feel like a modern CS1.6 clone that is open-source, community run servers (only), no match-making, modable by design, could actually work. Even in 2025. Just needs some internet meme magic and a few dedicated devs
The problem with mods is that there will be a million different mods with a million different rules A million different levels and behaviors, and you won't get good traction on any any specific style of gameplay, and people will not keep coming back.
Used to play CS1.6 for 30-40 hours a week in a DFW-based server called A Better Place to Play. Every time as_oilrig showed up in the rotation, people would scramble to join me on the CTs. We had so many great strategies, we could win almost every round. (And mind you this was a 32-person pub.) Greatest of times, and only possible because the server had a dedicated community and our clan was meticulous.
Also there were some killer WC3 mod servers out there. My goodness the fun that was had....
The AS and CS game modes were a bit janky and I believe included in the very first versions (or early on). I started playing way before 1.0 and I think they just fell out of favor because of that. A solid VIP game though was a blast !
1.5, where pulling the knife made you run faster. I really missed that when they removed it. Pulling the knife in CQC when you emptied your clip was a valid strategy before they changed it to keep the run speed the same in laster versions.
Heh glad someone mentioned 1.5, that was my golden version. Pack friends into my parents garage with a hub and play local. No famas/shield and no STEAMing pile of shit (as we called it then). WOL server days iirc too. Scouts and Knives was my level of choice in those days. "Wanna knife this round?" <3
Counter-strike is a industry nightmare. Endless fun, with almost no need for upgrades, hat-sales etc. A game like that eats int a whole industries subsections revenue for years and years.
I can't really agree. If you mean specifically the tac FPS industry, similar games have since broken through and do plenty well, such as Valorant. If you mean the games industry in general, CS isn't really relevant to its current state in the grand scheme.
>It is the most played game on Steam at basically every hour of the day
It is currently at 185th place. You are probably thinking of Counter Strike 2 which is a different game full of microtransactions and gambling which is what the grandparent comment was saying Counter Strike didn't have. Gacha is the strategy in the gaming industry that makes the most money.
I've played the WCG finals in Counterstrike 1.3 and what they've done to CS with the skin economy is tragic. The game got big because it was lightweight and accurate - a guy with better aim and low latency could take out 5-6 people on an opposing team with good strategy.
Today the hitbox and damage taken is all dependent on things that do not include aim i.e. if you're one game away from losing, you will likely hit jumping pistol headshots across a map and if you're 4 v 1 trying to close a round, the first person to engage will likely die and you will win with 2 or 3 left standing.
You're basically playing an RPG and paying Steam to make it look pretty. Good for Valve stock, bad for gaming
Still remember playing CS1.5/1.6 with my friends in early 2000s. Haven't gamed like that since then. Good times. Now everything is set up for money-grabbing. There's sadly nothing quite as good these days for my kids to play.
In late 2000 or early 2001 I got into CS with some guys in Austin. Our leader knew some other clan’s leader, and we scrimmaged against them every week for a while.
I thought I was decent, but, damn…this other clan destroyed us every time.
I start following the CS leagues, CAL, RiTD, STA, CPL, and look at that…there’s this clan we scrimmaged every week: CK3
So that was my intro to competitive gaming, unknowingly playing one of the best clans in the world.
I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore. You either have to rely on forming small parties with people you've stumbled upon one by one, or you have to seek out people from some much larger area like Reddit or Discord. It takes a lot of the serendipity out of the experience. Without a small community it becomes much harder to ensure you're not playing with people who make the game less fun by whatever metric you care about.
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
Like all AAA media in the age of supposedly social media, games became hostile to self-organizing communities that sustain themselves, because they want a push model for consumption where the producers decide what you see, when, and whom with. It commodifies media into generic content, emphasizes short lived novelty, naturally structures around subscription (and increasingly fragmented and numerous ones), and as a bonus keeps all of your activity observable so you also do the labor of saleable data creation for them.
Nearly all my worthwhile experiences in multiplayer games were related to permanent server communities (CS clan servers, 2fort2furious, SWG emulator servers, ridiculous minecraft servers that were effectively collaborative volumetric databases for external design tools).
I've lurked on HN for years, but I had to create an account just to respond to your post. I operated these servers – perhaps my handle is still familiar. I remember you for sure! I'm touched that you and so many others still have fond memories of that time.
It was such a gratifying experience to build out that server network and the accompanying integrations that attracted so many and built such a great community. I miss the days in college when I had time to work on stuff like that just for the love of it. I hope you are doing well!
This kind of interaction is what makes me miss the "old internet" the most...
My intuition is it still exists.
This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.
But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.
There's a name for this phenomenon, it's called the Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Honestly, this is partially why I actually love a lot of what's on Hackernews. This site still seems to have a big proportion of old school geeks within it's population, and it feels like one of the only places left for good discussion that i've found on tech.
Not really, the internet is fundamentally different now due to the amount of "attention" and resulting pressure it got.
You'll love this. I teared up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMDb1CWD6Y
Yeah I loved it so much. Thanks for sharing.
People just made stuff for the fun of it
That still happens. You just have to look a bit more for it.
We’re all still here. Build communities. Find, join, and support existing ones.
The fact that people still remember those servers all these years later? That's legacy-level stuff
I legit miss early 2000s gaming.
1) People interacted, they truly did. Dramas, friendship, everything. Where? Quakenet, Forums. Every clan had their channel, some easily reached 1000+ people.
2) People genuinely played together in teams: CS, Day of Defeat, you name it. You had your clan and spammed #5on5 on quakenet.
3) Those clans actually met in lan! At Smau Italian Lan Party 2002 there were more than 60 Counter Strike teams from *Italy alone*. And it was a bring your own computer event[1].
I know it's part nostalgia but I legit think it is borderline impossible to have anywhere near the same level of interactions with people today. Reddit is just not a good substitute for legacy threaded forums. Discussions die fast, they don't even have the material time to develop meaningfully.
[1] https://www.aspidetr.com/images/immagini/blu/varie/smau02_03...
In the late 1990s, living in South Korea during the fallout of the IMF financial crisis, my friends and I discovered PC bangs. These gaming havens offered titles like Rainbow Six, MechWarrior 2, and the legendary StarCraft. As a teenager, those moments were unforgettable—sitting in a buzzing PC bang, immersed in epic battles, sparked a lifelong passion for computer networks that I still pursue today.
In the 2000s, I helped establish CyberCafe, a PC bang in Oakland, California, where a diverse crowd came together to play StarCraft and Counter-Strike. It was a vibrant community hub, filled with shared excitement.
I wish PC bangs would make a comeback. Despite our powerful home setups and fast internet, gaming solo in your room can’t match the electric atmosphere of playing alongside others in a match, surrounded by camaraderie and competition.
PC Bangs in Korea are so awesome. I wish we had some where I live. The atmosphere is hard to describe. They are easy to miss. If you happen to get to Korea (gz as this whole country is just tantalizing) don't skip on the PC Bang experience!
What are "PC bangs"? Are they like internet cafes, but meant for gaming?
Weren't consoles with split screen supposed to fill that niche (too), right in your living room?
Consoles don’t even have split screen any more. Sucks.
Different kind of experience
There are lots of computer clubs throughout the world. Especially in CIS region. In Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, where I live, there are 182 computer clubs, with average 20-30 pcs. From low cost to luxury options, culture of going to computer clubs with your friends is still strong here
The thing with sites like reddit, HN and the like is that they don't promote "identity" like IRC, forums and others. Like, I'm replying to you, we are being "social" , but mostly we will interact in this thread and call it a day. There's no push to form community or some longer term interaction.
In the late 90s early 2000s I was very into a game called Tactics Arena Online, and we had several great communities.
Tbh better to stay anonymous as those were the days of not having to worried about being “cancelled” or “doxxed”
Yeah, exactly this. No idea exactly what happened but people at some point seem to have stopped accepting other people having different views or perspectives. With basically every community there was invariably some sort of oddballs.
I remember a BBS with this guy called 'Nihilist' who was a total insufferable asshole that'd make glory days Linus look like the world's most gentle man. But as is the nature with community, you learned more about him over time - and he was a guy in his 20s dying of some sort of a muscular deterioration issue, and him acting that way was just how he coped. Everybody loved him, hated him, mourned when he passed, and the community was somehow genuinely a worse place without him.
For another example I'm sure some here are familiar with, Flipcode had this one dude, extremely knowledgeable, who'd basically snipe into conversations, give amazing advice in a rather curt borderline hostile fashion (was it all caps? I think it was, but that was a long time ago), and then disappear. But he was such an important part of that already large community that I'm certain somebody else can fill in the blanks I'm leaving here.
But now when anybody does something as mild as saying the quite part out loud on dumb things, of which there are many in modern times (probably owing to this exact issue), it's like 'zomg burn the witch'! Basically a prerequisite of community requires accepting people for who they are. In modern times today that statement is basically a euphemism for sexual/LGB stuff, but obviously that's a negligibly small part of the diversity and richness of personalities, even if those personalities, or their opinions, may not always be the most pleasant or politically correct.
I’ve been seeking out classic phpbb-style forums more and more for community. I just stopped browsing Reddit a few weeks ago after realizing there was nothing I’d truly miss: no characters that I’d come to know, and no reason to maintain a relationship with anyone there in particular. Regarding “identity,” I actually feel that Reddit (and of course Facebook) rely on it too much: maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).
> maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).
One of the few things Google+ actually got right (admittedly after a good deal of pressure from the community) was the ability to set up simple one-way pseudonyms. It meant you could talk about business or mental health without it being forever chained to your real name.
Whoever can recreate this community feeling is going to be rich. Why did people spend so much time in specific phpbb forums? Maybe the problem is that there are too many communities out there now and so people just give up because you're in all of them and you're part of none of them at the same time?
Discord servers are the closest. People do build up friendships, relationships, enemyships, and a public persona / reputation within a Discord server.
My limited experience with discord was either no activity at all, or so much activity it’s hard to follow what’s going on.
I suppose I never found the right place
Discord is centralized, heavily censored, and surveilled, so it can’t serve this purpose for many communities (such as most of the ones in which I participate).
Indeed, I think the size of the internet these days is partly the problem. The community in GameSpy and Zone were super small from my memory. We had crappy websites that tracked singles and team ladders. Then Steam came along.
I’m sure an anthropologist can clarify, but once a community reaches a certain size, it seems that emergent properties take over.
Communities don't scale. This is the reason why nobody has done and why you couldn't get rich forming communities. Communities are handcrafted to accommodate the unique personalities of the people involved. Communities involve activities where a handful of people can socialize and bond. A service with a million users can never become a community because our social/grouping instincts don't work on that scale. A community should always be a few dozens of core people, with maybe a larger number of non-core people participating occasionally.
If their goal is becoming rich, then this is doomed from the very start. How would it be monetized? Ads? Great, then you have no incentive to actually build a healthy community. Signup fee? Not going to work, way too much of a barrier.
They did, and it’s called Reddit. Then it got enshittified.
I browsed around Gemini Space (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)) for some weeks, cold emailed an interesting guy and now we chat daily.
I think the communities still exist if you seek them out, Agora Road is a fun one.
All the like/share/upvote stuff makes the internet much less authentic. Imagine going to a party where everyone offers a thumbs up/thumbs down whenever you finish a sentence. Do you anticipate making any close friends at this party?
Ironically, I've replied to several people using physical thumbs up/down recently. This can be caused by several variations on voice not being viable at the moment:
* sore throat
* eating
* having another conversation
* context demands silence (often requires the question to be nonverbal somehow, but not e.g. if the context is "sleeping baby right next to me")
* noisy room (often asymmetric)
* target is deaf
That was an innocent and wonderful time for many of us, but there was a dark side to it, especially as this haven for nerds went mainstream. I have a good friend who was basically groomed/seduced in ann online game and raped by a 35 year old man when she was 13.
It just sucks on so many levels that we can’t have nice things because many among us are beasts.
Literally nothing got better for your far fetched use case, nothing.
If anything it got worse.
that's absolutely horrible, but it's not like it doesn't happen today; maybe even worse today with all the different social media
That is some crazy mental gymnastics.
Helping look after QuakeNet in the early 2000s was pretty wild. Glad you have positive memories!
LAN parties were welcoming on so many levels. Never played DnD? Come join. One time I recall was an isle of misogynist folk who haven't showered in days playing WoW.
The smell... no comment and in one case I recall at one LAN where a delivery woman was scared to walk down the isles to deliver so she asked me nicely if I could. No problem, pizza is here boys.
But within reason, they kept to themselves and were there to game. You kind of respected that and they respected you as you were there too to do the same.
Outside of all that they were highly intellectual and I recall talking for hours about other highly intellectual topics: psychics, space mathematics, game characters. I didn't approve of their extremist views and you could tell something went wrong somewhere with their psyche but there was a mutual respect. Unfortunately I was too young (20's) to grasp the true vibe.
I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend and felt completely cold shouldered. No one was really welcoming and it was very alpha gatekeepery.
Granted the audience were clique, everyone seemed to knew each other and the mean age would be 40-something but the attitude from some left me astonished compared to attitudes of some of the worse LAN gamers.
If I can hang out with folk who are of such and yet unable to hang with those who are not, I couldn't figure what I was doing wrong. It left me sour for my first major goth event, a sub-culture I've enjoyed since 17; 36 now kind of makes me want to hand in the towel.
Maybe I was craving wanting the LAN I once I enjoyed in my teens, but it was worse than that. It felt horrible being there by myself unable to connect with others. I left a day early. Yet all there for the same reason, music.
I do believe gaming has a power to bring others together but online games now just feel half arsed and are more released for money rather than fun.
Two different sects, yet the one you'd expect to be the worse turned to be more warm. It's weird to think that, but shrug. I really don't know what to think and has left me really perplexed.
> I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend
> the mean age would be 40-something
At least in Germany the "black" scene has a serious "recruitment" problem. It's basically the same set of people for decades now with very little additions to the pool.
It strange to me that I am amongst the youngest attendeds at concerts and "disco" events at 40.
seconding this.. went to Mera Luna a weekish ago (going there yearly) and in my early 40s I felt like such a child compared to many other festival goers even though it was like my 16th or so time.
"At least in Germany the "black" scene has a serious "recruitment" problem."
I mean, if that is the general attitude
"I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend and felt completely cold shouldered. No one was really welcoming and it was very alpha gatekeepery."
Then where should the new blood are coming from?
I have so much nostalgia for that time period.
Counter-strike was my introduction to how the Internet and TCP/IP worked. I built my first PC to play it. I learned linux to run servers for it. It inspired me and my friends to learn C to try and make our own mod. I made a website for my clan, self hosted it, and registered a domain for it.
The community was incredible, partly because of the server browser, as you point out. There was also a massive IRC community around it that was way more cohesive than what exists today. So CS was also my on ramp to IRC and the technology communities there.
I don't play a lot of games any more. Every now and then I'll try something. I have the GPU anyway and everything works great on Linux now. I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.
Counter-Strike was my introduction to actual programming! I learned to write AMX mods to help make administering our servers (banning cheaters and whatnot) mid-match possible without having to interrupt playing to open the console.
> I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.
Thanks for the tip!
Absolutely. I talk all the time about how I miss server browsers. Perhaps similar to the self hosting movement, we will see a similar movement in gaming to reclaim multiplayer games. The fact that a game can "die" and become unsupported now if it fails to find an audience at launch is crazy - just let people run their own servers if they want!
We also don't need content roadmaps for these games if you give the community modding and map tools.
There's a difference between being toxic within a community. The community can self correct, it can ban people.
And if you don't like a community, you can leave at any time.
Compared to being toxic anonymously. Unless you get banned by an algorithm, your free to just suck.
However, I was in one CS clan where a girl gave out her real number to a random guy. Within minutes she was getting spam calls and other not great stuff.
I miss my CS clan though. There was some tension and arguments, but that's inherent to any structure with people.
Funny enough one of my mates couldn't believe I wasn't white over voice chat. It was like being in this magic world where race didn't matter.
Good times.
Edit: If someone wants to start an open source realistic-ish multiplayer FPS I'm so down.
Invite only community servers. If you suck and cheat we will figure it out and ban you. None of this kernel level anti cheat junk.
Interested to have a chat regarding an open-source FPS. I know discord is a bad look, but just to get connected @joe3178
Realistically, we would need to raise like 10 million so we could work full time on it and buy quality art. Outside of that it's just a pipe dream.
If someone who actually knows how to run a business, wants to start this up I would gladly work at half of my corporate rate.
If I was a billionaire I literally would do nothing but fund to open source video game projects. And then maybe pull a Red Hat and monetize it somehow.
The other grossly understated downside of lacking server browsers is how the player nowadays relies on the system to match him with the "best match" they can get. This opens the door to all sorts of skinner box manipulations, such as the game shoving you into teams where the probability of you winning is low, only to put you into a match where the probability of winning is high.
The ability to introduce randomization of reward around a layer of "skill issue" and plausible deniability for the matchmaker. Elo/bronze hell exists because even the worst players can just swing up and down their rank, whereas if you didn't had any other choice but play with whoever is in your local server (or LAN part, but I digress) then the only solution for you is to observe and adjust.
I'm from Greece and, we used to have lots of LAN arenas before fast internet connections became accessible. I'd get my face pushed by skilled people, and while I'd feel bad about it, the fact that I was playing with my friends and enjoyed myself made it all tolerable. Eventually I gave up feeling bad having negative k/d ratios, and could finally spectate and learn from others. The result was me becoming good enough to join my local CS clan. We never became best in the country, but I have really fond memories both from chilling as friends and highlights from matches.
In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.
Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics.
Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure. Which of course, internally run servers tend to be built with a set image that gets cloned each time more are needed, making each one indistinguishable and fungible. The only problem becomes assigning the players accross servers depending on which ones have available capacity, which is where matchmaking comes in.
> In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.
I don't think anyone is confused about why this happened. It's obvious why a game company which is trying to make money in an extremely competitive field would prefer it. Having a good reason doesn't mean that there isn't reason to mourn the loss of what came before. Some things have improved! We should celebrate that gaming is more accessible now. It's been a long time since I've been kicked from a competitive shooter mid-match because a server crashed.
> Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
I don't run a business. I'd rather have a game with small communities of players which peters out over a few years than a game with millions of players for a decade+. Toward the end of a game's life player run servers allow the game to last potentially forever. The problem of games alienating newcomers is still a problem with matchmaking systems. Your community's average skill goes up over time once the rate of new players joining slows down.
> Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Games have handled this before with "official" servers or ones run by tournament hosts. I actually had fewer trouble with hacks on heavily moderated small servers because so many people knew each other and would catch onto cheaters quickly. Services like VAC help block repeat cheaters from joining in the future. I like having access to mods and to sometimes join a server and find something completely unexpected. I don't care much about competitive play, though I do like a fair number of e-sports-y games. I never had trouble finding vanilla CS servers back in the day.
>"Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics."
This just isn't true. The average TF2 player had 3K hours long before any official matchmaking was introduced, and UGC (TF2) and FACEIT (CSGO) were their own renditions of community-hosted competitive servers - and were done with great success.
The number to measure wouldnt be average playtime but monthly active users
Also, I find it really ironic that you can come to this conclusion and then talk about pandering to the "competitive" crowd in the same response. Pandering to the try hards has done more damage to the fun/community aspects of gaming than hackers ever could.
> they absolutely increase player retention
This, this, this, this and this.
I remember people being GLUED to their favorite servers due to community reasons. In Italy we used to have hundreds, of which at least few dozen popular open community-driven servers.
Actually, server hosting CS instances was a thing, so each provider had their own to show they had the most performing, so you played for free, and to get the best thing people in the same country gathered around the same set of servers.
I to this day remember countless of player nicknames from these times, oddly, I don't remember some of my school teammates from the time.
I think both should be a thing.
SBMM on official servers for those who want to just jump into a game and are there for the game loop, alongside whatever other features the official servers might have enabled, like progression or item drops.
Alongside those, the ability to self-host servers for those who crave more of a community aspect and even things like custom modes or mods.
Since my hand eye coordination sucks, I’d hate playing without SBMM and being in games where I get stomped every time, especially when it comes to competitive shooters - playing CS or Valorant without ranks would be suffering.
On the other hand, discovering that even games like Enlisted have community servers running a zombie mod, or the endless modes of the Arma series is immensely cool. Or just the ability to have a more chill custom server if the main game’s population is toxic.
Sometimes you get wildcards like SPT-AKI where the modders give you more control over the game than the devs ever would. Either way, having any sort of control is better than giving it all up to a company that sees you as a bag of money to be squeezed.
> In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.
I think that's the thing that everyone here is ultimately mourning.
I don't really buy it. First of all you can easily have both. Second, even if you think community servers are an issue, the concepts of server rooms with the server being on the standard company platform is totally feasible.
As for server uptime, if anything I think communities manage to provide excellent service and servers. Because the people running the infrastructure actually play with that infrastructure and know if something is wrong pretty quickly.
As for player retention, I played Dota in the Warcraft 3 days and it was the most played game on the planet while having horrible matchmaking on a terrible server system. And players continue playing.
And communities and particular matchup and games increase retention. I used to always play particular types of matches and rule-sets on servers I knew had a configuration and mod-set that I liked. One of the reason this doesn't exist anymore is part of the reason playing is less fun.
And again, you can have ranked match making primary servers as well if you feel like it.
> Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure.
You can still have hosted rooms on dedicated infrastructure, or have both.
I'm sure that's how companies these days justify their choices, but I don't see those problems as being inevitable on self-hosted infrastructure
Similar story, running modded COD4 dedicated servers largely got me into programming.
It's depressing the modern COD lobbies - chucked in with skill matched randoms on a small range of gamemodes, comms kept to a minimum so no one gets offended.
Then don't get me started how 50% of playtime is spent loading / in lobbies so eye balls on store can be maximised - I'll pass.
Overoptimization truly squeezes the health and fun and soul out of everything.
> I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers.
I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later. It was so easy to find a server to play on, playing the levels/mods you wanted to play.
Before that, I spent a lot of time (and money from my dad's credit card) on DWANGO. For those not familiar with DWANGO, you dialed in to their servers and then it acted like you were on a LAN. You could play games like Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, etc against other people. There was a main chat room to talk about what games you wanted to play.
It was also a much nicer place to play, partly because you had to pay _per minute_ in each game. The price wasn't anything crazy, if I recall, but it definitely kept people focused on the game.
Also met some good people and ended up working on a gaming site with one (MeccaWorld.com, on the off chance someone remembers that - I ran the Quake section) and started a company with them a decade or so later.
Does not ranked matchmaking make for more competitive matches, a bit like if you play ranked in lichess it matches with someone of your own level, and you have a real chance of improving your own level over a period of time.
There is seems to be lot of negativity against ranked ladders in the gaming community, but isn't that what would be best system to play with people of your own skill level.
Even disregarding the other comment, not necessarily.
For anything but 1-vs-1, individual skill gets smeared into the non-enemy (ally for team games, or everyone for a free-for-all) average.
Remember that cooperation isn't an individual skill (unless the meta is complete, I guess); it relies on knowing your specific partners.
And besides ... it's perfectly normal for a task-oriented group to have people at a variety of skill levels. If anything, homogeneity is what's strange. This does change what interesting interactions happen, but by no means prevents them.
>For anything but 1-vs-1, individual skill gets smeared into the non-enemy (ally for team games, or everyone for a free-for-all) average.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, CS is a 5v5 game yes, but at low rank it's a lot more depedent on individual skills. I love community game servers but a lot of time those are for fooling around and not much the competitive skills.
Not everybody wants to play competitively, especially when it's a band of close friends who play almost exclusively with each other regularly.
I have so many memories as a kid have so much fun on these servers. You guys had the rogue with almost complete invisibility. I played dust2 WC3 mod so much, hiding in weird corners with a knife waiting for someone to walk around the corner hoping it wasn’t whatever class had 300hp.
I owe much of my career in tech to counter strike. I learned to manage servers hosting clan websites, security and programming making the sites and “borrowing” designs from Clan Templates or whatever the company was that had the awesome animated flash headers. I remember learning about IDORs and SQL injection, before I even knew what it was called.
I learned 3d modeling with MilkShape for custom skins and models. Made dozens of surf maps and a few KZ. The AMX Mod community was so helpful learning to program. I think it was Small to write mods.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. That was a pivotal moment in my life. I learned how to control a computer and found my passion.
Toxicity is what killed the game for me.
I was really involved in how serious cs was being played in 2002 or 2003, but valve did not seize the opportunity. 5v5 is the best format.
Even today, the matchmaking is horrendous and toxic teammates ruin the fun.
When you solo queue, individual performance is ignored, so you must carry your whole team if you want to gain rank.
The game is great but generates too much frustration for me.
> toxic teammates ruin the fun
Relevant myg0t: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/171762 (2004, NSFW)
This Flash was my introduction to Refused though so that's cool
Vintage.
I also miss this. I used to be an admin of a popular Spanish community for Garry's Mod, TTT specifically. The whole community existed because we had our own server(s), and then added a BBS forum. It's impossible to do that anymore, afaik.
Played an insane amount of WC3 mod with you guys. Thank you for all the memories.
Im also chiming in to say i remember these servers.
Frankly, i never liked the mod very much and only advanced a few levels. But i distinctly remember trying to kill enemies with some sort of lighting bolt move.
> i distinctly remember trying to kill enemies with some sort of lighting bolt move.
I believe you were playing as an orc then
I thought I'd never played it until I read your comment, which brought back a memory. I guess I must have played it at least once.
Wait really?! Do you remember your handle?
Can't recall if I played on your servers, but I know I played an unreasonable amount of CS 1.6, including on a bunch of WC3 servers when I wasn't playing on ESEA.
If you happen to remember someone going by `nJs` - hi!
Thought I'd throw this out there, but server browsers are still around in CS2. There are a large number of servers populated around the clock with everything from surf maps, bhop, to even old custom maps from 1.6.
It's still very much alive.
I've been playing a lot of Half-Life 1 deathmatch on the few servers left for the last year and a half, and have been having a lot of fun!
I remember that mod. Quite fun. Along with surf, rats, ice world and all the other weird stuff from that era. Probably played on T3Houston!
You can still play this way. I still mostly play WolfET because modern FPS games are too stressful and too much work.
Haha I remember almost crying when I was 12 because I couldn’t get a single kill in ET. Crazy that no one makes a modern ET clone, such a unique gameplay, it would be an instant hit, just add some buzzwords „mission based tactical shooter with classes and progression“
Totally agree on the point about toxicity. Back then, when you kept running into the same folks, there was some accountability
People would practice 5v5 and find an opponent team on irc around 2002 2004
#5on5 or #pcw on irc.quakenet.org
Also, there were multiple tournament websites out there: ESL and another one I don't remember the name anymore, that hosted tournaments all time.
I remember lan tournaments in Italy with more than 60+ Counter Strike teams like Smau 2002, and you had to bring your own computer nonetheless.
It was really a golden age for gaming I swear.
People that didn't live that think that gaming is better now are severely mistaken.
Playing online videogames today is a solo experience, 20+ years ago it was the very opposite, even if you played alone you met people on the same hosted servers you liked, on forums, on IRC, in lan.
Today it's really sad.
The CPL was big and CAL was amazing for non-pro players.
#FindScrim #FindRinger was where my free time was spent in the early 2000's!
Lousiana Anti-Scripting Group - LAG was my family away from home while living in this distant country. The rules were extremely strict to allow for their kids to also play on the server which was run by a few, including a Nam vet, Phantom. Fun times.
CS2 still has a server browser...
At least the matchmaking option is so much better at making real competitive matches with players though now too. I like that both options exist.
I miss this old internet and gaming experience so much
I made so many friends by joining a lobby and just playing a game for a few nights in a row or whatever
Now I don't know how to really connect with people online anymore or build any kind of community
Discord servers don't seem like the right way, they are too busy and chaotic for me
I miss making friends online and gaming with them
I have close friends from a TF2 community server that's been dead for over a decade now, but I can't think of anyone I've met via random matchmaking since.
Game servers are the perfect digital third space, it starts off with random players but as you log in each night, you see more and more familiar faces pop up and before you know it you're all regulars popping in to chat while playing a few rounds, learning more about your new friends and praying to god that you've got the godlike Finnish sniper player on your team.
By comparison, modern matchmaking-lead multiplayer feels gentrified and - for lack of a better term - soulless. You're blindly shuffled between random players each game, and there's no way to properly build a connection with players or a community out of it. There's a vacuous and temporary nature to it all that just feels cold.
Edit: also the fact that things like skins & sprays - player controlled ways of expressing themselves - have been neatly packaged by gamedevs and sold back to players at a premium. It feels completely antithetical to the player-led nature of what such games used to be.
What baffles me is that Discord is basically mIRC with some extra features but the culture just isn't the same.
People have been trained to be assholes online.
On our neighborhood forum, someone could say their lawn mower blade broke, and some jerkoff will start yammering and democrats and bail reform.
It's not a discord problem it's an online culture problem. People now are addicted to trying to find things to be upset about and put people on blast for - make an off coloured joke in the old days and you may suddenly find your new best friend, now it's being clipped and shared on twitter and some one is calling your boss to try and get you fired.
It's not the tools it's the people
Oh snap!!! I think I played on T3 for a LOOONG time in the early 2000s. I once even beat Machine once.
I can't remember my handle...I've had so many over the years.
same, so good, so much wasted time also
I loved that time too, as well as the time before it when we used to run text-based MMOs until Origin, Everquest, and Blizzard stole the technology and put a 3D UI on it :-)
I use to help run Quick Gaming and was a mod on Allied Modders. Great times, taught me a lot.
As a counter point
I absolutely hated server browsers. Spending ages waiting for slots to free up on decent servers. Trying a new server only to find it had 100 shitty mods installed. Servers where the admins randomly kicked or banned people, or blatantly cheated
Even just joining mid game was annoying
Give me matchmaking any day
The problem is with monetization
Whenever/wherever a crowd of a certain size assembles consistently, you’ll soon have a giant corporation frothing at the mouth to monetize it
Why let these people organize communities for themselves? How on earth would we capture metrics and sell them shit?
This is why everything is awesome until corporations show up - social media is the perfect example
I don’t mean to come across as some anti corporate lunatic, it’s just the reality of the situation
I used to play on T3Houston every once in a while! Great times!
I did as well! @rimunroe I don't remember my handle, but you took me down a nice little path on memory lane.
The Warcraft mod was a little goofy, but as a younger kid who couldn't appreciate the hardcore competitive scene I liked the variety and silliness it brought.
I spent way too much time finding custom skins online to keep things interesting. Good times.
By any chance do you remember your handle?
I was involved with the Quake/HL modding community in the late 90s and I fully agree! I hate matchmaking, but I get it too... but nothing compares to finding that dedicated server and joining regularly until you notice other regulars, and then you have friends... Shout out to #PVK and #Mastersword, great mods that had awesome dedicated server based communities.
Same but for xTcR and Tw^2; better days.
Something that wasn't mentioned in the article is that Counter-Strike spawned the creation of the most iconic FPS map ever: de_dust2. If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk
Thanks for sharing this! Very interesting!
I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.
I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.
Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.
But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.
I feel like halo was never really big outside the US, I would guess unreal tournament, quake, DoD, CoD, battlefield, all were quite popular in the whole west
Halo was defiantly big outside of the US. I was prime age for gaming when Halo came out and Halo was the most talked about game and everybody loved it.
The X-Box was less common as the first X-Box never really sold all that well. But Halo came out for the PC as well and many people played it.
The only other map that started in a non-CS game that I think has even a slightly close level of fame would be COD Nuketown.
There have been days where 40M people played Fortnite on a single day. I'm kinda out of the gaming world a bit, but I did not believe when my nephew mentioned it, but it checked out. Given the age range of people who still actively play it, I'm not sure if they've even heard of de_dust2.
Yeah 2fort damn, servers been running 2fort only games 24/7 for decades...
FY_iceworld maybe, if we count number of rounds played?
q3dm17?
q3dm6
fy_pool_day
My absolute favorite was always fy_pool_party_v2 I think it was called. Such a perfect map. Every position had a number of elite advantages but also drawbacks.
Poolday was definitely a de
was de but named fy and no one planted anything :D
[dead]
Whenever I jump into CS I only play dust2. It’s such a perfect map.
I also have a soft spot for Aztec because of the rain. I would join empty servers just to hang out on Aztec for the aesthetic.
Dave Johnston also has a write up on his blog, for those interested: https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2/
The most fun one I've used is that it is my home environment in VR. In 3D it is a weird feeling to walk around and see how all the old sight lines are. I still duck a bit walking past mid doors :)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21021...
Rust and NukeTown are iconic maps from CoD. At least for younger folks like me who grew up on Xbox.
Always enjoyed de_dust more than de_dust2. But I am clearly in the minority on that one.
I also liked de_dust more because a well executed T rush to site A was as fun as it got on random servers before voice chat. Was awesome when it all came together and everybody worked together.
I vividly remember the thrill of taking out the entire T rush to site B myself in about two seconds during a clan match (not that high level ;)). It was like dominoes falling down in a neat row. It was quite unexpected to rush to site B; the other four of my team were already at site A.
It was way too CT favorable, dust2 offered more balance.
Only if terrorists pussyfooted around instead of rushing a.
Majority of the team rushing A, one bunny hopping like mad with an AWP to the tunnel..
I can't recount how many times I've bunny hopped out of spawning on de_dust2.
I'm pretty certain that there are modern FPS's that have gotten inspiration from that legendary map.
I'd love to see actual data on most-played maps across all FPS games
Facility must be up there.
I'd like to throw Facing Worlds in the ring...
Yes. I miss how wildly creative shooters used to be. In just UT[2K4] you had the translocator, the shock rifle (with a hidden third firing mode), and movement like wall jumping.
Well, not just FPS games. It got ported to Assetto Corsa[1], which is a driving simulator.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yeh5vFG1GK0
After De_Dust2, the Jungle Warfare map in the first Ghost Recon game that has a special place in my heart.
Blood Gulch from Halo has to be up there, they remade it in a few of the other games due to its popularity.
I really don't like how modern games are played on just a handful of fixed maps where players go through the same memorized motions thousands of times. The way we used to play Quake back in the day was that we had hundreds of maps and played one after the other maybe for few rounds at most. We were coming back only to very few bizarre and fun ones. Game involved finding yourself out in your new environment. It engaged spatial intelligence.
Give me any team vs team games that are played on procedurally generated maps.
I still don't get how dust2 became more popular than the original dust.
Sniper battles from spawn, and no nade hallway of doom?
> If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.
I gotta imagine that sucks to play in most of them. Maybe it occasionally 'works' in another game?
Gift Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/arts/counter-strike-half-...
I have a (knowingly irrational) dislike for Counter Strike because it fragmented what was previously an essentially single 'Quake / Quake 2" community, making the free-for-all adrenaline frag fests that I most enjoyed less populated, specifically at LANs.
I got my fun from balls out running and firing rockets and rails in the chaos of free for all, and CS offered what was essentially the 'we're all campers' version, which wasn't fun at all (for me, at the time).
I didn't want to simulate anything, I want(ed) chaos, instant respawn, lightning reflexes, constant motion. Maybe I do have ADHD.
CS has stood the test of time though, so respect for that.
You sound like me. I disliked CS because of how slow and campy it was compared to Quake and we always had this banter in my friend group about Quake vs CS vs Unreal Tournament and which game requires more skill. I ended up playing for one of the best clans in Sweden and competed for a few years until Q3 eventually died.
I did try playing CS more serious for some time but I just couldn't stand it and I never had the patience. Got to respect that.
Quake requires more skill btw.
> Quake requires more skill btw.
+10
I still get a buzz watching the old Q2 / Q3 frag videos.
I was never that good, but have scored a handful of ridiculous flick rails over the time. I think Rocket Arena 3 was peak for me. I'm nearly 20 years out of practice now though. Feels like I'm getting closer to picking up some light hardcore PC gaming again though ;)
My niece is looking forward to having a crack at Portal 2 in the near future (yes, it's old, but it came up somehow or other recently, and she knows it from memes), so I'm aiming to enjoy that together. Gotta refresh myself through Portal 1 first.
Playing Q3:RA3 felt like being dropped into a world full of crackheads with rail guns and telepathy. I still don't know if they were cheating or insanely talented.
Yep, brings a nostalgic tear to my eye.
For us the combination of WoW and WC3, then later LoL, are what ruined the thriving LAN centre scene across Ireland. There were 12 or so actual GAMETHEWORLD centres, then other wee franchised ones. WoW especially just didn't lend itself to LAN gaming, absolutely sucked the life out of the centres.
I started with CS: Source and quickly got into 1.6 because of the more expansive funmaps and modding scene. It was like the Wild West (or literally as was the case with de_westwood) - Nipper's penchant for glitchy drivable vehicles, ridiculously huge maps with teleports galore and weird music, fy_iceworld, gun game... it was so wonderfully weird. The fact that the core of the game stayed the same for so many years without DLC meant that people got good at it on their own merit without worrying about dropping money on upgrades or grinding long hours to get drops or whatever.
Maybe I'm old but I feel as though there's still a place for shooters of this nature. Every time I hear about new seasons dropping for some ultra-popular game I lose interest; I've no desire to keep up with the evolution of a game coordinated by a billion-dollar company to extract money from my wallet after I already paid for it.
You'll probably like this short series on fy_iceworld if you haven't seen it already: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-legacy-of-fy_iceworld-c...
But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.
I think there is still a huge market for this stuff.
An entire shooter based solely upon the principles of fy_iceworld & gun game would wipe the floor with most other AAA titles on offer right now.
I'm pretty sure Roblox replicates this feeling
Modding and mapping were what made CS great in my opinion. Since CS:GO, Valve has been quietly killing that scene by making it harder and harder for people to find these game modes.
But to be honest, I think it's an artifact of our (or at least my) generation. I've played CS for thousands of hours, same with l4d and cod2/4, and I don't _need_ a battle pass, seasons, constant updates etc. Though when chatting with my ~14 year younger cousin about this some months ago, he said it'd be "boring to play a game that doesn't get updates". So.. different times :)
The disappearance of the ability to run your own Dedicated Server is a real tragedy.
What games even let you run your own dedicated servers?
Mostly AA and indie game titles. The simulator scene is still going strong with dedicated servers (like squad, arma, farming simulator, the hunter etc etc).
Larger titles swapped over to more control in order to extract more money from the players, but also control the experience.
There is however some AAA titles every now and then which support hosting your own servers. But they're quite few these days
Many PC-only games do, more likely to do so the older they are. The newest I'm familiar with is Valheim.
I'm actually looking for Android (Kindle) game recommendations that are cross platform and allow self-hosted servers.
Battlebit, Valheim, Core Keeper, Minecraft, Enshrouded, Palworld, Ark
These days? Not many. I’m sure there are some but probably one of the most popular that I’m aware of is Minecraft. There are quite a few custom server implementations alongside the official Java one.
Factorio and Minecraft.
Rust!
Given the thread, I'm assuming their mostly referring to CS 1.6, but games like Minecraft are another example.
I don't think it's just "different times" as you put it. Those kids have had their brains ruined by companies' profit-maximization schemes. It makes me really angry (at these companies) and sad (for the kids) that they have been the victims of such a thing. Every generation before them could just enjoy things without needing endless novelty and updates, but they have apparently been robbed of that.
Quietly? They monopolized the modding community. There is a universe where gamers could sell their weapon skins, but now only Valve sells their own skins. They killed modders.
Actually that's a really good point on the skins aspect. But I think the community might be in a better shape if the dedicated servers were easier to find.
I miss surf_greatriver and its variants :(
When CS:Go came out, one of the younger guys on my team got into it, and invited me to come play some rounds at a LAN cafe. A lot of the skills were rusty, but the muscle memory was still there from playing the original starting from beta 0.7. He was stunned, not realizing that I had many more years of practice playing what was essentially the same game.
I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.
I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.
Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
Likewise for Dota 2 players. Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price. A friend of mine I used to play with had a $500 item. Getting rid of them may fund your game purchases for a bit.
There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a value of your inventory. Just make sure your privacy settings for your inventory are set to "public": https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings (though I'd recommend changing it back to private after you use one of the tools, since scammers will try and target you if you have public high value items).
> Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price
"Back in my day" you brought your own skins, maps, and mods to your clan's Quake 2 server and they'd be automatically copied-into other players' q2base profile directories when they connected: free and fast. Making skins in a cracked copy of Photoshop 5.5 or PaintShopPro (don't forget to save to PCX!) was trivial and because nothing really mattered no-one could possibly get angry at anything.
...but now you're telling me that if I want to add custom skins to CounterStrike I have to pay other people hugely inflated sums for the privilege of something that was still free and open to all only yesteryear? And we're surprised at how toxic the "gamer" community has become over the past 15 years since tradable lootboxes, cosmetics, and microtransactions became the norm?
That's already over ten years ago... Wow CS:GO is still the new CS for me, that never catched on and everybody played 1.6
It's a new game now, CS2. CS:GO isn't accessible anymore. But the loot carried on to the new game.
You can still access CS:GO, by selecting the "csgo_legacy" beta on CS2
Are there still servers running games? Not that it's really necessary since CS2 is basically CSGO with better smoke effects/lighting.
There are community servers, official matchmaking was killed off.
Source was the game that never really grabbed the 1.6 playerbase, moreso than 1.6.
I did this too! A few hundred dollars in my steam wallet now. Wonder how that compares to the money I would've made/lost by opening all of them.
Made $350 selling all my crates when csgo 2 came out
Same for TF2. I got like ~300€
Did this a few years ago and made close to $350.
However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
I have two tips:
Sell hardware and then you can get real cash. For example, use the Steam Wallet balance to buy Steam Deck Docks which you ship directly from Steam to your customer on eBay.
Secondly, use Steam Economy Enhancer.
> However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
but, you weren't playing the game as a job to make money, you were playing to have fun (hopefully?) so arguably the extra surprise money is a bonus.
for me, playing a game in order to make real world money would turn it into an awful grind and sap all the joy out of it
Coming from UT/CS and a bunch of other games where skins were simple mods I hate that skins cost so much real world money and so I refuse to spend a cent in protest.
Game with cool mechanics and a universe to play it in, that is worth $$$. Making your shirt green is not worth $... it is worth a colour-wheel implementation.
I have some old crates, including the oroginal 'Weapons crate'. But looking at the steam store, it's only worth about $100 usd.
Is there a more valuable one?
If your inventory is set to public you can calculate its value with a third party tool like backpack.tf.
Where would I check to see if I have any of these crates?
Go to your Steam inventory and look for Crates.
We're in a bubble.
Oh, absolutely!
Good times. I think my first CS was 1.0 beta. I played thousands of hours of this game, even seriously considered going pro back in the day, haha. Well, i was actually on that route, not just considering it - i was actually doing it. Clan wars, tournaments, lan parties...yeah, it was great.
Though looking back, I think they killed the joy for me with version 1.6 where the guns started firing all over the place and precision became more of a random thing than anything else, unlike previous versions.
I never understood the newer versions, like Condition Zero, Source and others. They look nothing like the original CS and played differently as well.
Anyway, good times :)
My first experience with CS was in early grade school back when it was just a Half-Life mod along with Team Fortress Classic - both broadly available in internet cafes.
Connection speed an ping was absolutely terrible back then, so I didn't really get into it.
I grew up with CS1.6 and spent what must be thousands of hours on it before I turned 18. But I can't stand what Valve did to modern versions of CS. The reason? Gambling. So much fucking gambling everywhere. Other games have lootboxes, I hate them, but they are usually "contained" in the sense that you do not see them in every context surrounding the game. But because CS skins can be traded between players, there is now an entire third party ecosystem for skin trading and worse, skin gambling. Lootboxes inside lootboxes. And now it feels like every CS YouTuber, streamer and even teams at lower tiers is sponsored by a skin casino. I remember dropping into a stream of a professional player only to watch him throw $500 (God knows where the money comes from) away playing what is basically a CS skin roulette. WTF.
And there is also the typical sports gambling shit. HLTV the main news source of the pro CS scene is full of gambling ads. Higher tier tournaments often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds between matches. And as you would expect in a scene with rampant gambling there is match fixing. The serious media and the authorities will not look into it because esports is not serious stuff, but people know it’s there. Whenever you see a tier 2 team throw a most winnable match in the weirdest fashion you can see a stream of Twitch chat messages calling it rigged. People know but nothing will be done against it. Check out Richard Lewis if you want more information on that.
https://richardlewis.substack.com/p/prologue-no-one-really-c...
I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS. But all we got is Valorant and its kernel spyware (oops I mean anticheat). Guess I should just keep player CS1.6 until I die shrug
Hate it all you want, but it's the sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today. Without skins, Valve would have shut the door on the game (and quite possibly the company entirely).
Skins is literally a money printing machine.
You don't think they make more money with Steam?
Yeah... selling games other than CS. The reason CS is still under active development is because the market economy rakes in huge amounts of money. Some analysts have added up figure for the numbers of case keys sold, and those alone sell $1 billion / year. Plus they take cut of all of the other market transactions.
> sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today
Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins. They have their own problems (usually around FOMO), but nowhere near the literal gambling that is CS.
> Valve would have shut the door on the game
In terms of not having any developers on it, sure, not impossible.
> (and quite possibly the company entirely)
Ahahahaha come on man, even without CS, Valve is one of the most profitable companies of all time.
> Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins.
Most games that are that old, don't survive.
Arms Deal came out in 2013 [0]. 1.6 came out in 2000, so that is 13 years (not considering CSS came out in 2004, and CS:GO was in 2012, without any monetization).
Fortnite is coming onto 8 years old now. The idea of it being around for 5 years longer is not particularly alien.
[0]: https://blog.counter-strike.net/2013/08/7425/
e: Actually, I should really be focusing on the time from Arms Deal to the present, which is 12 years. So, Fortnite has even less time to catch up to CS' current lifespan with gambling.
That's, excuse my French, fucking ridiculous. Steam is a money printing machine that affords Valve the capital to run its CS servers 100 over.
Skins are also a money machine but it's just false to claim without it Valve would close its doors.
> I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS.
I mean, that is still CS: you want one without gambling (which is reasonable!)
#priming
Uhm, wow. Most winnable matches often enough end when the drugs wear off for hundreds of reasons.
You are looking at it from the wrong angle. From what I have seen, it's rarely a whole team that fucks up while winning. Also: often enough: they don't seem to be aware of the pattern that just occurred in their brains (are not, as far as I learned from Paul E.). I believe these kids are put on drugs without consent.
I have no proof, of course.
I noticed it first in soccer back in '16, I think. Which surprised me because it was not boxing or wrestling or the UFC, where such things are the standard.
What drugs would that be? Amphetamine?
Why does the gambling side affect you? Just don't care what your gun or your body armor looks like, and you can play the game normally. As far as I understand it, at least the way it was the last time I played like 7 years ago, the loot boxes didn't give you special powers in the game, they were just skins
As someone with 10,000+ hours in CSGO/CS2, I think your argument is weak clearly is coming from someone who is a boomer.
CS is one of, if not, the least egregious "loot cases" systems in the gaming industry. Every case you open, gives you a reward, which can be sold. Each case you open has fixed odds and is not manipulated by the gaming companies to psychologically torment you. You get no benefit from using skins or stickers on your gun. It is purely cosmetic. Compared to other games which rely on pay2win mechanics, CSGO/CS2's systems are great.
I think skins are one of the best parts of CS. It blows my mind you can have skins worth thousands of dollars, trade them between friends like collectables, sell them for real life money and make your inventory look cool.
I agree the third party skin gambling sites aren't good, although the whole base concept, within Steam and a handful of trusted selling sites are perfectly fine.
Your gripe with the eSports side of this is also stupid. Have you watched / seen any sport on the planet? Gambling is apart of sports and sports culture, its one of the main revenue streams. Gambling helps grassroot sports and helps get kids into sports.
The whole "often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds" is rubbish. At most ESL, Blast, PGL events, the most that is even talked about odds is a brief mention of the odds, no breakdowns, no match betting options, etc. It's very, very tame. I likely have hours watching CS than I do playing too.
CS eSports is in a weird place because the funding comes from two main places in 2025, Saudi sportswashing and gambling. There used to be tons of VC, although that dried up when eSports didn't take off exactly how everyone expected it to. CS was one of the more safe investments are the game has been around for effectively two decades and has always had a competitive scene, dating back to early 2000s. CS is one of the most enjoyable and easy to watch eSports so its pretty enticing for viewers (and advertisers) although the marketablility of CS is hard due to bombs, guns and terrorists.
eSports needs a pay per view option otherwise the funding is always going to come from sketchy places, but the average eSports fan does not care enough to pay because they are too cheap to pay for stuff, or too young to have the funding to do so. Unlike traditional sport.
You are seemingly fine with killing gambling, so might as well kill all tier 2 and 3 scenes, including local scenes. They are mostly funded by gambling and even so, people throw matches because they get like 1k a month for being a tier 2 pro. People need to live and throwing gets more than their wage.
Your final point is Twitch chat messages saying stupid shit about match-fixing, I am not sure why this is even relevant. Studying twitch chat is like studying The Onion, not sure why you would.
Richard Lewis has talked extensively about everything I've said above.
I've played years of KZ and HNS after years of playing competitive CS on local communities (old PGL in romania!). I got over 6k hours in steam CS1.6 + many more on "non-steam". That game shaped me. I even learned the basics of programming while modding a KZ plugin: https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=130417
Nowadays I code for a living, but for sure this is the game that started the spark for me.
It was a great time and I feel that I can always run this game and get back to that childhood feeling.
I Started with actionquake (aq2). check it out.
Minh “Gooseman” Le, one of CS’s creators, was a fan of AQ2. Counter-Strike (first released in June 1999 as a Half-Life mod) built on AQ2’s ideas but refined them with better hitboxes, buy menus, maps, and more tactical pacing.
AQ2 is often described as “the bridge between Quake and Counter-Strike”.
Action Quake had quite different gameplay mechanics that made it difficult to get into. The movements were very fast and similar to Quake. Most of the weapons had very specific ranges (sniper rifles were useless at close range, shotguns were useless at long range). Each shot could cause bleeding, which had to be stopped with a tourniquet. Bleeding reduced your health bar and left a trail of blood behind you. Headshots weren't really emphasised. So as a beginner, you'd arrive on the map, take one or two shots from long range, then bleed to death or get finished off with a shotgun within the first 15 seconds. Counter Strike was much more accessible.
So many good mods back then - "the specialists" I remember being particularly fun as well
TS was severely underrated. I think it was inspired by Action HL, which of course I can only imagine was inspired by Action Quake. There were so many good ones though, like Natural Selection, Sven Coop, Firearms. It was incredible the quality of mods that were available, all for free
The AQ2 community perceived CS as way too slow though. No wonder when you are used to strafe jumping through team jungle and urban :-)
If you haven't seen it, TastySpleen Studios is working on a spiritual successor to aq2 called Midnight Guns.
AQ2 was such a fun mod. It's been a while since I played, but if I recall you could some real John-Woo style moves as if you are in an action movie.
The article says that Le created it though:
I loved aq2 so much, just an incredible mod with so many gaming moments seared in my memories.
Leaping off the cliff on "cliff" straight through the hatch in the cable car breaking my legs but right next to my opponent and blasting him with the double barrelled shotgun as they turned round. Classic .
Recently I stumbled upon an online port of CS 1.6, called play-cs.com.
It's just great - exactly the same game and works very smooth in a browser. I played it briefly for a few months and was happy I was able to get into the top rankings overall.
Just sharing it here if anyone wants to try it out.
Dude i love play-cs, I feel like there is a slight lag in the browser compared to the native app that I was playing on Windows back in the day... maybe i gotta switch over to Chrome from FF.
I’m glad Valve never sold out with Counter Strike. The game still has that raw brutal aesthetic that works so well with the gameplay. It’s a big part of the reason the game feels the way it does.
Other games have lots of wacky skins and stuff but the Counter Strike games never had that and hopefully never will. Some of the unofficial servers are pretty wacky which is fine as they are unofficial.
The same Valve that one day decided to put ads in spawn on de_dust2? :) They pretty much refused to fix anything related to Counter-Strike until they realized they could use it to sell the equivalent of hats.
I'd argue that the only reason Steam survived when it came out was because Valve forced people to use to play Counter-Strike. They've done better in the past 15 years though, I'll give them that!
I refused to install steam until I had to for my owned copy of CS Source.
Newer versions of counterstrike have skins/loot boxes
Yes but they aren’t wacky or silly
Fun story: when they added skin lootboxes to CSGO they intended to make the dull, serious looking skins rare ones and the flashy wacky ones common. It quickly turned out that the players like flashy skins more and now the wackiness and silliness of a skin is positively correlated with its rarity and price.
Instead they are a transparent system that enables literal children to get addicted to gambling and valve takes a cut of every payout and they are well aware of this.
CS is not a billion dollar game. CS is a fairly unprofitable game with a giant tumor of a marketplace attached, a significant point of which is being a faux currency that escapes most currency controls
"Fairly unprofitable [if you ignore all the parts that generate revenue.]"
I will admit that gambling $0.16 in skins on pro matches when I was 15 was a lot of fun. Maybe I'm lucky to have gotten away (relatively) unscathed, but I do have a little nostalgia for those days.
most people can try cocaine without getting addicted but that doesn't make it safe or something we should shove in the faces of children
CS is a billion dollar game.
The CS2 Skin market-cap is above $5 Billion itself. The eSport scene is massive and one of the largest in the industry. The game is almost always the most played game on Steam.
Not sure where you are getting your idea that CS isn't a billion dollar game.
umm... have you seen them lately?
Honestly, I’ll take what CS2 is giving any day of the week over the Bevis and Butthead/Nikki Minaj/Terminator anime laser skins that call of duty has been putting out lately. At least they stick to the standardized models.
It's not pay-to-win and the skins are de facto NFTs (with resale value). It's a loot crate system done right IMO
>loot crate system done right
Would advise looking into why those skins are so valueable. spoiler: money laundering and hooking kids on gambling
It is worse than the typical lootbox scheme because the entire CS ecosystem is now saturated with marketing of third party skin trading sites and casinos. And at the end of the day it is still gambling. Just because you can resell your skins (and let Valve take a cut in the process) does not make it ethical.
Being able to resell them makes it infinitely better in my mind than not being able to having money wasted permanently see other most other games with gambling mechanics like gacha...
[flagged]
I was looking forward towards the Classic Offensive mod but then Valve DMCA'd it just a few days before the release. Awful move considering that not only they've okayed it before but also completely ignored the developers when they were trying to contact them. 8 years of development for nothing.
Valve gets away with murder for some reason even though the "gAMeR" community loves to get the pitchforks out for several minor controversies per month.
Gotta be a sunk cost thing right?
No.
Valve explicitly says you cannot use that version of the Source SDK to make games on Steam, yet Classic Offensive did just that and subsequently got blocked for it.
Play by the rules and you can public just about anything you want mod-wise for Source.
There is no company that comes close to allowing the sheer content and modability than Valve.
They literally give you a full SDK, near full editor tools for both Source 1 and Source 2. Ability to publish games using some of these tools and for free, host the Steam Workshop and its likely PB's of modded content.
I don't see Activision given rights and modability to CoD Games, they DMCA instantly.
I don't see EA/Dice letting people use the Frostbite engine.
Ahh, I started playing CS back in 2004. I go back to it every year for a few weeks / months, but the latest iteration (CS2) leaves some things to be desired from the 'community server' perspective.
No good surf ("TDM") style games anymore, seems like that game mode has mainly died in favour of the timed surf game-mode.
So now I stick to the 'vanilla' game much more, but without a group of friends that plays regularly, it's a bit of a frustrating experience at times.
Yeah I dabbled with the “competitive” play in 1.6 back in the day when it was finding matches on irc but most of my fun came from the communities I played with consistently. Maybe you can find these in some form but it’s not what most people are talking about these days if they say they “play counter strike”. I don’t really like the seriousness of ranked play so I never got back into it.
Yeah, I started playing it on vacation in a German lan cafe.
Came back to Canada and asked EB games for a copy but they didn’t know what counter strike was, and I didn’t understand that it was a mod for half life
I can't quit, it's the only game I love but my hands are getting old.
https://archive.is/nzEEG
I have fond memories of CS, but I have more memories of the cheats making it miserable to play. Perhaps it was a good thing, as it drove me to find more mods and alternative games. Q3:RA and Q3:UT became my happy place, as well as DoD and others. I played newer games but they never felt as fun.
> After several other versions, Valve released Counter-Strike 2 in 2023 without Le’s direct handiwork.
This is closest the article gets to mentioning css and csgo. Both of those games were like 90% of my teens
Lots of history glossed over. Like the maps and plugins/addons. The mappers were legends in their own right
Even today I sometimes yearn for those good old days of CS 1.6. CS was never the same again after that. Until 2022 I played it. Then on Apple Silicon macs somehow I never got it work, besides I doubt anyone would be playing 1.6 anymore. I did try in browser couple of times but the links I got were riddled with popups and I am sure malware. Thanks for all the shots, CS.
Among og, de_aztec was my favourite map, but somehow ended up playing de_inferno and villa piranesi the most.
But the real fun was the go bonkers world of custom and modded maps.
[dead]
I had a mild addiction to this game about 7 or so years ago. Purely casual but lots of hours. I found it sort of a stress relief.
On the upside it gave me all sorts of free items as in-game 'drops'. I ignored them all at the time as didn't care about buying keys or cosmetics. Last year I saw that they'll worth a bunch of money now (!) and had about $1500 if sold on the steam marketplace. I got a Steam Deck with money from some of them, and it's basically my C:S 401k for steam games. What a weird world.
God I miss playing CS all night long in a LAN house with my friends, and then exiting at 06:00 and going all of us to a type of Brazilian bakery (padaria) to eat freshly-baked bread with butter and a cup of coffee…
Wild to think one of the most influential shooters of all time started as a dorm room mod. And love that Valve didn't crush the mod but embraced it
It seems like many Valve classics began as mods. Team Fortress and Dota also saw the light first as mods.
> At the end of June, Le was asked to join a handful of professional gamers onstage for a round of Counter-Strike at a game conference in Austin, Texas.
Conference isn't really the right term here: it's more equivalent to a sports tournament (it was the BLAST Austin Major, with a $1.2 million prize pool). Also, round is confusing given the dual usage, he played for an entire showmatch.
It's just a platform to allow children to gamble at this point
So many great memories growing up playing this game decades ago, but you can still pick it up and have a blast. Counterstrike is a great example of a simplistic concept executed flawlessly, in a way that a lot of modern games choose not to match. It's the video game equivalent of soccer or beer pong, you can pick it up in 10 minutes and play forever.
Beta 5.2 was when I had the best time with Counter-Strike. de_dust with a Colt was fun. Never forget the AWP snipers lurking near the big front door in cs_assault. There were some weird maps like cs_siege — I think it had some sort of a moving vehicle there somewhere in a tunnel.
I used to be an admin in CAL (Cyber Athlete League), wrote my own mIRC scripts for support desk tickets and had a janky PHP interface for managing scores. Good times!
I loved the CAL forums! There was an abrupt void when it was all taken down
I started playing CS:GO back in 2013 and it was a lot of fun. I played nothing except de_dust_2 and sometimes mirage. It was a big leap from BF and CoD.
I used to do homework while waiting for the next round to start. Homework, round, homework, round. The game was perfect for a few minutes of excitement than enough time to solve the next math problem.
I don’t know but it was less intimidating than trying to focus JUST on the homework. It’s always made me wonder if there are kinds of multitasking that actually work to overcome the when to work feels intimidating.
It’s survived a generation and I really enjoy playing it with my kids. Even though they can run circles around me with their reaction times, I still can win on strats sometimes. Good times.
Timely, I was just wondering yesterday (as I was launching the BF6 beta) if there was a current FPS with a mod scene like we had for Half Life and BF 1942.
I can't seem to find anything.
The conclusion I came to is that this is due to the availability of game engines and game distribution, which have made modding pointless. Why expend countless hours building a game mode for someone else's game, in a world where that has copyright implications, when you can just build your own game?
The indie scene blew up, modding is less popular.
Modding is a lot more approachable than making a whole new game. The only issue is most games aren't moddable. Some people still try to mod games that don't support modding and that's where you're likely to run into copyright issues.
Even if you get by the legal implications, you still have to deal with building a sandcastle on a surface that wasn't designed for it. Yes, that has always been the case to varying degrees, but I think it can make a big difference, too. Factorio has a good modding scene, and it's in part because it was wholly and intentionally embraced by the developers in their engine design.
A very real impact was that modders got hired for their work. So there are less around from that generation that made literally free games for fun.
Modding is hugely poplar in RPGs like Skyrim and Baldurs Gate.
Cyberpunk 2077 does seem to have a large audience making mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/games/cyberpunk2077/mods
edit: actually, I got it backwards, just browse nexus mods :)
Squad, Arma (and especially Arma reforger), Dayz, Battlebit, Heretic + Hexen and thr list goes on.
Arma usually gets the more complex and janky stuff (in a fun way). While the others are more modified experiences.
Like Squad, we're they've re-created star wars battlefront
The gaming isn't quite like CS, more 'tactical' oriented, but the modding scene is good - Ground Branch
Arma games, currently arma reforger which they released as a test before arma 4. Also dayz.
Stay up late playing
Scoutzknivez low gravity
A youth so well spent
I feel like a modern CS1.6 clone that is open-source, community run servers (only), no match-making, modable by design, could actually work. Even in 2025. Just needs some internet meme magic and a few dedicated devs
There is not only one but actually two separate CS 1.6 recreation projects floating around. CS: Legacy and Classic Offensive
Check out "CS2D" - it's exactly what you're describing and has been running successfully for years with an active community and regular updates.
The problem with mods is that there will be a million different mods with a million different rules A million different levels and behaviors, and you won't get good traction on any any specific style of gameplay, and people will not keep coming back.
1.5 was peak CS in my opinion. No shield bullshit and massive amounts of customization and maps and servers.
as_oilrig ftw
Used to play CS1.6 for 30-40 hours a week in a DFW-based server called A Better Place to Play. Every time as_oilrig showed up in the rotation, people would scramble to join me on the CTs. We had so many great strategies, we could win almost every round. (And mind you this was a 32-person pub.) Greatest of times, and only possible because the server had a dedicated community and our clan was meticulous.
Also there were some killer WC3 mod servers out there. My goodness the fun that was had....
The AS and CS game modes were a bit janky and I believe included in the very first versions (or early on). I started playing way before 1.0 and I think they just fell out of favor because of that. A solid VIP game though was a blast !
1.5, where pulling the knife made you run faster. I really missed that when they removed it. Pulling the knife in CQC when you emptied your clip was a valid strategy before they changed it to keep the run speed the same in laster versions.
I loved coming home from curfew in HS and firing up the server browser to find a 24+ person as_oilrig. Such a fun time
jeepathon2k was peak CS.
Seriously though, I miss the VIP and hostage rescue modes. I guess hostage rescue is still there but hardly played.
Heh glad someone mentioned 1.5, that was my golden version. Pack friends into my parents garage with a hub and play local. No famas/shield and no STEAMing pile of shit (as we called it then). WOL server days iirc too. Scouts and Knives was my level of choice in those days. "Wanna knife this round?" <3
And I still play CS2 all the time. Great game.
Counter-strike is a industry nightmare. Endless fun, with almost no need for upgrades, hat-sales etc. A game like that eats int a whole industries subsections revenue for years and years.
I can't really agree. If you mean specifically the tac FPS industry, similar games have since broken through and do plenty well, such as Valorant. If you mean the games industry in general, CS isn't really relevant to its current state in the grand scheme.
Yes, it is not relevant for the larger industry. But minecraft for example is.
How can you honestly say bullshit like that, fuck me.
It is the most played game on Steam at basically every hour of the day, without fail and has been like that for a decade.
It is one of the most popular games on Twitch and has been for almost a decade.
It is one of the biggest eSports in the world and is the most globally diverse eSport.
>It is the most played game on Steam at basically every hour of the day
It is currently at 185th place. You are probably thinking of Counter Strike 2 which is a different game full of microtransactions and gambling which is what the grandparent comment was saying Counter Strike didn't have. Gacha is the strategy in the gaming industry that makes the most money.
Anybody got a working archive link?
https://archive.ph/g049r
I've played the WCG finals in Counterstrike 1.3 and what they've done to CS with the skin economy is tragic. The game got big because it was lightweight and accurate - a guy with better aim and low latency could take out 5-6 people on an opposing team with good strategy.
Today the hitbox and damage taken is all dependent on things that do not include aim i.e. if you're one game away from losing, you will likely hit jumping pistol headshots across a map and if you're 4 v 1 trying to close a round, the first person to engage will likely die and you will win with 2 or 3 left standing.
You're basically playing an RPG and paying Steam to make it look pretty. Good for Valve stock, bad for gaming
wow. the new york times, writing about counter strike. i dont know if i've ever seen a more powerful no click zone
The background video looks like an AI video for "generate a video of Counter Strike 1.4 gameplay"
Fond memories of 1.4 and 1.5, when it was still a Half-Life mod.
Obligatory: https://cryptologie.net/posts/some-unrelated-rambling-about-...
Still remember playing CS1.5/1.6 with my friends in early 2000s. Haven't gamed like that since then. Good times. Now everything is set up for money-grabbing. There's sadly nothing quite as good these days for my kids to play.
In late 2000 or early 2001 I got into CS with some guys in Austin. Our leader knew some other clan’s leader, and we scrimmaged against them every week for a while.
I thought I was decent, but, damn…this other clan destroyed us every time.
I start following the CS leagues, CAL, RiTD, STA, CPL, and look at that…there’s this clan we scrimmaged every week: CK3
So that was my intro to competitive gaming, unknowingly playing one of the best clans in the world.
My favorite game. It has singularly kept me fully entertained for 11 years.
[dead]
[flagged]