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
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!
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!
(I was MethodMan)
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 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.
In the late 90s early 2000s I was very into a game called Tactics Arena Online, and we had several great communities.
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.
It just sucks on so many levels that we can’t have nice things because many among us are beasts.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 think that's the thing that everyone here is ultimately mourning.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's depressing the modern COD lobbies - chucked in with skill matched randoms on a small range of gamemodes, comms kept to a minimum so no one gets offended.
Then don't get me started how 50% of playtime is spent loading / in lobbies so eye balls on store can be maximised - I'll pass.
I 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.
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.
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.
Nearly all my worthwhile experiences in multiplayer games were related to permanent server communities (CS clan servers, 2fort2furious, SWG emulator servers, ridiculous minecraft servers that were effectively collaborative volumetric databases for external design tools).
I 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.
Relevant myg0t: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/171762 (2004, NSFW)
This Flash was my introduction to Refused though so that's cool
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.
We also don't need content roadmaps for these games if you give the community modding and map tools.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
It's still very much alive.
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.
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.
Brood war is still active in Korea
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.
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.
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.
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 can't remember my handle...I've had so many over the years.
I absolutely hated server browsers. Spending ages waiting for slots to free up on decent servers. Trying a new server only to find it had 100 shitty mods installed. Servers where the admins randomly kicked or banned people, or blatantly cheated
Even just joining mid game was annoying
Give me matchmaking any day
The 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.
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.
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.
We probably had more fun on death32c though.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21021...
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.
Give me any team vs team games that are played on procedurally generated maps.
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'm pretty certain that there are modern FPS's that have gotten inspiration from that legendary map.
I gotta imagine that sucks to play in most of them. Maybe it occasionally 'works' in another game?
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
Skins is literally a money printing machine.
Skins are also a money machine but it's just false to claim without it Valve would close its doors.
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.
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.
I mean, that is still CS: you want one without gambling (which is reasonable!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
The skin is worth over $2k now, oh well.
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.
Is there a more valuable one?
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.
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.
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 :)
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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 .
The article says that Le created it though:
Two years later he created Action Quake 2, a fast-paced game inspired by “Die Hard”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.
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!
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.
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
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 :)
Connection speed an ping was absolutely terrible back then, so I didn't really get into it.
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
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.
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.
Those were great times, but all the strafing caused some shoulder and arm problems so I eventually gave it up and moved on.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
What? Who told you this?
I can't seem to find anything.
The indie scene blew up, modding is less popular.
edit: actually, I got it backwards, just browse nexus mods :)
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
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.
as_oilrig ftw
Also there were some killer WC3 mod servers out there. My goodness the fun that was had....
Seriously though, I miss the VIP and hostage rescue modes. I guess hostage rescue is still there but hardly played.
Scoutzknivez low gravity
A youth so well spent
Fond memories of 1.4 and 1.5, when it was still a Half-Life mod.
:(
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.