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
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!
Wow! Of course I remember you! I've actually tried to hunt you down in the past to say hi and thank you for all the good times. I thought I found you on Steam recently. If you see a friend request from a Stealth Penguin (https://steamcommunity.com/id/stealthpengu1n), that's me.
I'm doing great these days and hope you are too! That was such a fun time. If you want to get in touch, my gmail address is rimunroe. I'd love to catch up!
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.
I was part of a group of high schoolers that found each other on IRC and ICQ. We built out what became Day of Defeat-another HL mod. We followed CS-were early adopters of their betas and realized we could also mod. We were fortunate that we had parents that let us build on a very wild internet . I know a few from the group made it with Valve-I kept in touch with a couple- and my parents stayed involved but I dropped it before Valve moved a few out to an apartment. If there was a way to find those channels/chats again… awesome time to come of age while being completely naive to how the world operates. To have that level of dumbness and overly eager confidence again
Seems it is not just about geeks VS general population but rather the classical case where success (ease of access) & popularity inevitably bring failure. Few open (loosely or not actively moderated) "spaces" left. No wonder given the general attitude of the, lol, "invaders". :D
In the past - you pick an IRC server and a room and 4 out of 5 times you'll learn something interesting, have actual fun with ppl you don't know and just enjoy the interactions. Now similar experience can happen only in closed/invite only or hard-to-find groups. The mainstream ones (different "social media" services) seem filled with people who want only to show off while remaining as alienated (and as consequence hostile) from one another as possible. Good or bad - the old Net is dead. The new one is predominantly for making money and BS.
The same trend can be observed virtually anywhere. In the past - people experimented with games, lots of cr@p titles but also pure gems, games that last. Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again. Anyway - it is what it is, the good thing is there are still meaningful places and people worth reading/listening to, just way harder to find through the noise. News.y seems one of the few remaining and open islands.
To bring this further - it's like the migration from villages to cities and towns - proliferation of alienation, loneliness, broken communities, fake smiles and treating anyone not part of your close circle as potentially hostile psycho ready to steal your kidneys, sneeze in your coffee or /dev/null ya. Anyway, no more laments for the past given the current situation presents interesting problems that nobody has solved-solved yet, perhaps because they won't make you a billionaire lol.
> Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again.
Nope. Maybe that's what you see because you don't have the time to check for diamonds in the coal mine but there are a ton of indie games being released every day. Many trying random concepts.
Yes modding is not en vogue nowadays but frameworks like rpg maker, godot etc allow a lot of people to experiment and materialize their ideas (good or bad). And that's without factoring in what LLM will allow when some get trained on those tools and related tutorials.
I'm just basing my views from what is available on Steam. I think there are a lot more experimental games and genres being developed and shared in those channels I don't have the time to discover and enjoy.
"the old internet" seems to still exist. Today they're the semi-private discord/slack/mattermost/matrix servers that mostly replaced IRC. Some are large enough that separate channels on them are their own communities - for example like Hangops.
Or takes a bit of effort to find them, but they're there, with lots of friendly people geeking out about common topic.
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.
It’s kinda funny right? You’d expect the number of comments to rise with the number of users, but aside from a few highly controversial topics we still have posts on the front page that barely get to triple digits comments, if even.
I mean partially, i've still not really noticed a post that has more than 1000-3000 votes on a daily. As a comparison to other social media, that's miniscule
I don't meh. This site has had a huge change now that it's become a sort of GenXer geek culture icon. I had originally come to this site to escape the stupid Natalie Portman sliding my bowl of grits Weird Al worship that was on Slashdot but it came back here and everyone who was into that culture joined this place too. A particularly uncharitable part of me wonders why folks who are so displeased with the state of greater social media are willing to override norms of other sites just to chase their particular idea of social media but of course that is the basis behind Eternal September.
There is a reason we tend to call "the new internet" "web 2.0": it's dominated by platforms. For better or worse, the dynamics are entirely different. In the new internet interactions are facilitated by the algorithm, whereas in the old internet it was a web of peers.
Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.
I even think there are a lot more geeks 'out of the closet' now. Gaming, board games, reading scifi/fantasy, programming and general tech interest - I think they've all massively increased in popularity when compared to the 90s? I for one have found that I can find 'regular people' sharing with me what used to be pretty much solo and online hobbies. Might also have been that life has forced me to develop new friendships and so I had to open up on my hidden hobbies.
The server browser is deliberately hidden, neglected, and full of spam on the modern versions of CS.
It's no longer the "default" way to play, and only a select amount of people get around to using it. Despite a much larger playerbase, there is far less activity than there was in the past.
There's still community servers out there (and niche communities like surf and bhop when still possible), but they're only still around for legacy reasons. If there wasn't any lineage there it would have been removed entirely in GO.
This kind of interaction happens many times a day on various social media platforms. The internet is how a lot bigger and more private which means that it is harder to see such people reconnecting.
We used to all have our nice own gardens. If anyone was happening by we might say hello, and invite them in.
It was easy to walk around your neighborhood, and find someone with a nice garden, who was having a garden party. You could present yourself by your handle (which was probably, or at least possibly globally unique), and join in, and maybe have fun at their garden party.
It was difficult to find gardens that you didn't care about.
When you found someone in the "gaming" garden, and then found them again in the "rally driving" garden (and you know they were the same person due to the nearly globally unique handle), it was fun and exciting.
Now there are a handful of giant gardens that I don't really want to go into for the most part. They're owned by old royalty, they're uncomfortable (for me), the only reason the garden owners want me to be there is so that they can make me look at ads, not appreciate the garden. Maybe my friends are there too, but all I see are people yelling about their small section of the (private) garden.
Sure I may still find my old friends in these weird giant gardens, but ben3212 is probably not my friend Ben who happens to have the favorite number 3212.
Hacker News is a relatively "smaller" community that is closer to the old internet.
Also the top streamer on tik tok / youtube shorts / ... are not likely posting here trying to get massive up votes on their content, as there aren't very many ways to monetize having the top post on hacker news, so while this interaction happened on the "current Internet" I know of one or two places like this on the current internet. I used to know of more, and I think I liked that better.
I know this isn't so different than "Also the clouds used to be different. They used to be whiter, and puffier! It was better then!", but here I am.
Agreed. I think we probably even have better tools to search for things now, but there's just so much more that in some ways it's harder to find that kind of stuff.
Hah, I remember your gamertag! I (gognog) would've been the 180 ping player on your team you wanted to kick, playing from NZ cause there weren't any servers here. Small world, those WC3 servers were the real deal.
They were so good. The owner really put a lot of work into them. There were a lot of WC3 mod servers, but these ones were much more fully featured than most. I've always wanted to ask rACEmic how much of the features I remember were custom. The forums were extremely active. I don't know how accurate my memory was, but I think there were around 3000 registered users. I was active in the community in my mid-late teen years, so it was a formative time I remember pretty clearly.
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!
I taught English in Seoul for a year in '02/'03. bang = room. There was (maybe still is?) a PC bang on every block or two pretty much. I'm sure I went at least 100 times. Great way to kill some time playing counter-strike for me and dabbling in starcraft. It was maybe $1.50/hr at the time. For a much better PC, nice chair, pre-installed games and snacks available.
Alternatively, there's enough folks here who could probably commit to a time/day every month to play some of these games online.
Obviously, not the same as doing it in a cafe or a LAN party, but I'd personally love to play some Brood War with fellow HN folks. Private server or not, i don't really care - I just want to play with people I can connect with in the lobby or in a discord server or whatever.
I never got into SC2 but Brood War IMO is the best RTS ever made hands down.
Sure they do - depends on the game. Baulder’s Gate 3 can handle split screen coop. It Takes Two is a co-op only platformer. Knight Squad gets up to 8 people playing at once.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The classic "tolerance of intolerance" thing (not sure if it fully counts as a paradox).
Basically this has been stuck in my mind ever since 2018 when I hear a friend of my aunt's teenage daughter answer the question "should we tolerate the intolerant" with "no, we should NOT tolerate intolerant" people.
I didn't think of this back then but, by definition, if you do not tolerate intolerant people, you are yourself intolerant, and therefore do not tolerate yourself, which I imagine could lead to some problems if your life goals are anything other than "self-loathing tortured artistic genius".
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")
I use nonverbals frequently as well, but I think what 0xDEAFBEAD is getting at is more like if everyone were to walk around with a touch display hanging from a lanyard where you could like or dislike every comment. The simulacrum would cheapen the real experience by its very presence.
Exactly. These metrics are supposed to help filter for "quality", but popularity isn't that great as a proxy for quality, and the metrics have the side effect of turning social interaction into a constant status competition.
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.
This is actually significantly worse now. The video game Roblox alone is awash in tens of thousands of cases of attempted grooming or child endangerment, according to their own metrics, and that's just what they have detected.
20+ years ago kids would play out on the street unsupervised with their friends from the neighbourhood from the age of 6-8 and all the adults would look out for each others' kids. It's only recently that everyone's retreated inside onto their screens that all sense of community has been lost and you get comments like this.
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.
I remember going to a goth concert in Germany back when I was 19 (20 yearsish ago) amd yeah not welcoming described them well. So I do think it's very much a problem of that specific segment of the community
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.
Huh, here in Lyon, France, the scene (or maybe I should say scène) is quite vibrant and you've got everything from old ponytail greybeards who remember their first Black Sabbath concert to 16 year old edgy teenagers who think smoking rolled cigarettes they bought from a government regulated shop with their parents money counts as "sticking it to the man and overthrowing the capitalist system".
You're welcome to drop by, the Rock'n'Eat in particular is a good "vampires, werewolves and other demons of the night" type venue and it's quite near my house, so feel free to hit me up if you ever feel like going, it'll be a good opportunity for me to practice my German :)
"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."
This sounds a lot like one of my favorite games, TagPro, aside from the difference in scale. It has a very tight-knit community, brought together especially by its several community-run competitive leagues. There was even an IRL meetup recently. Sadly it doesn't have anywhere near the marketing budget to become as big as CS.
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.
CS was my intro to programming as well. Although for me it was in a very simplistic form - buy macros. It was something like this in the userconfig.cfg that would load when you start the game:
```
alias "buyak" "buy ak47; buy vesthelm; buy primammo"
bind "F1" "buyak"
```
I guess this is more configuration than programming but as a kid it was a significant threshold still.
It also delighted me that you could bring up a console in game. So cool.
The reason I made my mod was that I ran into the limit of how many keybinds I could remember or quickly access, plus I wanted to be able to make dynamic lists of players and whatnot
I wouldn't be playing video games anymore if there were no more games with dedicated servers. Not from a moral standpoint, or from a competitive standpoint, but purely from the community perspective.
My youth was spent on Counterstrike: Source playing zombie mod, and then for years mapping for Zombie Escape, as a way to give back to those communities that gave me so much. I was never a mic user, and didn't use in game chat a huge amount either, but over time those regulars would still greet me and say hello. I rarely play now, but even after 17 years, when I show up once a year or so I'm always welcomed back in by all those who recognize me and admins switch to some fun maps (or some less fun ones that I made...), and we have a short catchup on life. Certainly many of these communities are on life-support, and most are long dead, but in all those people who play in these communities are the remnants of the communities who had just a little contribution in shaping the person I am today. I'll never forget when one community held a birthday event for me; for 8 hours we played every map I'd ever made, and won them all, with a full 64/64 server for the majority.
And I would never have experienced this if I hadn't happened to open Counterstrike: Source for the very first time, and my server browser's first entry just happened to be an early zombie mod server.
Shoutout to some of the old ZM/ZE communities: Syndicate Gamers, Plaguefest, i3D, icannt, ZES, Unloze & many more. ZE drove my interest to mapping, which drove my interest in Sourcemod, which drove my interest in programming, which led me to my career, which led me to my wife. Thank you.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The community can self correct, it can ban people.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, we decided that banning toxic users was some kind of infringement on "free speech". It's wild to me that people think sites like Twitter are a better place with previously banned but now reinstated toxic users.
> It's wild to me that people think sites like Twitter are a better place with previously banned but now reinstated toxic users.
It's because the people doing this had a test for "toxicity" with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity. It's easy to catch criminals if you lock up everyone ever accused.
i played CS competitively and the cheating was horrendous. if i had to put a number to it, i would guess that 50% were cheating in some form simply because it wasn't very difficult. I would ultimately be relying on checking the number of digits in your Steam ID to tell whether this account was fresh (higher probability that you bought a new one and were cheating). I think the anon matchmaking is the horrible part, not the anti cheat software.
i disagree. Faceit and others have really done a great job. Riot's anticheat is also fairly effective. Anyway, it all depends on what you're trying to achieve. If it's casual gameplay, then who cares (although I wouldn't want to play in a server with cheaters even casually). But if you have ranks and a competitive scene, then anticheat is crucial
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.
Seems to be a modernized version of the last Doom engine.
Hypothetically if we could actually get a team together I'd put up my own money to get art done. However, I still think creating a high quality FPS would require money at some point.
Undoubtedly I’ve seen / played with you at one point or another. I spent many years in these kinds of servers, because with active mods they weren’t toxic. You kept the cheaters at bay, and they were reliable places to jump in, frag and chat for hours. I used a handful of different names over the years, but usually bounced between variations of “Trigger,” “Asylum,” and “Shifty”. I miss the days you could bop into a server, meet a handful of people, end up on a CAL team with them, and find friends for the next few decades. Best case today, everyone in online games now might as well be a ghost. They’re just strangers in passing if they talk at all. And worst case - they’re overly toxic, loud, and abusing the mic. The only communities I belong to now are the ones I build myself and with friends I’ve made in real life - and we jump between games together now.
I'm afraid that time we long for is gone now as we've all gotten older, busier, and moved on to other things. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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.
Pseudo Anonymity is sort of a key feature of IRC that I think acts like a strong filter for people
People who are jerks will use anonymity to be jerks whereas when they are forced to tie an account to their identity they might pretend to be not jerks
People who are kind when anonymous are likely just good people at their core
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'd go a couple of steps further, not the tools, or even the people, or even the culture, but rather the incentive structure. There are massive social rewards, psychological rewards, and even financial rewards, for identifying and sharing a novel source of outrage.
As you said, this produces a culture where there are steady pools of people both seeking out the content, and waiting to consume it. The flip side of this is that everyone also knows the game, and manages their online presence so they don't end up on the trending tab of twitter.
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.
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 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.
> I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later
You drove me down nostalgia lane, looked in email and have my GameSpy receipt with unlock code. We paid $21.55 after tax in March of 1998 - my memory is really fuzzy but besides CS I think Quake III Arena was also popular at the time.
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.
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).
Even though I played CS at the highest level for the time, CAL-i, I always thought the maps were too small for 5v5 and that competitive would have benefitted from 7v7 or 8v8. That was how pubs were, and the dynamics were better. I think 5v5 won out due to practicality.
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.
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!
This inspired me to check on Cube2: Sauerbraten. Still alive? Yep, barely. I guess some online games never die. In the case of Cube2, the game isn't really competitive (servers have no lobby, players can join and leave games anytime, even switch teams in the middle of the game sometimes when it's not the server itself that moves you to the other team on respawn in order to balance the game a bit) and it is one less toxic component of online gaming. People were having a break and talk about various topics in the chat while watching the ongoing game.
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.
OMG. I also just created an account on this site after being in read-only mode forever just to say 'Hi'.
We played together basically daily for quite some time in the early 2000s. I remember you and CamCam.
My handle here is the same as it was in CS. I spent countless hours in college in this server leveling up every class to the max and trying to break the game with the 'spider man rope'. Great times!
The rope mod was always one of my favorites. I think I asked rACEmic to add it. I have distinct memories of putting up votes in the server to see if people wanted me to enable it, especially in de_rats or de_jeepathon2k
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.
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.
> 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.
I don't like playing a game where I need to worry about ranking systems. It adds a layer which I'm just not interested in. It's fine if I die more often than other people. Some of my fondest memories are of watching someone much more skilled than me absolutely steamroll my team. If you're playing with people you know, a vastly more skilled player becomes a fun challenge for you to try and overcome together.
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.
The move is intentional, it's extremely hard to sell someone microtransactions if they find themselves a member of a tight knit community they enjoy playing a game with. If they are isolated and believe the only mechanism for advancement is microtransactions, they are much more likely to spend money.
If anyone else played on the T3Houston servers, there's a (mostly dead) Steam group which would be a solid place to reconnect in https://steamcommunity.com/groups/t3houston
> 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.
It's been many moons since I was into gaming, but back in the RtCW [1][2] days there was a bunch of regulars that played on a server run my (IIRC) Charter. There were many servers in the browse list, and I'm sure many had a community of regulars just like we did.
These things still exists in CS (though not as popular in US but that's a reflection of CS losing popularity there)
People right now are having the same community experiences in custom server, or with official Valve, or third party like FaceIt... From crazy custom mods to try hard competitive games.
From time to time I stumble on some community servers when looking for a better DM warm-up server. Players and admin talking to each other like they were regulars, admin flying around in a batman skin killing a camper with lightning bolt, all the usual admin/community tools and more... also all the laughing, banter, playing songs and crap on the mic...
Would you have tried to join in? Let's just face it we've abandoned and stopped seeking it as we got older.
Oh yeah I used to play on T3Houston all the time, back in ~2003 (as Undead). There weren't that many W3 mod servers that had a consistent player population. I lived in PNW though so the latency was always around ~80ms.
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.
Wow, I played on your servers as a 9-10 year old. I lived in Houston and joined your server simply because they said Houston and I assumed my ping could make it there. I became obsessed with the WC3 mod. Handle was probably Coomie at the time.
I still remember invisible humans, elves with evasion, orcs with massive nade damage, undead with life steal… good times. I didn’t know how to spell “ultimate” so it took me forever to actually be able to bind an ult to keyboard.
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.
I have fond memories of playing on those modded community servers once in a while, it was a nice variety in the world of rats and regular gameplay.
While there is still some amount of it around in the Counter-Strike 2 era, there's a strong disincentive for joining random community servers when there have been client vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution.
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“
I reinstalled it recently but I got baited so hard at all the servers filled with bots. For a second there I thought, "this game is totally NOT DEAD". Sadly, I couldnt find any non bot filled server with a decent ping.
Absolutely.
The unique flavor the admins of your server added were something completely special.
As an aside. I always appreciated the street justice the admins would sometime enact. Running through the level with invincibility and godlike mods just gibbing everyone left and right.
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.
100% - local servers is what led to having lan events in your city, less toxic players and its just funner running into the same players. those were the good old days
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.
Anything from a simple to filterable list of servers with names and player counts. Most importantly: it gives the player consistent and complete control of their experience vs an auto-match-making algorithm that randomly throws you into lobbies.
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.
As much as I love all the maps you mentioned, and could probably sketch their layouts from memory, I think Rust and Nuketown from the call of duty series are probably better known by a wide margin. Rust has been featured in 3 different games that had a combined sales of over 2 billion dollars, but even that is small peanuts compared to Nuketown.
Nuketown has been featured in six different games, with 17 total variants of the map existing, and 8 different game modes that are Nuketown maps 24/7.
I’ve played neither Counterstrike nor Call of Duty, but I know de_dust2 by name and can even visualise what it looks like, and I’ve never heard of Rust or Nuketown.
Rust was more of a brawl map than the others. Lots of 1v1 fights, but no where close to the playtime of the other two.
If we count the Nuketown map on Call of Duty mobile (mobile has over a billion downloads) I would have to say that's the winner, but if not de_dust2 is the king. Mirage would also be pretty up there.
Yeah, same was true of me until a couple of years ago when I started playing call of duty with my younger brother to reconnect. At least for me, PC gaming puts me in a massive filter bubble in terms of what you see and hear about, and call of duty, which overwhelmingly sells to consoles, has always been viewed sort of derogatorily.
I think on the flip side, most of my brother's friends I played Call of Duty with probably haven't heard of counterstrike, or Quake, or unreal tournament.
Man if you saw the endless wailing and gnashing of teeth about every single change that happens iteration to iteration you'd be astounded.
The two subfranchises, modern warfare and black ops do generally feel substantially different though. Modern warfare is generally a slog, but black ops can be quite zoomy, especially now that Raven software is working on them.
That's just gaming. It doesn't matter what developers do, some portion of the playerbase will be mad about it. Nerf a thing, someone gets mad, don't nerf it someone else gets mad. I'm sure some people will get mad at both options.
Yeah, the CS skin market is pretty crazy, but its still no where near CoD sized. Black ops 6 turned over $3 billion in revenue, and black ops 7 is expected to sell higher yet.
I find the yearly release model exhausting, honestly. Some people only play Call of Duty and still spend more per year than I do on video games.
I have fond memories of 2fort. Desperately wanting to play TF1 on a 14.4K modem from Germany - no European servers meant playing with 500ms ping, which made aiming completely impossible, so I took the pacifist route each time by picking the scout class and then trying to steal the flag unnoticed by coming in through the sewers. It worked sometimes when the server was only half full.
I would just play as medic and camp the enemy spawn room, infecting them as they spawned and watch as they passively infected their teammates. It was great fun (I have since grown as a person). It wasn't long before the enemy spawn rooms would instantly kill you if you entered.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 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.
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.
Mostly balance issues, I think. Balance matters in pubs.
If dust had the underpass-stairs option from the beginning, and maybe moved the T spawns forward by 1 second, it probably would be just as popular today.
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.
Did you miss the entire article? CS itself came from a dorm room. You can have excellent games that spawn from creativity instead of monetization.
I was really into the odd maps (NIPPER) and early Internet community around games (joe2). We hosted servers off of unused CPU cycles from oil exploration boxes.
This still exists all over the web, but the creators that figured out economics moved on.
Valve has already pretty much "shut the door" on its games relatively to how much money they have and how much dev effort they could put into it if they actually tried harder, because they're mostly just maintaining their gambling facades (cs/dota2/tf2) and abandoning everything else (l4d2/other stagnant games and ip).
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
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.
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.
Saying its among the least egregious examples just isn't true. Doppler knives can sell for over $10,000. We know the sorts of psychological outcomes that occur from putting a vanishingly unlikely $10,000 jackpot on a slot machine.
People will willingly blow their paychecks, week after week, hoping to strike that 0.00275% chance for big money. This is bad for society, just like slot machines.
I agree that the gambling side looks bad, egged on by streamers pretending to be overjoyed when they win, but is $10000 really big money? I'd have thought a lottery ticket would be far more enticing.
I think the psychology is a bit different though, winning the lottery is a moonshot that everybody will at least say they don't think will ever, ever happen.
Meanwhile you can watch a video on youtube of a streamer pulling a $10000+ knife, several $1000+ knives, and a litany of $100+ knives and skins all in a single stream (where they sat opening cases for 8 hours straight and spending $18000 on 2000 cases + keys).
I think generally the way I've experienced people justify it is that $10000+ would be a life changing amount of money for them in a way that the $100 they have on hand isn't, and even if they strike out they still get cool skins for a game they play, so why the hell not. And eventually they are $2300 dollars poorer, with nothing to show for it but some in game skins.
Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$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.
Personally, I used my Steam Wallet money to purchase several of the most popular skins on a third-party site and resold them there. I probably took about a 15% hit but who can complain for $400 in profit?
> 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 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
Mostly non-AAA studio games. Then there's plenty of games with steam workshop or nexusmods support, even easier to mod these days as they use Unity or Unreal and you don't have to rely on an homegrown SDK release.
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.
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 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.
There was also the whole branch of Surfing, which exploited a glitch in the physics engine that caused standing sloped surfaces to generate forward velocity. Flying around massive expansive maps gliding on slopes while blasting people with shotguns was so much fun (or sniping them mid air with an awp).
There was also a whole sub-genre of skill surf, with mechanically challenging courses to complete.
Oh and then kz maps too, which was just for climbing up huge structures.
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.
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.
RA3 is where I started my interests in first-person shooters. My family and someo of their friends had a clan, and they would hold LAN parties, playing matches against other clans. Sometimes I was allowed to play a bit, and got instantly hooked.
When I got my first personal computer, I stated playing RA3 a ton–and Unreal Tournament on the side. Later on it became Quake 3 OSP/CPMA (as well as Freeze Tag and InstaGib) and Quake Live Clan Arena, but never really competitively.
At the same time I also discovered CS 1.6. It was sort of a relaxation from all the fast-paced fragging for me. I liked the slower pace and different skill it required. I eventually joined some tournaments and started playing more competitively, hooking up with people in IRC.
I try to seek out games every now and then, but unfortunately there's less and less communities around Q3 and the likes, so it's becoming increasingly harder to find fun matches.
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.
The issue that was noted at larger LANs I used to go to was that matches of DotA could lock in around 12 people for around 45m per game which would make getting participants for other games more difficult. There would be constantly running CS/UT servers where people would drop into to kill time, but trying to get a large game running or something like battlefield required advance planning
Agreed. The only thing more technically challenging than Q3 was its aptly named Challenge ProMode (CPM) mod which added thing like full air control to make gameplay even faster. Watching demos of the best CPM players I had the feeling that they were playing the game faster than I was able to follow it.
i used to think that too coming from quake i was like wtf if i die i have to just wait? lol. but i've grown to love all the tactical skill required in CS. tbf back in the day you could bunny hope like a quake player before they neutered all that
I can somewhat relate as the creator of fy_iceworld (if you believe). The one who commented on the Rock Paper Shotgun article.
The quote from the NY Times article, "it allows amateurs to add imagination with limited resources." is exactly what I was feeling at that time. I knew nothing about programming, had minimal art skills, but was able to create CS maps.
It makes me nostalgic and wonder, "What if I started making a mod or a game today?" I really miss those golden days of modding.
Nice to see someone similar. I was into the Weapons Factory mod, first for Quake 2 and then Quake 3. I made a map for the Quake 3 version that it still played this day by a small group of die-hards. I think it took me three days to make that map. Draw a brush, slap a texture on it, keep things neat. All there was too it. It wasn't long before modding just became too hard. I remember reading about static meshes being introduced in the Unreal Engine and I knew I was done.
Nice! Iceworld was a classic at my LAN parties. Great design for fast action.
(Interestingly now you mention it I realize one of the call of duty MW2 multiplayer maps has the same layout).
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.
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”.
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
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.
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 .
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don’t really like the seriousness of ranked play
I see a lot of people say this type of thing and it's strange to me beause it doesn't have to be serious. You can do whatever you want within reason, as long as you're not griefing or something.
I have a group of friends who I play Overwatch 2 with occasionally, but they always insist on playing quick play instead of ranked and especially in that game quick play is just worse. Rankings are just a way to match you with people of roughly equal skill, you don't have to chase a higher rank all the time. I actually like losing ranks because it just means I'll have an easier time for a while until I go back to where I start struggling.
Meanwhile I see others get legitimately emotional about dropping a rank and I just don't get it. Relax, it's just a game. We're not playing for money or fame or anything. If you're really at a level where money and fame is on the table you probably don't care about your matchmaking rank anyway.
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'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 played thousands of hours of KZ in CSGO. I knew pretty much everyone in the community back then, was involved with House of Climb as a sort of crew member/moderator and set a couple world records and top 5 times etc.
Those were great times, but all the strafing caused some shoulder and arm problems so I eventually gave it up and moved on.
Now that's a blast from the past. Before we had good one-in-all plugin solutions for solo play, I'm pretty sure I ripped the hook code from ProKreedz for my listen server. Then I got a checkpoint plugin from another guy, LJ stats from somewhere else and so on. I could tinker with my server freely and make it work just like I wanted.
That's what I really loved about CS 1.6. It allowed so much freedom in terms of what kind of maps and plugins you could create. We got amazing community-cultivated game modes such as KZ, HNS, surf and so many more out of it. And what's more, it was relatively easy to whip up your own map in Hammer and get it out there for everyone to play.
Community servers were first class citizens back then, prominently displayed as soon as you launched the game. These days someone getting into the game might not ever find out about the rich variety of experiences provided by community servers because they get funneled right into the default 5v5 matchmaking experience.
I tried TF2 recently and it took me a minute to figure out how to play a game without queuing into matchmaking. It's a bit sad.
I honestly think developers undervalue the power of moddability in adding value and especially longevity for their games. Fortunately, and as you pointed out, CS 1.6 is still there, and there's still a lot of active communities around that game. I believe that's because the game allowed the community to carve out a space for the themselves and build whatever they wanted.
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.
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…
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.
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!
More than just counter-strike, HL's modding system spawned a generation of new games: team fortress, day of defeat, Sven co-op, echoes, ricochet, etc. Several of them were good enough for Valve to ship them into later editions of HL, and Valve's experience shipping other people's games definitely helped them make Steam what it is today.
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.
> 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.
In its current form, the game is a shell of its former self. They took away a lot of features and maps. They even combined the reviews of CS:GO and CS2 to make CS2 look better.
You can't even play CS:GO anymore. It was all moved to CS2, with cosmetics as the highest priority.
The hostage map rotation used to be 5 maps, with variety. They've cut it to 2 maps, and are outright neglecting any variety. You can play some other maps but only in private matches.
They even got rid of the very fun drop-in mode where you could do Last man standing in pairs.
It's like they don't even care. I've completely stopped playing since CS2 and I hope they can see the metrics of other long-time gamers who also stopped.
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
> 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.
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 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.
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.
I think its both. Modding has become harder, and making games easier. At some point they are close enough to parity that it just makes sense to put in the extra effort to avoid all the tertiary issues, like copyright/trademark violations.
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.
In the FPS space, there used to be only three games worth modding for: Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life. You could make a mod back then and get tons of press and players if you could follow through. I was interviewed in popular gaming websites! The games themselves were quite simple graphically so anyone with a drip of talent, time, and motivation could contribute. That specific environment doesn't exist anymore. There are so many games now, it's an ocean, developers have exerted more control over their games, and the talent required to create content for FPS games is too high a bar now.
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 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.
I was very into the HL mod scene back in the day (as a player) and chatted extensively on IRC with makers. I was focused on single player mods and Neil Manke was my fav HL1 modder. Unfortunately his HL2 mod never got released.
I loved the mods for the holy trifecta: Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life. I consider it the golden age of online gaming. I also spent a lot of time on IRC servers chatting with developers (eventually joining a team myself which lead me to my current career as a developer). My favorite was for Weapons Factory, which was a popular Quake 2 mod at the time. The old dev team moved on with their lives so the community took over...and it was actually released and was even better than the first. High quality, with tons of cool maps, and for an active community of maybe 1000 people? Insane.
Yeah exactly, and the golden age of modding, at least for FPS games. In a few years the engine evolves to something so advanced that only professionals can work on them. I consider HL2 the last moddable engine by the commoners. After that you gotta be a professional or someone with the patience of a saint to mod an FPS engine.
And nowadays they mostly use UE and Unity anyway. Only some of the boomer shooters are moddable.
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
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.
Counter Strike is legendary. I spent so many hours playing with friends. That's when I developed my reflexes the most. Games are sometimes an overlooked way of training your mind while having fun
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.
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 never had any experience come close to it since then, and miss competition dearly.
This person hasn't seen competition. Take Starcraft on ICCup for example. CS/DoD where you can rely on others for team games are much easier psychologically than a one-on-one duel where it's just you and nobody else but you to fuck things up.
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
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!
Wow! Of course I remember you! I've actually tried to hunt you down in the past to say hi and thank you for all the good times. I thought I found you on Steam recently. If you see a friend request from a Stealth Penguin (https://steamcommunity.com/id/stealthpengu1n), that's me.
I'm doing great these days and hope you are too! That was such a fun time. If you want to get in touch, my gmail address is rimunroe. I'd love to catch up!
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
Never heard of that until now so thank you so much for sharing!
I was part of a group of high schoolers that found each other on IRC and ICQ. We built out what became Day of Defeat-another HL mod. We followed CS-were early adopters of their betas and realized we could also mod. We were fortunate that we had parents that let us build on a very wild internet . I know a few from the group made it with Valve-I kept in touch with a couple- and my parents stayed involved but I dropped it before Valve moved a few out to an apartment. If there was a way to find those channels/chats again… awesome time to come of age while being completely naive to how the world operates. To have that level of dumbness and overly eager confidence again
> We built out what became Day of Defeat
Thank you for that. This mod was awesome in LANs.
I think you're right
My son spends most of his time in small closed Discord servers.
The niche areas still exist, but a lot of them are hidden and invite only, or just intentionally or unintentionally not easy to discover.
Seems it is not just about geeks VS general population but rather the classical case where success (ease of access) & popularity inevitably bring failure. Few open (loosely or not actively moderated) "spaces" left. No wonder given the general attitude of the, lol, "invaders". :D In the past - you pick an IRC server and a room and 4 out of 5 times you'll learn something interesting, have actual fun with ppl you don't know and just enjoy the interactions. Now similar experience can happen only in closed/invite only or hard-to-find groups. The mainstream ones (different "social media" services) seem filled with people who want only to show off while remaining as alienated (and as consequence hostile) from one another as possible. Good or bad - the old Net is dead. The new one is predominantly for making money and BS. The same trend can be observed virtually anywhere. In the past - people experimented with games, lots of cr@p titles but also pure gems, games that last. Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again. Anyway - it is what it is, the good thing is there are still meaningful places and people worth reading/listening to, just way harder to find through the noise. News.y seems one of the few remaining and open islands.
To bring this further - it's like the migration from villages to cities and towns - proliferation of alienation, loneliness, broken communities, fake smiles and treating anyone not part of your close circle as potentially hostile psycho ready to steal your kidneys, sneeze in your coffee or /dev/null ya. Anyway, no more laments for the past given the current situation presents interesting problems that nobody has solved-solved yet, perhaps because they won't make you a billionaire lol.
> Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again.
Nope. Maybe that's what you see because you don't have the time to check for diamonds in the coal mine but there are a ton of indie games being released every day. Many trying random concepts.
Yes modding is not en vogue nowadays but frameworks like rpg maker, godot etc allow a lot of people to experiment and materialize their ideas (good or bad). And that's without factoring in what LLM will allow when some get trained on those tools and related tutorials.
I'm just basing my views from what is available on Steam. I think there are a lot more experimental games and genres being developed and shared in those channels I don't have the time to discover and enjoy.
Yeah, I (a teenager) have been lucky enough to find a community like this. It's amazing but it's hard to find communities like that.
"the old internet" seems to still exist. Today they're the semi-private discord/slack/mattermost/matrix servers that mostly replaced IRC. Some are large enough that separate channels on them are their own communities - for example like Hangops.
Or takes a bit of effort to find them, but they're there, with lots of friendly people geeking out about common topic.
I have a few amazing signal groups to add to that.
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.
It’s kinda funny right? You’d expect the number of comments to rise with the number of users, but aside from a few highly controversial topics we still have posts on the front page that barely get to triple digits comments, if even.
I mean partially, i've still not really noticed a post that has more than 1000-3000 votes on a daily. As a comparison to other social media, that's miniscule
I don't meh. This site has had a huge change now that it's become a sort of GenXer geek culture icon. I had originally come to this site to escape the stupid Natalie Portman sliding my bowl of grits Weird Al worship that was on Slashdot but it came back here and everyone who was into that culture joined this place too. A particularly uncharitable part of me wonders why folks who are so displeased with the state of greater social media are willing to override norms of other sites just to chase their particular idea of social media but of course that is the basis behind Eternal September.
There is a reason we tend to call "the new internet" "web 2.0": it's dominated by platforms. For better or worse, the dynamics are entirely different. In the new internet interactions are facilitated by the algorithm, whereas in the old internet it was a web of peers.
Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.
I even think there are a lot more geeks 'out of the closet' now. Gaming, board games, reading scifi/fantasy, programming and general tech interest - I think they've all massively increased in popularity when compared to the 90s? I for one have found that I can find 'regular people' sharing with me what used to be pretty much solo and online hobbies. Might also have been that life has forced me to develop new friendships and so I had to open up on my hidden hobbies.
The OP comment itself is funny because Counter Strike itself still has a server browser lol.
The server browser is deliberately hidden, neglected, and full of spam on the modern versions of CS.
It's no longer the "default" way to play, and only a select amount of people get around to using it. Despite a much larger playerbase, there is far less activity than there was in the past.
There's still community servers out there (and niche communities like surf and bhop when still possible), but they're only still around for legacy reasons. If there wasn't any lineage there it would have been removed entirely in GO.
It does but most games don't
Pre-monetization. Would this come back if money was made useless?
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
Thanks for sharing :)
Yeah I loved it so much. Thanks for sharing.
This kind of interaction happens many times a day on various social media platforms. The internet is how a lot bigger and more private which means that it is harder to see such people reconnecting.
Any particular reason why? This interaction just happened on the "current Internet".
We used to all have our nice own gardens. If anyone was happening by we might say hello, and invite them in.
It was easy to walk around your neighborhood, and find someone with a nice garden, who was having a garden party. You could present yourself by your handle (which was probably, or at least possibly globally unique), and join in, and maybe have fun at their garden party.
It was difficult to find gardens that you didn't care about.
When you found someone in the "gaming" garden, and then found them again in the "rally driving" garden (and you know they were the same person due to the nearly globally unique handle), it was fun and exciting.
Now there are a handful of giant gardens that I don't really want to go into for the most part. They're owned by old royalty, they're uncomfortable (for me), the only reason the garden owners want me to be there is so that they can make me look at ads, not appreciate the garden. Maybe my friends are there too, but all I see are people yelling about their small section of the (private) garden.
Sure I may still find my old friends in these weird giant gardens, but ben3212 is probably not my friend Ben who happens to have the favorite number 3212.
Hacker News is a relatively "smaller" community that is closer to the old internet.
Also the top streamer on tik tok / youtube shorts / ... are not likely posting here trying to get massive up votes on their content, as there aren't very many ways to monetize having the top post on hacker news, so while this interaction happened on the "current Internet" I know of one or two places like this on the current internet. I used to know of more, and I think I liked that better.
I know this isn't so different than "Also the clouds used to be different. They used to be whiter, and puffier! It was better then!", but here I am.
People just made stuff for the fun of it
That still happens. You just have to look a bit more for it.
Agreed. I think we probably even have better tools to search for things now, but there's just so much more that in some ways it's harder to find that kind of stuff.
We’re all still here. Build communities. Find, join, and support existing ones.
I spent many a weekend on your servers as a teen. Thank you for running them!
(I was MethodMan)
Hah, I remember your gamertag! I (gognog) would've been the 180 ping player on your team you wanted to kick, playing from NZ cause there weren't any servers here. Small world, those WC3 servers were the real deal.
Oh, I remember you (for your ping, not your gamertag lol).
For real, though. After years of playing CS the WC3 plugin revived the game for me. De aztec was amazing when you could teleport all around the map.
Your name seems familiar, and I distinctly remember one regular who would frequently rubber band around due to their ping.
I remember you! I was Stealth Penguin. I made annoying squawking noises over my mic
The fact that people still remember those servers all these years later? That's legacy-level stuff
They were so good. The owner really put a lot of work into them. There were a lot of WC3 mod servers, but these ones were much more fully featured than most. I've always wanted to ask rACEmic how much of the features I remember were custom. The forums were extremely active. I don't know how accurate my memory was, but I think there were around 3000 registered users. I was active in the community in my mid-late teen years, so it was a formative time I remember pretty clearly.
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?
I taught English in Seoul for a year in '02/'03. bang = room. There was (maybe still is?) a PC bang on every block or two pretty much. I'm sure I went at least 100 times. Great way to kill some time playing counter-strike for me and dabbling in starcraft. It was maybe $1.50/hr at the time. For a much better PC, nice chair, pre-installed games and snacks available.
broadly yeah. the computers have games pre installed and sometimes with subscriptions or free game time included in the price of your time there etc
Alternatively, there's enough folks here who could probably commit to a time/day every month to play some of these games online.
Obviously, not the same as doing it in a cafe or a LAN party, but I'd personally love to play some Brood War with fellow HN folks. Private server or not, i don't really care - I just want to play with people I can connect with in the lobby or in a discord server or whatever.
I never got into SC2 but Brood War IMO is the best RTS ever made hands down.
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.
Sure they do - depends on the game. Baulder’s Gate 3 can handle split screen coop. It Takes Two is a co-op only platformer. Knight Squad gets up to 8 people playing at once.
You can find many more options here https://www.co-optimus.com/games.php
It’s more like: the default assumption of a AAA console games used to be some local multiplayer. Now, you have to look for it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
When they establish personality archetypes and roles bonds form readily. That's like, the purpose of roles in an organization.
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.
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).
I’m sure an anthropologist can clarify, but once a community reaches a certain size, it seems that emergent properties take over.
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.
They did, and it’s called Reddit. Then it got enshittified.
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.
> 'zomg burn the witch'
And that often comes from groups who loudly claim to promote, and obnoxiously demand diversity and tolerance.
The classic "tolerance of intolerance" thing (not sure if it fully counts as a paradox).
Basically this has been stuck in my mind ever since 2018 when I hear a friend of my aunt's teenage daughter answer the question "should we tolerate the intolerant" with "no, we should NOT tolerate intolerant" people.
I didn't think of this back then but, by definition, if you do not tolerate intolerant people, you are yourself intolerant, and therefore do not tolerate yourself, which I imagine could lead to some problems if your life goals are anything other than "self-loathing tortured artistic genius".
Related, the classic "I can tolerate everything except the outgroup" from Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
This does not scale. If you have eccentric sure it's fine. If you have millions it degrades the experience and is impossible to moderate.
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
I use nonverbals frequently as well, but I think what 0xDEAFBEAD is getting at is more like if everyone were to walk around with a touch display hanging from a lanyard where you could like or dislike every comment. The simulacrum would cheapen the real experience by its very presence.
Exactly. These metrics are supposed to help filter for "quality", but popularity isn't that great as a proxy for quality, and the metrics have the side effect of turning social interaction into a constant status competition.
https://xcancel.com/AliceFromQueens/status/11280356337279303...
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.
This is actually significantly worse now. The video game Roblox alone is awash in tens of thousands of cases of attempted grooming or child endangerment, according to their own metrics, and that's just what they have detected.
This is a parenting issue. The internet doesn’t need training wheels. No offense to those children, but their parents are complete failures.
20+ years ago kids would play out on the street unsupervised with their friends from the neighbourhood from the age of 6-8 and all the adults would look out for each others' kids. It's only recently that everyone's retreated inside onto their screens that all sense of community has been lost and you get comments like this.
At some point you reach a critical mass of personal responsibility failures where you need a systemic solution.
Even if the internet doesn't need training wheels, the video game where the average player is 12 might.
that's absolutely horrible, but it's not like it doesn't happen today; maybe even worse today with all the different social media
Literally nothing got better for your far fetched use case, nothing.
If anything it got worse.
That is some crazy mental gymnastics.
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.
I remember going to a goth concert in Germany back when I was 19 (20 yearsish ago) amd yeah not welcoming described them well. So I do think it's very much a problem of that specific segment of the community
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.
Been there for 10+ years as well. Recently decided that it has gotten too money grabby and started our own privat festival :-/
Huh, here in Lyon, France, the scene (or maybe I should say scène) is quite vibrant and you've got everything from old ponytail greybeards who remember their first Black Sabbath concert to 16 year old edgy teenagers who think smoking rolled cigarettes they bought from a government regulated shop with their parents money counts as "sticking it to the man and overthrowing the capitalist system".
You're welcome to drop by, the Rock'n'Eat in particular is a good "vampires, werewolves and other demons of the night" type venue and it's quite near my house, so feel free to hit me up if you ever feel like going, it'll be a good opportunity for me to practice my German :)
"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?
This sounds a lot like one of my favorite games, TagPro, aside from the difference in scale. It has a very tight-knit community, brought together especially by its several community-run competitive leagues. There was even an IRL meetup recently. Sadly it doesn't have anywhere near the marketing budget to become as big as CS.
Helping look after QuakeNet in the early 2000s was pretty wild. Glad you have positive memories!
What is stopping us from all using IRC again ?
agreed - damn i miss DoD now too haha - that was a fun mod to play when i wanted to get away from CS
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!
CS was my intro to programming as well. Although for me it was in a very simplistic form - buy macros. It was something like this in the userconfig.cfg that would load when you start the game:
```
alias "buyak" "buy ak47; buy vesthelm; buy primammo"
bind "F1" "buyak"
```
I guess this is more configuration than programming but as a kid it was a significant threshold still.
It also delighted me that you could bring up a console in game. So cool.
The reason I made my mod was that I ran into the limit of how many keybinds I could remember or quickly access, plus I wanted to be able to make dynamic lists of players and whatnot
I wouldn't be playing video games anymore if there were no more games with dedicated servers. Not from a moral standpoint, or from a competitive standpoint, but purely from the community perspective.
My youth was spent on Counterstrike: Source playing zombie mod, and then for years mapping for Zombie Escape, as a way to give back to those communities that gave me so much. I was never a mic user, and didn't use in game chat a huge amount either, but over time those regulars would still greet me and say hello. I rarely play now, but even after 17 years, when I show up once a year or so I'm always welcomed back in by all those who recognize me and admins switch to some fun maps (or some less fun ones that I made...), and we have a short catchup on life. Certainly many of these communities are on life-support, and most are long dead, but in all those people who play in these communities are the remnants of the communities who had just a little contribution in shaping the person I am today. I'll never forget when one community held a birthday event for me; for 8 hours we played every map I'd ever made, and won them all, with a full 64/64 server for the majority.
And I would never have experienced this if I hadn't happened to open Counterstrike: Source for the very first time, and my server browser's first entry just happened to be an early zombie mod server.
Shoutout to some of the old ZM/ZE communities: Syndicate Gamers, Plaguefest, i3D, icannt, ZES, Unloze & many more. ZE drove my interest to mapping, which drove my interest in Sourcemod, which drove my interest in programming, which led me to my career, which led me to my wife. Thank you.
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
Both are valid KPIs to measure, “player retention.”
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> The community can self correct, it can ban people.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, we decided that banning toxic users was some kind of infringement on "free speech". It's wild to me that people think sites like Twitter are a better place with previously banned but now reinstated toxic users.
> It's wild to me that people think sites like Twitter are a better place with previously banned but now reinstated toxic users.
It's because the people doing this had a test for "toxicity" with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity. It's easy to catch criminals if you lock up everyone ever accused.
i played CS competitively and the cheating was horrendous. if i had to put a number to it, i would guess that 50% were cheating in some form simply because it wasn't very difficult. I would ultimately be relying on checking the number of digits in your Steam ID to tell whether this account was fresh (higher probability that you bought a new one and were cheating). I think the anon matchmaking is the horrible part, not the anti cheat software.
>I think the anon matchmaking is the horrible part, not the anti cheat software.
Exactly. That's why an invite only community server can work.
Anti cheat is a losing game.
i disagree. Faceit and others have really done a great job. Riot's anticheat is also fairly effective. Anyway, it all depends on what you're trying to achieve. If it's casual gameplay, then who cares (although I wouldn't want to play in a server with cheaters even casually). But if you have ranks and a competitive scene, then anticheat is crucial
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.
A high-performance, multiplayer MVP would be the first order of business. No need for art so early. Remember fy_iceworld - that did not need much art!
The question is, what to build it on. Godot?
Depends...
Are we talking about actually getting this done or just dreaming of a nice billionaire giving us money ?
https://codeberg.org/Liblast/liblast-framework
I'd start with that if you want to build it in Godot.
However, I'd prefer to build it from scratch with an actual engine designed for an FPS.
ID Tech for example makes amazing FPS games that aren't resource hungry.
From 30 seconds of googling,
https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG
Seems to be a modernized version of the last Doom engine.
Hypothetically if we could actually get a team together I'd put up my own money to get art done. However, I still think creating a high quality FPS would require money at some point.
Undoubtedly I’ve seen / played with you at one point or another. I spent many years in these kinds of servers, because with active mods they weren’t toxic. You kept the cheaters at bay, and they were reliable places to jump in, frag and chat for hours. I used a handful of different names over the years, but usually bounced between variations of “Trigger,” “Asylum,” and “Shifty”. I miss the days you could bop into a server, meet a handful of people, end up on a CAL team with them, and find friends for the next few decades. Best case today, everyone in online games now might as well be a ghost. They’re just strangers in passing if they talk at all. And worst case - they’re overly toxic, loud, and abusing the mic. The only communities I belong to now are the ones I build myself and with friends I’ve made in real life - and we jump between games together now.
I'm afraid that time we long for is gone now as we've all gotten older, busier, and moved on to other things. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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 kinda not though
Pseudo Anonymity is sort of a key feature of IRC that I think acts like a strong filter for people
People who are jerks will use anonymity to be jerks whereas when they are forced to tie an account to their identity they might pretend to be not jerks
People who are kind when anonymous are likely just good people at their core
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
I'd go a couple of steps further, not the tools, or even the people, or even the culture, but rather the incentive structure. There are massive social rewards, psychological rewards, and even financial rewards, for identifying and sharing a novel source of outrage.
As you said, this produces a culture where there are steady pools of people both seeking out the content, and waiting to consume it. The flip side of this is that everyone also knows the game, and manages their online presence so they don't end up on the trending tab of twitter.
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.
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 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.
Interesting, we had something similar in Germany in the late 90s. Had to dial in with a client and they had a chat, newsgroups/forums and internal mail. - RivalNet http://web.archive.org/web/19980515163616/http://rivalnet.co...
> I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later
You drove me down nostalgia lane, looked in email and have my GameSpy receipt with unlock code. We paid $21.55 after tax in March of 1998 - my memory is really fuzzy but besides CS I think Quake III Arena was also popular at the time.
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.
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).
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
TIL newgrounds is still around
Vintage.
Even though I played CS at the highest level for the time, CAL-i, I always thought the maps were too small for 5v5 and that competitive would have benefitted from 7v7 or 8v8. That was how pubs were, and the dynamics were better. I think 5v5 won out due to practicality.
Hey, I was CAL-i too! At least...that's what we told people in IRC :P
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.
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!
This inspired me to check on Cube2: Sauerbraten. Still alive? Yep, barely. I guess some online games never die. In the case of Cube2, the game isn't really competitive (servers have no lobby, players can join and leave games anytime, even switch teams in the middle of the game sometimes when it's not the server itself that moves you to the other team on respawn in order to balance the game a bit) and it is one less toxic component of online gaming. People were having a break and talk about various topics in the chat while watching the ongoing game.
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.
OMG. I also just created an account on this site after being in read-only mode forever just to say 'Hi'.
We played together basically daily for quite some time in the early 2000s. I remember you and CamCam.
My handle here is the same as it was in CS. I spent countless hours in college in this server leveling up every class to the max and trying to break the game with the 'spider man rope'. Great times!
hi!!! If you're on Steam still feel free to add me: https://steamcommunity.com/id/stealthpengu1n/
The rope mod was always one of my favorites. I think I asked rACEmic to add it. I have distinct memories of putting up votes in the server to see if people wanted me to enable it, especially in de_rats or de_jeepathon2k
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.
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
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.
Not everybody wants to play competitively, especially when it's a band of close friends who play almost exclusively with each other regularly.
> 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.
I don't like playing a game where I need to worry about ranking systems. It adds a layer which I'm just not interested in. It's fine if I die more often than other people. Some of my fondest memories are of watching someone much more skilled than me absolutely steamroll my team. If you're playing with people you know, a vastly more skilled player becomes a fun challenge for you to try and overcome together.
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'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!
The move is intentional, it's extremely hard to sell someone microtransactions if they find themselves a member of a tight knit community they enjoy playing a game with. If they are isolated and believe the only mechanism for advancement is microtransactions, they are much more likely to spend money.
If anyone else played on the T3Houston servers, there's a (mostly dead) Steam group which would be a solid place to reconnect in https://steamcommunity.com/groups/t3houston
> 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.
It's been many moons since I was into gaming, but back in the RtCW [1][2] days there was a bunch of regulars that played on a server run my (IIRC) Charter. There were many servers in the browse list, and I'm sure many had a community of regulars just like we did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein
[2] A Linux client was actually released, which is what I mostly used. (Actually running it on FreeBSD's Linuxator.)
These things still exists in CS (though not as popular in US but that's a reflection of CS losing popularity there)
People right now are having the same community experiences in custom server, or with official Valve, or third party like FaceIt... From crazy custom mods to try hard competitive games.
From time to time I stumble on some community servers when looking for a better DM warm-up server. Players and admin talking to each other like they were regulars, admin flying around in a batman skin killing a camper with lightning bolt, all the usual admin/community tools and more... also all the laughing, banter, playing songs and crap on the mic...
Would you have tried to join in? Let's just face it we've abandoned and stopped seeking it as we got older.
Oh yeah I used to play on T3Houston all the time, back in ~2003 (as Undead). There weren't that many W3 mod servers that had a consistent player population. I lived in PNW though so the latency was always around ~80ms.
Do you remember what name you went by?
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.
Warcraft 3 remains my favorite game to this day, simply due to the sheer volume of custom maps you could play.
I can't explain how excited I was for the Reforged version of the game and how disappointed I was when it flopped.
My favorite part of games is learning the mechanics and coming up with strategies. Which paired well with an endless supply of new game modes to try.
I have been unable to find any modern game that is both active and has a series of custom maps. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
Does StarCraft 1 & 2 count?
Brood war is still active in Korea
Wow, I played on your servers as a 9-10 year old. I lived in Houston and joined your server simply because they said Houston and I assumed my ping could make it there. I became obsessed with the WC3 mod. Handle was probably Coomie at the time.
I still remember invisible humans, elves with evasion, orcs with massive nade damage, undead with life steal… good times. I didn’t know how to spell “ultimate” so it took me forever to actually be able to bind an ult to keyboard.
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!
I have fond memories of playing on those modded community servers once in a while, it was a nice variety in the world of rats and regular gameplay.
While there is still some amount of it around in the Counter-Strike 2 era, there's a strong disincentive for joining random community servers when there have been client vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution.
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“
Nobody that plays it wants a modern clone. You can just play ETLegacy.
I reinstalled it recently but I got baited so hard at all the servers filled with bots. For a second there I thought, "this game is totally NOT DEAD". Sadly, I couldnt find any non bot filled server with a decent ping.
The FA clan servers usually have 40-60 people online mid day during my TZ. I get around 70 ping but whatever.
Absolutely. The unique flavor the admins of your server added were something completely special.
As an aside. I always appreciated the street justice the admins would sometime enact. Running through the level with invincibility and godlike mods just gibbing everyone left and right.
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.
100% - local servers is what led to having lan events in your city, less toxic players and its just funner running into the same players. those were the good old days
I was an east coast player but still loved the T3Houston WC3 servers.
Do you remember the name you went by on there?
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 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 :-)
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
Totally agree on the point about toxicity. Back then, when you kept running into the same folks, there was some accountability
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
Warcraft 3! My favorite game of all time. I got so addicted to it, one has to have self-control
Oh man, brings me back. That public server was pot smoker's lounge (PSL) for me. No AWP!
I use to help run Quick Gaming and was a mod on Allied Modders. Great times, taught me a lot.
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?
Same but for xTcR and Tw^2; better days.
what is a server browser? is it like how on disboard you can find discord groups?
Anything from a simple to filterable list of servers with names and player counts. Most importantly: it gives the player consistent and complete control of their experience vs an auto-match-making algorithm that randomly throws you into lobbies.
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.
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.
As much as I love all the maps you mentioned, and could probably sketch their layouts from memory, I think Rust and Nuketown from the call of duty series are probably better known by a wide margin. Rust has been featured in 3 different games that had a combined sales of over 2 billion dollars, but even that is small peanuts compared to Nuketown.
Nuketown has been featured in six different games, with 17 total variants of the map existing, and 8 different game modes that are Nuketown maps 24/7.
I’ve played neither Counterstrike nor Call of Duty, but I know de_dust2 by name and can even visualise what it looks like, and I’ve never heard of Rust or Nuketown.
Rust was more of a brawl map than the others. Lots of 1v1 fights, but no where close to the playtime of the other two.
If we count the Nuketown map on Call of Duty mobile (mobile has over a billion downloads) I would have to say that's the winner, but if not de_dust2 is the king. Mirage would also be pretty up there.
Yeah, same was true of me until a couple of years ago when I started playing call of duty with my younger brother to reconnect. At least for me, PC gaming puts me in a massive filter bubble in terms of what you see and hear about, and call of duty, which overwhelmingly sells to consoles, has always been viewed sort of derogatorily.
I think on the flip side, most of my brother's friends I played Call of Duty with probably haven't heard of counterstrike, or Quake, or unreal tournament.
By "six different games" do you mean six practically identical re-releases of the same game?
Man if you saw the endless wailing and gnashing of teeth about every single change that happens iteration to iteration you'd be astounded.
The two subfranchises, modern warfare and black ops do generally feel substantially different though. Modern warfare is generally a slog, but black ops can be quite zoomy, especially now that Raven software is working on them.
That's just gaming. It doesn't matter what developers do, some portion of the playerbase will be mad about it. Nerf a thing, someone gets mad, don't nerf it someone else gets mad. I'm sure some people will get mad at both options.
COD can be fun, but to me it gets boring quickly.
cs skins are pulling in a billion a year nowadays.
Yeah, the CS skin market is pretty crazy, but its still no where near CoD sized. Black ops 6 turned over $3 billion in revenue, and black ops 7 is expected to sell higher yet.
I find the yearly release model exhausting, honestly. Some people only play Call of Duty and still spend more per year than I do on video games.
Yeah 2fort damn, servers been running 2fort only games 24/7 for decades...
I have fond memories of 2fort. Desperately wanting to play TF1 on a 14.4K modem from Germany - no European servers meant playing with 500ms ping, which made aiming completely impossible, so I took the pacifist route each time by picking the scout class and then trying to steal the flag unnoticed by coming in through the sewers. It worked sometimes when the server was only half full.
I would just play as medic and camp the enemy spawn room, infecting them as they spawned and watch as they passively infected their teammates. It was great fun (I have since grown as a person). It wasn't long before the enemy spawn rooms would instantly kill you if you entered.
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.
Halo wasn't even ported to the PC until 2003, and wasn't well regarded or played much.
It even had a Mac port. Supported both PowerPC and Intel! Though yeah--I'm not sure how many players it had. It's just neat that it happened.
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
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.
I pine for a time pre-CS, pre-QWTF when dm4 would have been top dog in the most played map.
We probably had more fun on death32c though.
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...
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/
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.
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..
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
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.
Rust and NukeTown are iconic maps from CoD. At least for younger folks like me who grew up on Xbox.
I still don't get how dust2 became more popular than the original dust.
Sniper battles from spawn, and no nade hallway of doom?
Yeah just tradeoffs I guess. I mean at one point you could get a kill and buy a mac-10 first round if you were lucky enough.
Mostly balance issues, I think. Balance matters in pubs.
If dust had the underpass-stairs option from the beginning, and maybe moved the T spawns forward by 1 second, it probably would be just as popular today.
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 was thinking that really the article should have been about dust2. By far the most enduring map of any game ever created.
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'd love to see actual data on most-played maps across all FPS games
Facility must be up there.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
You can sell and make skins without the literal loot boxes
> 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.
#StopKillingGames
Did you miss the entire article? CS itself came from a dorm room. You can have excellent games that spawn from creativity instead of monetization.
I was really into the odd maps (NIPPER) and early Internet community around games (joe2). We hosted servers off of unused CPU cycles from oil exploration boxes.
This still exists all over the web, but the creators that figured out economics moved on.
Valve has already pretty much "shut the door" on its games relatively to how much money they have and how much dev effort they could put into it if they actually tried harder, because they're mostly just maintaining their gambling facades (cs/dota2/tf2) and abandoning everything else (l4d2/other stagnant games and ip).
I love CS, but I also hate the gambling shit. You can literally spend your death time gambling in the game.
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
> 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?
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.
Saying its among the least egregious examples just isn't true. Doppler knives can sell for over $10,000. We know the sorts of psychological outcomes that occur from putting a vanishingly unlikely $10,000 jackpot on a slot machine.
People will willingly blow their paychecks, week after week, hoping to strike that 0.00275% chance for big money. This is bad for society, just like slot machines.
I agree that the gambling side looks bad, egged on by streamers pretending to be overjoyed when they win, but is $10000 really big money? I'd have thought a lottery ticket would be far more enticing.
I think the psychology is a bit different though, winning the lottery is a moonshot that everybody will at least say they don't think will ever, ever happen.
Meanwhile you can watch a video on youtube of a streamer pulling a $10000+ knife, several $1000+ knives, and a litany of $100+ knives and skins all in a single stream (where they sat opening cases for 8 hours straight and spending $18000 on 2000 cases + keys).
I think generally the way I've experienced people justify it is that $10000+ would be a life changing amount of money for them in a way that the $100 they have on hand isn't, and even if they strike out they still get cool skins for a game they play, so why the hell not. And eventually they are $2300 dollars poorer, with nothing to show for it but some in game skins.
Gift Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/arts/counter-strike-half-...
ty
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.
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.
Personally, I used my Steam Wallet money to purchase several of the most popular skins on a third-party site and resold them there. I probably took about a 15% hit but who can complain for $400 in profit?
> 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
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.
Made $350 selling all my crates when csgo 2 came out
I had a M4 skin that was a rare skin back in 2014. I traded it for a knife back then.
The skin is worth over $2k now, oh well.
Same for TF2. I got like ~300€
Where would I check to see if I have any of these crates?
Go to your Steam inventory and look for Crates.
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.
We're in a bubble.
Oh, absolutely!
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.
Would they? Gun game has been an official game mode is CS for a long time, 2 of the maps follow the same layout fy_iceworld. COD had/has it as well.
I've even stumbled upon fy_pool_day recreation in Roblox.
Almost anything your nostalgia can think of is available "current" games like Fortnite and Roblox.
> Gun game has been an official game mode is CS for a long time
This official version differs quite a bit from the original gun game though and it is not as fun.
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.
Mostly non-AAA studio games. Then there's plenty of games with steam workshop or nexusmods support, even easier to mod these days as they use Unity or Unreal and you don't have to rely on an homegrown SDK release.
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.
Battlebit, Valheim, Core Keeper, Minecraft, Enshrouded, Palworld, Ark
Given the thread, I'm assuming their mostly referring to CS 1.6, but games like Minecraft are another example.
Factorio and Minecraft.
Rust!
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 :(
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.
There was also the whole branch of Surfing, which exploited a glitch in the physics engine that caused standing sloped surfaces to generate forward velocity. Flying around massive expansive maps gliding on slopes while blasting people with shotguns was so much fun (or sniping them mid air with an awp).
There was also a whole sub-genre of skill surf, with mechanically challenging courses to complete.
Oh and then kz maps too, which was just for climbing up huge structures.
Good times
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.
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.
RA3 is where I started my interests in first-person shooters. My family and someo of their friends had a clan, and they would hold LAN parties, playing matches against other clans. Sometimes I was allowed to play a bit, and got instantly hooked.
When I got my first personal computer, I stated playing RA3 a ton–and Unreal Tournament on the side. Later on it became Quake 3 OSP/CPMA (as well as Freeze Tag and InstaGib) and Quake Live Clan Arena, but never really competitively.
At the same time I also discovered CS 1.6. It was sort of a relaxation from all the fast-paced fragging for me. I liked the slower pace and different skill it required. I eventually joined some tournaments and started playing more competitively, hooking up with people in IRC.
I try to seek out games every now and then, but unfortunately there's less and less communities around Q3 and the likes, so it's becoming increasingly harder to find fun matches.
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.
You get to know the areas of the map from which you can see the most and are exposed to the least, and move along those lines as much as possible.
CS requires more skill considering just mechanical and movement skills... let alone everything else ;)
Competitive Quake is to CS, like bowling is to basketball btw
This is a silly take. You're comparing apples and oranges.
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.
The issue that was noted at larger LANs I used to go to was that matches of DotA could lock in around 12 people for around 45m per game which would make getting participants for other games more difficult. There would be constantly running CS/UT servers where people would drop into to kill time, but trying to get a large game running or something like battlefield required advance planning
Agreed. The only thing more technically challenging than Q3 was its aptly named Challenge ProMode (CPM) mod which added thing like full air control to make gameplay even faster. Watching demos of the best CPM players I had the feeling that they were playing the game faster than I was able to follow it.
i used to think that too coming from quake i was like wtf if i die i have to just wait? lol. but i've grown to love all the tactical skill required in CS. tbf back in the day you could bunny hope like a quake player before they neutered all that
I can somewhat relate as the creator of fy_iceworld (if you believe). The one who commented on the Rock Paper Shotgun article.
The quote from the NY Times article, "it allows amateurs to add imagination with limited resources." is exactly what I was feeling at that time. I knew nothing about programming, had minimal art skills, but was able to create CS maps.
It makes me nostalgic and wonder, "What if I started making a mod or a game today?" I really miss those golden days of modding.
Nice to see someone similar. I was into the Weapons Factory mod, first for Quake 2 and then Quake 3. I made a map for the Quake 3 version that it still played this day by a small group of die-hards. I think it took me three days to make that map. Draw a brush, slap a texture on it, keep things neat. All there was too it. It wasn't long before modding just became too hard. I remember reading about static meshes being introduced in the Unreal Engine and I knew I was done.
Nice! Iceworld was a classic at my LAN parties. Great design for fast action. (Interestingly now you mention it I realize one of the call of duty MW2 multiplayer maps has the same layout).
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 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”.
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
Ah, I just Ctrl-F-ed to see if anyone else had mentioned. That mod was a little mad!
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.
The AQ2 community perceived CS as way too slow though. No wonder when you are used to strafe jumping through team jungle and urban :-)
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 .
He wasn't just "a fan", he worked on AQ2, specifically on weapon models.
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’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
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.
"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
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...
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.
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.
Yeah, man. The golden era of the internet when only nerds like us were online :)
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.
> I don’t really like the seriousness of ranked play
I see a lot of people say this type of thing and it's strange to me beause it doesn't have to be serious. You can do whatever you want within reason, as long as you're not griefing or something.
I have a group of friends who I play Overwatch 2 with occasionally, but they always insist on playing quick play instead of ranked and especially in that game quick play is just worse. Rankings are just a way to match you with people of roughly equal skill, you don't have to chase a higher rank all the time. I actually like losing ranks because it just means I'll have an easier time for a while until I go back to where I start struggling.
Meanwhile I see others get legitimately emotional about dropping a rank and I just don't get it. Relax, it's just a game. We're not playing for money or fame or anything. If you're really at a level where money and fame is on the table you probably don't care about your matchmaking rank anyway.
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
There are still some communities active on CS:Source around the place, I play Gun Game on those every now and then.
I can't quit, it's the only game I love but my hands are getting old.
https://archive.is/nzEEG
> 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
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 played thousands of hours of KZ in CSGO. I knew pretty much everyone in the community back then, was involved with House of Climb as a sort of crew member/moderator and set a couple world records and top 5 times etc.
Those were great times, but all the strafing caused some shoulder and arm problems so I eventually gave it up and moved on.
Now that's a blast from the past. Before we had good one-in-all plugin solutions for solo play, I'm pretty sure I ripped the hook code from ProKreedz for my listen server. Then I got a checkpoint plugin from another guy, LJ stats from somewhere else and so on. I could tinker with my server freely and make it work just like I wanted.
That's what I really loved about CS 1.6. It allowed so much freedom in terms of what kind of maps and plugins you could create. We got amazing community-cultivated game modes such as KZ, HNS, surf and so many more out of it. And what's more, it was relatively easy to whip up your own map in Hammer and get it out there for everyone to play.
Community servers were first class citizens back then, prominently displayed as soon as you launched the game. These days someone getting into the game might not ever find out about the rich variety of experiences provided by community servers because they get funneled right into the default 5v5 matchmaking experience.
I tried TF2 recently and it took me a minute to figure out how to play a game without queuing into matchmaking. It's a bit sad.
I honestly think developers undervalue the power of moddability in adding value and especially longevity for their games. Fortunately, and as you pointed out, CS 1.6 is still there, and there's still a lot of active communities around that game. I believe that's because the game allowed the community to carve out a space for the themselves and build whatever they wanted.
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.
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…
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.
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!
Oh man, playing CAL-I was peak adolescence for me. I even had some friends turn pro, and another became a professional shoutcaster.
I loved the CAL forums! There was an abrupt void when it was all taken down
More than just counter-strike, HL's modding system spawned a generation of new games: team fortress, day of defeat, Sven co-op, echoes, ricochet, etc. Several of them were good enough for Valve to ship them into later editions of HL, and Valve's experience shipping other people's games definitely helped them make Steam what it is today.
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.
> 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.
In its current form, the game is a shell of its former self. They took away a lot of features and maps. They even combined the reviews of CS:GO and CS2 to make CS2 look better.
You can't even play CS:GO anymore. It was all moved to CS2, with cosmetics as the highest priority.
The hostage map rotation used to be 5 maps, with variety. They've cut it to 2 maps, and are outright neglecting any variety. You can play some other maps but only in private matches.
They even got rid of the very fun drop-in mode where you could do Last man standing in pairs.
It's like they don't even care. I've completely stopped playing since CS2 and I hope they can see the metrics of other long-time gamers who also stopped.
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
This is just not true.
> 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.
What? Who told you this?
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 started beta 6 but i remember on siege i managed to get the APC stuck in the elevator located in the mining cave - i was a legend that day
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.
CS 1.5 has been clean room re-implemented GPL Quake engine, just need assets to make a fully free Counter-Strike.
https://github.com/eukara/freecs
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.
I met most of the people that inspired me to continue programming on the CS:S bunny hop servers. This game will forever be close to my heart.
It's just a platform to allow children to gamble at this point
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.
I think its both. Modding has become harder, and making games easier. At some point they are close enough to parity that it just makes sense to put in the extra effort to avoid all the tertiary issues, like copyright/trademark violations.
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.
In the FPS space, there used to be only three games worth modding for: Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life. You could make a mod back then and get tons of press and players if you could follow through. I was interviewed in popular gaming websites! The games themselves were quite simple graphically so anyone with a drip of talent, time, and motivation could contribute. That specific environment doesn't exist anymore. There are so many games now, it's an ocean, developers have exerted more control over their games, and the talent required to create content for FPS games is too high a bar now.
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.
Dayz has a lot of mods and modded maps on PC.
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 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.
I loved Urban Terror and Rocket Arena! Rocket Arena was definitely old school, I think I started playing that in '96 or '97 (the Quake 2 version).
I was very into the HL mod scene back in the day (as a player) and chatted extensively on IRC with makers. I was focused on single player mods and Neil Manke was my fav HL1 modder. Unfortunately his HL2 mod never got released.
I loved the mods for the holy trifecta: Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life. I consider it the golden age of online gaming. I also spent a lot of time on IRC servers chatting with developers (eventually joining a team myself which lead me to my current career as a developer). My favorite was for Weapons Factory, which was a popular Quake 2 mod at the time. The old dev team moved on with their lives so the community took over...and it was actually released and was even better than the first. High quality, with tons of cool maps, and for an active community of maybe 1000 people? Insane.
> I consider it the golden age of online gaming
Yeah exactly, and the golden age of modding, at least for FPS games. In a few years the engine evolves to something so advanced that only professionals can work on them. I consider HL2 the last moddable engine by the commoners. After that you gotta be a professional or someone with the patience of a saint to mod an FPS engine.
And nowadays they mostly use UE and Unity anyway. Only some of the boomer shooters are moddable.
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.
jeepathon2k was peak CS.
Seriously though, I miss the VIP and hostage rescue modes. I guess hostage rescue is still there but hardly played.
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
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
Full article: https://archive.is/g049r
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.
Counter Strike is legendary. I spent so many hours playing with friends. That's when I developed my reflexes the most. Games are sometimes an overlooked way of training your mind while having fun
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.
My favorite game. It has singularly kept me fully entertained for 11 years.
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
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.
https://archive.md/nzEEG
It seems like many Valve classics began as mods. Team Fortress and Dota also saw the light first as mods.
I think it's crazy they sell skins for like a knife and it costs $2,000.00 dang.
Stay up late playing
Scoutzknivez low gravity
A youth so well spent
Anybody got a working archive link?
https://archive.ph/g049r
And I still play CS2 all the time. Great game.
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.
Shout out to GotFrag
what's with the sign-in to read (nytimes) article?!
:(
Obligatory: https://cryptologie.net/posts/some-unrelated-rambling-about-...
> I never had any experience come close to it since then, and miss competition dearly.
This person hasn't seen competition. Take Starcraft on ICCup for example. CS/DoD where you can rely on others for team games are much easier psychologically than a one-on-one duel where it's just you and nobody else but you to fuck things up.
iPGN!