gaming
August 16th, 2001 – 8:03PM
Over the last six months or so I have seen, what I believe many other admins are starting to see now, the decline of game quaility with Counter-Strike. What I mean by this is the maturity level of many of the players nowadays. It used to be that you could hop on a server, does not matter which one, and be greeted.
Player1: Welcome Jaxx!
Player3: Greetings, ready for a can of asswhup?
Jaxx: Always. 
But now, you log onto a server, again, doesn’t seem to matter now, and what are you greeted with?
Player1: great, nother lame ass to beat on
Player2: 3y3 0\/\/| j00r b0x!
Player3: jaxx? ghey name!
To me, it seems there are less and less of the mature players on the servers then before.
I used to run Las Vegas Gamers Assoc until I tired of all the stuff that was going on on the server, in the forums, etc, to the point where it was starting to effect me personally. And I know I am not the only one that this has happened to.
Case in point:
There has been a thread started in the Admins Mailing list recently by one of the folks that I have lots of respect for, SQLBoy. He has offered alot to the community, been a very helpful person on the list, answering questions and giving things to the community. But this is what I saw him say last night:
Well, I finally shut my public Counter-Strike servers down. Its a sad day.
Its not the cheating. I put my faith in PB and I feel they have done a good job.
I’ve been logging into my servers under a couple different aliases and the amount of hatred, biggotry, rasism, and general hatred and stupidity in the community has made me feel they don’t deserve my servers or the work and money I put into them. I remember a day when those servers were great places to play, everyone was friends, and everyone got along.
That was beta 2.0 to 5.2. Now, all those players have gone and what I have left is a bunch of 12-15 year old kids who annoy the shit outa me. You can grep the logs for “h4x”, “fag”, and “f*ck you” and I think they occur about once evert .05 seconds. Its quite sad.
R.I.P. The Executive Game (you needed 5 boxes of Ziti just to sit in on this game)
R.I.P. Operation: Llama
I’ll still be around, I have about many public/private rentals and such I have to deal with.
SQLBoy
And I agree with him. That is why I gave up running my servers. I had dumped alot of money, time, effort, along with the help of others (SantaClaws, Corona75, Ramscan, Harley77, etc etc) to run these servers. We had simple rules, but they always wanted to break them. Unlike SQLBoy, I didn’t shut them down. As some of the equipment was donated. But I did take my equipment out and gave control over to the others and they now feel what I felt.
As another poster by the name of James said:
[csserv1@cs cstrike]$ grep gay logs/* |wc -l
494
^ 2 weeks logs. I do sometimes point out to these children that statistically, something like 20% of them will grow up homosexual. They don’t like that very much. Maybe they’ll learn not to be so biggoted and hateful when they reach puberty, who knows.
I’ve come so very close to shutting down my server many *many* times. I do wonder why I spend hours and hours of my own time that I could be spending with my wife or working on other projects for the bunch of ungrateful biggoted selfish arrogant kids who frequent my server.
So, I know how you feel and you have my sympathies. At one point, I thought about having some sort of intelligence test on the web page that would give you access to the key for the server, thus elminating people with an IQ less than a grape. Sadly however, this plan is completely unworkable..
On the other hand, I don’t think a similar plan is unworkable. All you need to do is identify a hardcore of people who are mature enough to play properly and open a private server, with new people being allowed to join on an invite basis. I think I could look through the logs on my server and pull out a couple of hundred people I know to be reasonable and work from there.. Would be an interesting experiment.. Has anyone ever tried anything like this?
I think the biggest problem here is respect. There is none. No respect for our time, our equipment, our money, and our willingness to share. Yet, when they get banned, first thing they say is that we should show them respect for coming to our server. Ironic is it not?
I have noticed servers from Amateur-Hour.net go down and even go private for a time to help control some of this. Others that have gone down include Mourning After, Alpha Complex, Clan THC, just to name a few. Reason being most of the people just get tired of dealing with it.
And no, this is not only happening in the CS community. I am seeing this in many places. Everquest (just goto the forums at eqvault.com), AO (the volunteers there are flamed on many boards), Tribes2, and the list could go on. And this is pushing the good, fun loving players away. It causes people to tire of playing games or in worst case, turns them into one of these twits.
I guess I should of titled this ‘State of the gaming community’ instead, huh?
-j
