Jesus. I hadn’t thought about it.

I never make friends in games these days. I just drone around and quit when I get tired of it. I don’t even like multiplayer anymore. This is why.

Back in Counter-Strike/CS: Source days I made a ton of real friends. I knew what was going on in their lives. I congratulated them when they got married and had kids.

My clan server was always full of regulars just laughing and telling jokes and making changes to the server to see what worked for us. We had it perfect. Vote for knife fights, fun sounds like “gotchya bitch” for a knife kill. We built it together and we all stumbled into the server by accident and it just fit who were so we stayed. We had a rotation of maps that we all agreed on.

They’re still on my friends list. Last online 11 years ago, 7 years ago, 13 years ago, 12 years ago.

Damn, looking at that hurt a little bit.

It’s sad just how fast time goes. I have no idea where they are now or what they’re doing. That sucks.

The last time I talked to the one dude he had overdosed on heroin and was trying to get his life together. He might not even be alive anymore.

For nearly 5 years I hung out with those dudes every night.

I meet people now that I could see myself being friends with, but there’s no incentive to talk to them again. Random lobby, play game, the end.

I was hoping GO (now 2) would have an active user base in the servers. Nope. No gungame, no endless custom maps, no fun sounds, just base shit.

As sad as it was, I’m glad you made me think about this tonight.

Spot on!

Sometimes even cheaters could be dealt with without an admin in those days. Servers would have fun game settings and odd maps that would break cheating gameplay.

My brother and I often played CS in the same room, on opposing teams because we didn't like being cheated and didn't want to be cheaters. We found an empty server with a sniping-only map. Made for great fun and someone joined in about 15 minutes later. They seemed really good, so we joined together to see if we could make it challenging. The new guy was just too good, so we decided to swap back and forth with the new guy to see if one of us could make a 1v2 miracle happen. That's when we figured out he was impossibly aim hacking. Bummer, our fun game was toasted.

Then we realized the map settings had friendly fire on and a 5 second start delay. Aim hacks don't target your own teammates. A perfect trap was available: we'd headshot TK the cheater at game start and then 1v1 each other. The cheater tried swapping to the other team only to find my brother using the same TK tactic. Our cheating friend found himself without a chance to grift. Needless to say, he didn't hang around for long.

Holy fuck I miss community servers