I feel like it should be up to valve to fix this no? It feels like it should be possible to require an email for everyone that wants to start a server and then boot all of the ones that cannot be bothered to reply to your messages to stop spamming the server browser.
If they start banning everyone that does it even those operators will rapidly run out of burner accounts. Can’t keep justifying $30 for every CS purchase if it’s going to be banned a day later.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
> Unfortunately a steam account is required to run a server, and that burner accounts are no problem for server operators, which was mentioned at the end of the article, so the strategy you suggested wouldn't work
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
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The person who used to run the server network I was describing replied to me, but alas I think they didn’t see my reply[1]. This is one of the few times I wish HN notified you of replies. Maybe I’ll run into them again in another decade or two.
My point is that a brand new user might not know they need to manually check for replies. They’re much less likely to know about some third party utility for monitoring them
That’s a feature, not a bug. Real time Reddit-style reply notifications encourage flamewars, or at least less thoughtful comments. I’ve even found myself falling into that trap now that I get notifications from HNReplies.
Hm thanks for the meta-discussion. I thought I was missing a "reply notification" setting somewhere and was meaning to go search for enabling it one day.
This was also my experience when joining the site. Nowadays I appreciate not having the notifications, but when I joined I didn’t realize there weren’t any and I missed some comments I would have preferred to respond to.
> This should be a warning sign to any game wanting to have community servers. This is not a feature you leave running in the background. It requires maintenance.
Which, to most game developers, looks like a great reason to not have community servers.
When developing anything (including games, but really anything that accepts user-generated content), the developer MUST ask and address in their design: “What possible ways will this be used to make spam?” Humans suck, and always eventually turn every unmoderated resource on the Internet into spam. I wish we could edit this shitty gene out of human nature, but we can’t.
They could also use the Minecraft approach, where you're free to join servers via IP/domain addresses from a simple UI instead of being obliged to trudge through the browser.
Console isn't even enabled by default. The average player would need to:
1. Enable Developer Console in Settings
2. Find a server via a third party website
3. Use said IP + Port to connect.
* This results in low dedicated server player counts due to effort and the issues mentioned in the blog above.
Valve has expressed intentions directly and indirectly to remove the console from CS2 and operate almost exclusively out of the in-game Settings menu.
Over the years, this setting menu has increased in options. Although to cover the vast amount of commands is simply impossible.
Nothing changed, you need to know that host:port first, and that's where the problems with the official serverlist being flooded with fake entries become apparent.
I'm in the group of people looking forward to CS:Legacy. it is a fan-made project to revitalize the classic game, based on Valve's public 2013 SDK https://x.com/cslegacygame
I play SvenCoop a lot and mostly just stick to a handful of servers. The amount of servers is such that discovering new ones is pretty easy. However it also makes it a bit vulnerable to your favourite server getting hit by a DDOS attack or protocol exploit (thankfully that one was eventually patched!).
So there are problems at both extremes.
Never underestimate salty gamers. One entirely reasonable moderation decision against a mentally underdeveloped player with too much money or time and you'll inevitably be ddosed.
Welcome to 2025, where any channel of human attention will be tragedy-of-the-commons'd into dust to squeeze out some kind of profit. Settle in and watch the malthusian trap slowly shut.
Hmm... Servers with more than 10 players are common for different game modes, like deathmatch, scout vs scout, gun game, dueling servers, zombie modes etc. A server with 32 active players isn't automatically fake.
I feel like it should be up to valve to fix this no? It feels like it should be possible to require an email for everyone that wants to start a server and then boot all of the ones that cannot be bothered to reply to your messages to stop spamming the server browser.
As someone pointed out (and I should’ve mentioned earlier in the article): yes, Valve have a system for registering servers with Steam IDs.
But there’s two problems: they haven’t done any enforcement action ever, and server owners have access to massive amounts of burner accounts.
edit: I've now updated the article to mention that in the main body of the text.
If they start banning everyone that does it even those operators will rapidly run out of burner accounts. Can’t keep justifying $30 for every CS purchase if it’s going to be banned a day later.
Agreed. With that being said, the price isn't $30 for the spam creators, they're buying shady accounts for far cheaper.
[flagged]
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To be fair it’s a footnote and the article is a little difficult to follow
All feedback on the latter point appreciated :).
Maybe op isn't familiar with counterstrike servers as they were back in the day. For me it was a very easy read.
Glad to hear it was an easy read for you! I did do some refactoring of the article based on the feedback here, so that might have also helped.
> Unfortunately a steam account is required to run a server, and that burner accounts are no problem for server operators, which was mentioned at the end of the article, so the strategy you suggested wouldn't work
FTFY
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
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.
of course! But there isn't much else to do so I'm just giving a solution that works for me
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?
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
I'd heard of https://github.com/JustArchiNET/ArchiSteamFarm for Steam cards but was not aware there were CS2 drops.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Just another variation of Eternal September?
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.
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.
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.
An all bot server kicking the only human player?
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.
> 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.
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
Related recent discussion 1 week ago, with a 200+ comment initial sub-thread on how the server browser was a key part of the "good old days":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941369 (460+ comments) Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
> I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers.
The person who used to run the server network I was describing replied to me, but alas I think they didn’t see my reply[1]. This is one of the few times I wish HN notified you of replies. Maybe I’ll run into them again in another decade or two.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44953109 (of course, rACEmic might just not be interested in reconnecting, which is obviously okay)
I use HNReplies. It sends an email for each reply, and is quite reliable and fast.
My point is that a brand new user might not know they need to manually check for replies. They’re much less likely to know about some third party utility for monitoring them
That’s a feature, not a bug. Real time Reddit-style reply notifications encourage flamewars, or at least less thoughtful comments. I’ve even found myself falling into that trap now that I get notifications from HNReplies.
Hm thanks for the meta-discussion. I thought I was missing a "reply notification" setting somewhere and was meaning to go search for enabling it one day.
This was also my experience when joining the site. Nowadays I appreciate not having the notifications, but when I joined I didn’t realize there weren’t any and I missed some comments I would have preferred to respond to.
Please note I said “This is one of the few times I wish HN notified you of replies”. I’m normally glad it doesn’t notify me for that very reason.
> This should be a warning sign to any game wanting to have community servers. This is not a feature you leave running in the background. It requires maintenance.
Which, to most game developers, looks like a great reason to not have community servers.
I don't have any solution for this.
When developing anything (including games, but really anything that accepts user-generated content), the developer MUST ask and address in their design: “What possible ways will this be used to make spam?” Humans suck, and always eventually turn every unmoderated resource on the Internet into spam. I wish we could edit this shitty gene out of human nature, but we can’t.
They could also use the Minecraft approach, where you're free to join servers via IP/domain addresses from a simple UI instead of being obliged to trudge through the browser.
Has anything changed in CS2? You could always just `connect host:port` in the console in Counter-Strike.
Console isn't even enabled by default. The average player would need to:
1. Enable Developer Console in Settings 2. Find a server via a third party website 3. Use said IP + Port to connect. * This results in low dedicated server player counts due to effort and the issues mentioned in the blog above.
Valve has expressed intentions directly and indirectly to remove the console from CS2 and operate almost exclusively out of the in-game Settings menu.
Over the years, this setting menu has increased in options. Although to cover the vast amount of commands is simply impossible.
Yet known the debug or cheat-protected commands.
Nothing changed, you need to know that host:port first, and that's where the problems with the official serverlist being flooded with fake entries become apparent.
One thing that has nicely developed there is a set of submission-only websites for viewing servers.
I'm in the group of people looking forward to CS:Legacy. it is a fan-made project to revitalize the classic game, based on Valve's public 2013 SDK https://x.com/cslegacygame
I play SvenCoop a lot and mostly just stick to a handful of servers. The amount of servers is such that discovering new ones is pretty easy. However it also makes it a bit vulnerable to your favourite server getting hit by a DDOS attack or protocol exploit (thankfully that one was eventually patched!). So there are problems at both extremes.
Why would someone DDoS a Sven Coop server of all things? Is there anything to gain by doing that?
Never underestimate salty gamers. One entirely reasonable moderation decision against a mentally underdeveloped player with too much money or time and you'll inevitably be ddosed.
Welcome to 2025, where any channel of human attention will be tragedy-of-the-commons'd into dust to squeeze out some kind of profit. Settle in and watch the malthusian trap slowly shut.
Hmm... Servers with more than 10 players are common for different game modes, like deathmatch, scout vs scout, gun game, dueling servers, zombie modes etc. A server with 32 active players isn't automatically fake.
Not what I meant to convey, I need to adjust some wording there!
I figured you knew that and it was just awkward wording :)
FWIW there's https://cs2browser.net