[Mitchell]

Originally Posted by comodder For example, bot ping is a plugin that I find hilarious because newbie players think the bot is a real player & give it call outs. Valve saw it as a method to dupe players, even though players can easily check if it's a bot or a human through "server info" in server browser.

Except that's not exactly the full story. Bot ping sure isn't really the issue. There were extensions that would make a server 75% full of "players" which would actually be bots, the server info wouldn't show them as bots as back then you could trick the master list. Players would connect to these 'full servers' and then be automatically redirected via a browser link to an actual server with players connected to it (usually only a few players in these servers also). This is pretty scummy and a cheap way to get your servers to the top of the server browser/gametracker.
We started banning plugins that faked info to the players here because we wanted to prevent bringing toxicity to our games we love to mod. This also includes just changing the visual ping of the bot, even though it's harmless it's still brings people looking here for malicious plugins etc.

[Dr.Mohammad]

Originally Posted by comodder Disclaimer: This is from my extensive experience in one game's community. The same may not be true in other games. For example CS 1.6 here is better, community is pro open source, has websites & community forums unlike the game I talked about below. I don't know about other games as I have not played them enough to comment on. Honestly in some ways it's a good thing. Where I come from, India, community servers are -100 to +10, most under 0. What I mean to say is most community servers are just servers for small friend groups that don't have user passwords. Admins ban without any reason, cheat themselves & most players just suck up to them. If you are an Admin's friend, u can do whatever the f*** you want no one's gonna raise their voice. The whole foresaken scandal is a prime example of how he was thick with the admins and got to cheat all the way through ESL India tournament!. Ahh the politics, favoritism, is just filthy! Then there are ones who DOS attack your server & boast how they are a hacker & how they "DDOSed" the server!. For GOD SAKE ITS A DOS YOU IDIOT!! Then there's the no steam side of things which alliedmodders is highly allergic to, oh god!. Please buy the game In fact every kid here wants to have his own server on the internet. The "community servers" here are on the rise, but for all the wrong reasons!. They even copy the exact name (trademark infringement?. They use "tm" in their names (lol!)). Some steal plugins, others shamelessly claim credit for plugins they haven't written a single line of code for!. It gets worse, since most these "kids" just use ready made servers from mother russia!, they just add their branding in the chat, saying the server has an anticheat named after themselves (Usually SMAC / KAC/ Detox) and BOOM, they don't even enable voting plugins or rtv!. U can't even mute a mic spammer! Yesterday some guy (a reputable member in the community here) was trying to sell SMAC rebranded in his name for $50. A quick chat with him proved he had no programming knowledge. A quick connect to his server showed the chat advertisement of his anticheat. But a quick check showed he was using the base SMAC 0.8.6.0. This is not the first time something like this has happened, there's one such person on this forum too but I won't name him. For these reasons, it's best to have official servers, where there is equality, quality & responsibility.

Not true!!
Official servers All players use cheat.
In my country buying cheat and use is very easy.
VAC is broken and need have to updates

sorry for bad speak english

[wolvez04]

Originally Posted by Starbish I'm talking about average person or sum of all players in my country

2 years ago about 350 peak people playing community servers in my country.

Now, at least 450+ during peak.

[Rattyp00ned]

i feel its because of the skins/knife plugins being illegal and motd advertisement things, servers are relying on donations more often.

[Starbish]

Originally Posted by wolvez04 2 years ago about 350 peak people playing community servers in my country. Now, at least 450+ during peak.

I thought it's decreasing globally, but it was just happening especially in my country xD

btw, I pm'ed you. can you check it out?

[headline]

There hasn't been an increasing amount of servers closing down; the downhill gameserver trend is quite steady.

If sourcemod usage is any indicator, that is. This should only push us (the modding community) to create more new and incising mods for players to enjoy

[Starbish]

Originally Posted by Headline There hasn't been an increasing amount of servers closing down; the downhill gameserver trend is quite steady. If sourcemod usage is any indicator, that is. This should only push us (the modding community) to create more new and incising mods for players to enjoy

It is interesting

[headline]

Originally Posted by Starbish It is interesting

Indeed.

Also note that November 2015 on the week of the 19th yielded over 800k players. November of this year on that same week is around 485k players. I'm still cherry-picking here, but there definitely has been a bit of player-base degradation as well. I think it's safe to blame both us and the age of the game. That's only for CS:GO, though, which probably is our most used game.

[Lubricant Jam]

A vast amount of servers have been closing down, primarily the ones that were made as pure money grabbers (specifically "communities" which release about 50 retakes servers on one machine with nothing but advertisements on and the base retakes plugin) which have started to close down because of no funding. It's now simply made people go down the P2W route with some servers and the people that ran it purely as a money maker don't care about the integrity of what they had and are moving onto other schemes (namely one person that got banned recently for trying to leak a throwaway account of mines steam password).

That being said CS:GO is not dying, that's one hell of an exaggeration and is merely people being arrogant. As Headline specified above, it's to do with the players and the age of the game, nothing more. If the speculations of Valve starting the port to source 2 then things may be on a heavy incline, only time will tell.

That's my two cents, it's a heavily opinionated debate so it's going to be an endless cycle.

[asherkin]

Originally Posted by Headline If sourcemod usage is any indicator, that is.

I suspect that some portion of that "decline" is migration from other games to CS:GO - which isn't included in those stats, so it's probably not quite as steep really.