[comodder]

Before we go into the death of the community servers, I'd like to take a minute to diagnose it's health. How's the conditions of community servers in your countries? How do they differ on game to game basis? How have they changed in the last 5 yrs?

I am looking for symptoms or factors server like up time, server quality & reliability (any server issues that lag, broken skins/ textures, any other technical issues), admins and player base (toxicity, admin abuse, etc), transparency in stats/ranking, bans, plugins & mods used, maps, etc., petty server wars & politics (dosing other's servers & calling it ddos -_-).

For example, in 1 of the CS games, it's not too uncommon here for cheaters to pay server owners for adminship & hence cheat themselves, only to snub & ban anyone who raise their voice against them. This is discouraging to new players. This comes under the admins & player base / community factor.

At the end of the day, the question is, does the community gaming scene have any inherent weaknesses, that encourage players to use official game servers?.

We must have a deep look within ourselves before we point the finger at Valve or any other game company.

Disclaimer: I am very pro community server / dedicated server, I highly value the idea of being able to host your own dedicated server to play with friends as per your wish, to be able to support a game's multiplayer mode for the community long after the official game company has closed it's servers. Dedicated servers are a boon and should never die.