Play casual matches! They only match you with players nearby and its a lot of fun. I regularly see the same people and its a lot of fun getting to know everyone and banter throughout the game (I only play the hostage gamemode as well).

The only issue I've had is the amount of bots. When I play I regularly get into matches where 19/20 players are all bots and they auto kick you the moment you join. Its very frustrating

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leftyspook a day ago | parent | next [-]

That really is not a solution.

Third party servers used to host plenty of non-standard gamemodes that Valve does not provide. Retakes, mentioned in the blogpost, is one of those modes.

	▲	beckthompson a day ago \| parent [-]
		of course! But there isn't much else to do so I'm just giving a solution that works for me

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homebrewer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I recently looked at 1.6 servers for the first time in maybe 10 years. There are tons of active servers out there now, far more than there were ten years ago, and they're filled to the brim with bots, which definitely was not the norm back then. You used to see just a few active servers filled with real players, and the rest were simply empty, with either zero or just a couple of players who knew each other.

What changed? Was this lunacy adopted from CS2?

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beckthompson a day ago | parent | next [-]

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

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password4321 a day ago | parent | next [-]

I'd heard of https://github.com/JustArchiNET/ArchiSteamFarm for Steam cards but was not aware there were CS2 drops.

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matheusmoreira a day ago | parent [-]

Farming game drops via custom clients is prohibited since the TF2 days. Farming cards doesn't seem to be though. The support pages recognize the existence of "Steam idlers".

	▲	Ekaros 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My understanding is that farming cards is just some minimal application masquerading as some game running to Steam Client. Which then updates server and occasionally drops cards. Which then can be sold or crafted to badges. From Valve viewpoint this might even be preferable as alternative is users actually downloading those games and just running them. Not to mention the 10%-33% tax they take on their market trasnactions.

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squigz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Err, no. Bots (in the context of 1.6 at least) are not tied to a Steam account and can't earn anything.

Anyway, GP's is not my impression of 1.6 back in the day: lots of bot servers back then too.

	▲	dankwizard a day ago \| parent [-]
		Not bot in the traditional sense of the game's AI, but bots as in accounts loaded up with the bare basics to join games and AFK - They level the account, get the steam free drops, and then sell that drop + the account eventually. There is decent money in it. Back in CSGO I had a VM running two full bot servers at a run cost of ~$3.xx per week to earn ~$30 fully automated.

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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Aeolun a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Just another variation of Eternal September?

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brazzy 21 hours ago | parent [-]

No. Eternal September is about large numbers of new participants overwhelming a community's ability to maintain standards of behavior.

This is case of Tragedy of the Commons, where individuals can profit from ruining something that benefited everyone, because their individual profit is larger than their individual loss.

	▲	Aeolun 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was thinking that that’s only worth it if there’s something to gain. E.g. you need a maximum mass of people to be playing CS to make fucking with the server browser worth it. When CS was relatively unpopular, say the 1.6 era, nobody would bother with it.

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bot403 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ai has gone sentient now but just plays video games. And it doesn't want to play with a slow-moving slow-reacting human. It prefers to play against other bots.

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colejohnson66 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An all bot server kicking the only human player?

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

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bakugo a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> They only match you with players nearby and its a lot of fun

Must be great if you happen to live near one of the limited server locations with a high number of players queueing for casual.

I don't, and casual matchmaking is completely unusable for me: it almost always puts me into matches with low player counts that never fill up, and if I leave and requeue, it's almost guaranteed to put me back into the same exact match I just left, over and over again, because there are no others to join. I once left and rejoined the same match 10 times in a row before giving up and closing the game.

I don't even bother trying to play CS anymore, even though it was once one of my favorite games. Everything I loved about it is gone in favor of 5v5 competitive matchmaking and gambling.

	▲	beckthompson a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah that would be an issue... It's pretty common in like the middle of a week day and I'm in a pretty populated area