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: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
201–210 of 478 posts
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
I’m sure an anthropologist can clarify, but once a community reaches a certain size, it seems that emergent properties take over.
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 St…
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 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.
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
Discord servers are the closest. People do build up friendships, relationships, enemyships, and a public persona / reputation within a Discord server.
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#206I 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…
People would practice 5v5 and find an opponent team on irc around 2002 2004
#FindScrim #FindRinger was where my free time was spent in the early 2000's!
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The CPL was big and CAL was amazing for non-pro players.
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#208I 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…
> 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.
Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#209Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
#210I 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…
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.