I didn't want to post this on a related forum since the CS community has the collective IQ of a turkey, and taking a single trip down steamcommunity.com's CS2 section you will immediately be given retina cancer, so in the interest of having an actual intellectual conversation I remembered there's a gaming section on Worlio here.

When I use the title "fell off" I don't mean CS is dead, but rather it seems like finding a good game to hop into is a dumpster fire these days. Eversince CS2 came out I've been endlessly frustrated by Valve's horrible skill group system putting me into derank hell in competitive matches against smurf accounts who should be in Gold Nova or higher. CS:Source servers are either endless deathmatch only, Dust 2 only, filled with old people who will have a meltdown if you don't play exactly how they tell you to, or all 3. And CS 1.6 is mostly just goof around servers at this point.

Valve is mostly focused on trying to "listen to the community" (that is, finally implement an automatic anticheat hoping they will stop crying, even though it will change nothing) and they've resorted to using AI to automatically ban players. In typical cheater fashion, cheat devs are already finding workarounds, while players are getting their accounts permanently banned for just using the wrong sensitivity. Previously Valve was insistent on using AI to assist human moderators, because everyone knew using an AI to automatically ban players and then let it run unsupervised was a bad idea, but I guess common sense has gone out the window.

Trust factor and Overwatch are basically dead in the water and real customers are getting the short end of the stick no matter who you are. I get into a lot more games recently where players are not sharing weapons despite having over 16k saved up while the rest of the team has no money, making fun of others and giving no useful information but just cluttering voice chat with relentless unprovoked insults, throwing rounds or teamkilling others, or just straight up not communicating. CS:GO didn't used to be even remotely like this for me.

Valve's increasing move towards Electron and React in the Steam client which has been a buggy mess on every platform, leaving slower systems completely unresponsive, among other issues, has really left me with a sour taste in my mouth. They seem to just rush everything out now. CS2's server browser isn't even the Source server browser, it takes you to the Chrome-based one that forces you to alt-tab out of the game and has a horrible interface.

I have my own CS:Source server I run from time to time but it's basically dead and I don't have a very attractive map pool, mostly just dust reskins right now, and some of my friends have been banned from all the half decent CS:Source servers for being too good at the game, so it's been a real struggle trying to find a place to go. Is anyone else angry or just me?

P.S. If any of you are interested or have suggestions for maps and such I could host then let me know. I do occasionally invite friends to an SRCDS server.

Sounds about par for the course for an online competitive shooter.

My suggestion would be to try and find an indie game that scratches your itch. Maybe try Splitgate if you haven't already.

For map suggestions, if you don't have one already I'd suggest a map that takes place on a high floor of a fancy office building/office building lobby. I know there's a couple of maps like this for CS already (at least for CS:GO), but I like the idea of mundane and neatly-organized city spaces being used for skirmishes.

Splitgate isn't an indie game and I already have Halo which is essentially the same thing, no thanks.

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EDIT: Before someone says "if you try it you'll like it": I played back a few months after Splitgate first launched on Steam in 2019, before they relaunched it as Splitgate beta and changed the logo and then the game blew up.

It wasn't as popular back then and I don't remember it being particularly remarkable.
After the game started doing well (for a time, at least) the developers did something and now the performance is... very poor for a game of this style. Also they gave me zero of the promised early supporter rewards for playing the game in it's first year when nobody cared about it, which is a slap in the face. "You're one of a few thousand who helped us gain traction. Anyway, we don't care, fuck you."
The design of the game is lazy: level design is alright but it's literally just Halo with a portal gun and even though it's fun it does next to nothing to hold my interest. Most people I know who've played it stopped caring after only a month.

Being a Halo clone, Splitgate is also a console-eqse arena shooter. CS is a tactical shooter meant for mouse and keyboard. The two play very very different, Splitgate will never scratch that same itch.

Yes, I've tried Valorant. Also played it when it was fairly new. I don't have much against it gameplay wise but I stopped playing because for a while Unreal Engine was not playing nice with my network card. Also, no ultrawide support and their anticheat is annoying. I've been a CS guy for years now, something about the purity, fluidness, and simplicity with underlying complexity makes it thrilling, in the same way Unreal never quite lived up to the legacy of Quake in my mind. Finding a different game to replace CS outside of just Valorant is hard.

That's cs_office. It's fun to mess around in but at a high skill level it's extremely T-sided and the chokepoints are terrible when you have more than 2 people camping T spawn. Office isn't in the Premier map pool for this reason. It's more of a goof around map, and as the only hostage map in CS2 it gets old quickly.

When I play CS Source this is fine, since most of the maps are made by novices for the sole purpose of being casual hangout spaces, so it's what I come to expect. I think I've played on de_nipperhouse a lot recently and that's always been fun. It's just that when I want to play the game as a team, those types of maps that aren't dynamic enough for good team strategy don't hold my interest.

I still haven't played CS2 and from what I hear it's just a reskin of cs:go.. Valve putting in minimal effort to breathe life back into the game. Guess this brought back all the tryhards too.

Almost like they realized CS:GO was a mistake but then just did it all over again.

The idea of porting Global to Source 2 was requested by players and modders for years, it wasn't exclusively because of Valve trying to stretch out the game's lifespan. That could have been a motive for releasing it so early though.

The problems have to do with the execution and many of the oversights due to the rushed release of the update, rather than just the idea of it. Most people don't really care that it's GO on a new engine because GO is something they like, and when you tamper with a long standing competitive video game that's been refined as far as it can go and you introduce major gameplay differences you'll get flamed in every direction. GO and Source were like this at launch, people complained Source was too random, everyone thought that GO wasn't competitively viable (and to be 100% honest, most of these harsh criticisms were objectively true). We don't really want a "new" CS game. You just can't change that much without ruining what makes it CS in the first place.

If Valve just waited another year to announce CS2 in order to avoid broken promisesーsomething they should already be good at, you know how much Valve hates talkingーthen CS2 wouldn't be controversial, but they rushed it out because Source 2 had been in the works for years already and apparently getting CS2 on Source 2 as fast as possible was a priority for them. Profits do matter, former Valve employees have talked about their bonuses being influenced by their contributions to the company annually which encourages smaller, quickly released projects that aren't a large investment.

I guess I'm that much out of touch with the vidya games.

Yeah, Counter-Strike isn’t as big as it used to be, but a good community server can still make it fun. For help, try forums or Discord. Just keep it fair. No dayz hacks or cheats and people will enjoy them!