BP's Server

The Future of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

It’s been nearly four months since the release of Counter-Strike 2, leading to the quick death of CS:GO. And after playing the new game for some time, I really have not been enjoying it. The new subtick system makes the game feel more like you’re playing on ice. Along with this, while the new graphics are nice, my 2016-era hardware doesn’t enjoy it. This hardware requirement is even worse with modding!

While it’s saddening that CS:GO will no longer have support given to it, I have also seen this as a benefit. The last, stable release of the game. No more mod-breaking updates are ever going to be expected. With this, and my dablings with Matrix, and other federated services, while CS:GO still has a dedicated server browser, what if it’s possible to create a federated matchmaking system again? Not really bringing back competitive, but rather the vanilla gamemodes. As great as DS’ are, and the amazing communities that surround every server, they always are custom gamemodes:

Now, there might be an uptick in vanilla servers, as the game is dead, along with all the MM servers. But even with the extra availability, it’ll be very difficult to get into a 5v5 match, with friends. There is usually not enough open slots, or your party is too large compared to the rest of the server’s player-body, where some friends will end up on the other team.

From my background in modding CS:GO, I’m a bit interested in looking into a third-party, scalable, federated matchmaking system. I know the term federation is the new buzzword for FOSS services, but it makes sense as a means of unifying matchmaking again, in the most vanilla way possible. A collection of fractured dedicated servers, whenever they aren’t in use, can be queued and configured by a master server in order to create a match for a group of friends, or randoms.

I can see a lot of security holes from such an infrastructure, as well, which is a major issue. There’s also the question of how it’ll be implemented into the game. In order to make something like this accessible, we’d have to ensure it’s as VANILLA as possible. That means, NO DLL injections or modded clients, a discouragement of using a third-party website to manage lobbies and connect to servers. But I think that will have to be needed in order to do this. I have seen that it’s possible to modify the Panorama UI, so there may be some ability to add in integration for everything into the game. The only issue then is making the player feel dedicated enough to install a mod.

Maybe all this infrastructure isn’t needed in the first place. I remember it’s possible to use Valve’s P2P service, but is it still up and running for CS:GO? There is only a max of 10 players iirc.

Damnit, I should do this blogging stuff earlier in the day, this is way too late to be dealing with this shit. I’m going to bed. I’ll think about it more later.

Also, this post should be my first post where I have created a CI pipeline to automaatically publish my posts every time I push to the server, so hopfully I will be seeing this on production.