On the 3rd of December, I collected data on every active Counter-Strike 1.6 server.
Why?
Because.
For all we know, it could predict CS:GO’s future, or may highlight why it will be different.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way.
Almost 2/3 of all 1.6 players are on defuse maps, and of that, over half are on Dust2.
That’s over a third of all players playing on just one map of one gamemode!
I can’t say that I’m surprised.
In fact, I expected more.
But it’s safe to say that Dust2 is in a league of its own.
Within the defuse category, Inferno is the second most popular, followed by Nuke and
then there are like, 4 that are close to each other.
These are the surprising ones- we see maps like Aztec and Dust, which aren’t at all
popular in CSGO.
But also Westwood, the most popular ‘unofficial’ map for this gamemode.
It was made by Nipper who’s done many great maps for Valve games, including my personal
favourite, blahhh.
He’s a legend.
Going down further we see yet more familiar maps, as well as Kabul, Alexandra and Abaddon,
which all seem to be dusty in theme.
It would be interesting to see if these could become as popular in CS:GO.
But this video is just an overview so I won’t go into depth with any of these maps.
Feel free to do so yourself!
Not all servers were populated.
You can see that only 55% of dust’s were, compared with 92% of westwood’s!
In general, custom maps are more likely to be populated than the official map rotations,
if I had to guess why I’d say it’s because people have to specifically choose those custom
maps or because, after being inactive, servers revert to default maps after a while.
It doesn’t matter!
I was impressed that 77% of Dust2’s servers were populated, though.
These numbers could also be skewed by bots.
Don’t hate me, I’m doing the best I can with the tools at my disposal!
This is the CS 1.6 player population per gamemode.
As I’ve said already, Defuse is the massive favourite, followed by…
Zombie mode?
What?!
It’s even more popular than Counter-Strike’s default hostage maps!
I thought it was worth looking at which zombie maps were most popular… and it turns out
that it’s dust2.
Again.
Dust is also highly played, as is… fust?
This is just getting silly now.
I thought it was fascinating that there were 182 different zombie mode maps currently being
hosted on servers, compared with just 159 for the far more popular defuse mode.
And the third most popular was classic hostage mode.
Assault wins hands down.
Italy is next, followed by Office.
After ‘Max’, which I’ve never heard of before, Mansion (which I have) and Militia
(Which I wish I hadn’t), this mode quickly loses popularity.
The award for the least popular map goes to Backalley, where only 4% of servers running
it are actually being played on.
That’s even less than Havana’s 6%!
And although fightyard appears to be the 4th most popular mode, it should actually be jail
since there are also over 600 people on ‘jb’ maps- it appears that even after all these
years, the community is still split over which prefix should be used!
Like I said, analysing 1.6 was a very messy job and I’m sure that a lot of people will
disagree over some of the choices I made when doing it.
I chose to combine these two jail communities for upcoming analyses in this video.
Let’s move onto this question: Could CS:GO benefit from anything learned from 1.6?
Take Dust2, for example.
Is its popularity stopping other maps from having a chance?
Or is it as popular as it is because other maps aren’t as good?
And would moving Dust2 into a category of its own solve this issue, or would another
map simply rise up and take its place within the remaining map pool?
I saw this analysis of 1.6 as a great chance to test this by looking at what’s happened
in other gamemodes that don’t have such a dominant map.
If there wasn’t an obvious favourite map that got voted in at the end of every game,
surely people would be more inclined to try new and custom maps and the map-pool would
be more diverse as a whole?
Maybe, but take what I’m about to say with a pinch of salt.
This was because comparing different game-modes was like comparing apples to oranges.
They are all unique in how they operate!
Take GG, for example, which has no single favourite map.
But not only that- there were seemingly very few designed for it and its players seemed
happy with maps designed for other game-modes instead!
It just seems to take whatever it can from others.
If I compare the two game-modes, you can see how dominant Dust2 for defuse is.
Even if we remove that map from defuse and zoom in a bit, you can see that defuse players
still play a smaller map pool than those in gungame, who seem more open to trying more
than just the 10 most popular maps for the mode.
But you can’t just lop off the most popular map and assume the results still mean something,
since those players who were on Dust2, without it, might not remain on defuse at all!
Even with Dust2, Assault and the most popular jail map, Buyukisyan, these favourites can
still be spread across several different versions!
Dust2 alone comes in more flavours than some entire gamemodes.
In fact, the gametypes with the most dominant maps were FY and AWP.
AWP had ‘India’ which had very little variation to its design, apart from a sequel
which I grouped separately and which became the second most popular map for the gamemode!
And FY Snow alone took up 63% of all players on the game-mode, though the average number
of players per server is surprisingly low.
I noticed a lot with 3 players on, which I suspect could be bots.
If you want to find out then be my guest, because they’re seriously inflating how
popular this gamemode looks.
A bit of a confession to make, I wasn’t happy with any graph I could come up with
to show this stuff.
But this sort of does it.
In short, the further down and to the right these curves are, the more maps that are being
played by an audience.
Those up and to the left to the left imply that a game mode is more likely to be dominated
by just a few maps.
Take this red line, for example, which covers the zombie game-type.
It starts here since the single most popular map is being played by 10% of the entire playerbase.
To cover half of all players, we have to include the 16 most popular maps, and finally, by
the 149th most popular map, it has now included everybody.
The opposite of zombie mode would be fightyard, which has fewer maps and over 90% are playing
on just the 4 most popular maps.
It makes sense that the higher up these lines start, the more dominant the most popular
map for the gamemode is.
And most of these results are pretty consistent; modes with no single star map, like Zombie
and Jail mode, also have the most variety being played.
Makes sense to me.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the maps for these modes are bad, it could just mean
that appeal of these modes is more about their unique gameplay and that part of the fun is
in playing it on new maps.
On the other end of the spectrum you have FY and hostage maps, where perhaps the maps
require more time to master so fewer are played.
The most interesting has to be Gun Game, which manages to have the least popular MOST popular
map and yet still has less variety than the likes of jail and zombie mode.
This suggests that Gungame’s fanbase has a large number of regular maps that they like
to play on.
For the record I play very few of these modes, please let me know if I’m reading into something
that isn’t here!
If you’re a fan of Vsauce, you might have watched his Zipfs law video, which says that
almost everything you can imagine is governed by a strange rule where the second most popular
thing is half as popular as the first, the third one a third as popular and so on.
But does this apply to 1.6?
I compared it to Counter Strike’s 8 largest gamemodes to find out.
Now, I have 2 Zipf’s laws, the infinite one is if there were infinite maps to compare
it to whereas the other is just if there are the same number as the gamemode in question.
Because of the limited nature of these gamemodes, this red line is more important than the blue,
which is just there to protect me from anal statisticians.
Most gamemodes have one super popular map that is greater in comparison to the others
than Zipf’s law would indicate, which ruins it all pretty quickly.
And of course, since more are on the most popular map, there’s less percent to share
across the others so the tail of this graph tends to underperform compared to the law.
This has definitely happened with Fight Yard.
Its small map pool breaks the law pretty clearly.
Jail and deathrun modes follow it most closely.
The rest follow it to some extent though I’m not that impressed with them.
I conclude that since it varies so much per comparison, that Zipf’s law is just another
way of showing that different gamemodes seem to favour differently sized map pools.
I think from this we can say that not every gamemode needs a map as dominant as Dust2
in order to be successful.
But perhaps some do benefit from having just a few dominant maps!
But the more maps being made for a game-mode, the more chance there is of a good one being
made.
As Valve, I’d feel it was my responsibility to give these with potential a foothold- enough
exposure to raise the good ones above the bad ones.
At the moment we have operations to do this and ones that aren’t featured, don’t stand
a chance of ever taking off.
Several times a year, a handful of maps are chosen and are given a decent chance to become
fan favourites.
But is this a viable replacement for the variety that a server browser can offer?
Does it make it more, or less fair?
I think there are better solutions to be found.
I propose officially introducing workshop maps into the game.
I’m sure we all have a different ideas of how this could be done, but here’s mine.
Have a Dust2 option.
It’s earned a permanent place in the game.
Maybe even keep the Active map pool for Mirage, Cache, Inferno and other long-time favourites
and tournament choices.
But replace reserved with an ever changing assortment of workshop maps, which are hosted
on official servers.
In this mode, at the end of every match, an option could appear for players to rate their
experience on that map.
Using some kind of ELO system based on these ratings, the most popular ones could get hosted
more regularly and once they gain enough support could be upgraded to the active map pool for
a more permanent placement.
The difficulty is keeping this liquid enough to always give newer maps a chance, but also
solid enough that maps on the list are given a decent chance before being displaced by
others.
I don’t see this as my job to worry about!
And why limit this approach to maps?
Give official support to other game-modes as well, perhaps in the form of an icon for
every game type.
Have a ‘gamemode of the day’ and if people like it, they can add it to their favourites
for quick and easy access whenever they want.
This would all be a lot of work for CS:GO developers to create and to maintain.
And the game’s doing well without it.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But looking at the communities that 1.6 and CSS had, it seems a shame that these smaller
communities have been hidden out of site in CS:GO, replaced by more mainstream game modes.
Even going through and constructing this list, I encountered difficulties and made many assumptions,
like assigning maps with a CSS prefix to the CS gamemode.
I found some maps with names like gg_lego_arena_cs16_c- I mean, what am I supposed to do with a name
like that?!
I found remakes of newer maps, as well as references to modern things like overpass
and Skyfall.
I found de_italy and fy_dust2.
I felt like a complete noob for not understanding things that appeared common within certain
subcommunities.
Things like 32 and 2x2, which I suspect indicate player numbers, or LG which appears to be
a large gaming community?
I felt like an explorer, discovering a long lost tribe!
No offense, 1.6 players.
But if custom maps are to be properly supported, the workshop needs to prepare for spin-offs.
For example, you have a map’s prefix, like de_.
Then you have the name of a map.
But more popular maps get another part of their name after this!
And with a map as big and as popular as Dust2, even these spin-offs can get spin-offs!
Popular maps continue to evolve and to branch out into niches tailored for specific players.
It’s beautiful to behold, but also a down-right pain for me to document and for the workshop
to deal with.
As well as misspelt names and ones that refuse to fit into existing categories.
But rather than seeing this as a problem, we should see this as the thing that’s nurtured
and evolved a diverse, custom community in the first place.
It’s this variety that makes custom maps and gamemodes so successful! (page 260)
Even if Valve doesn’t choose to support these communities -which would be a massive
undertaking- I still think it’s wrong that they hide them away within the server browser.
I’m sure that many players who would LOVE these custom gamemodes aren’t even aware
that such communities exist!
We need to raise awareness to this side of the game, since it’s this that has made
the game what it is.
Counter Strike itself was a mod for Half Life!
There will be a lot of mistakes with my findings.
I captured all of these servers as quickly as I could but some will no doubt be double-counted
if any started up or closed down as I was doing this(ie, 79 to 80).
I did this at around 5 in the evening for me, meaning that Russian and Chinese servers
make up a lot of the results.
I’m sure that I’ve mistaken bots for real people.
But getting hung up on these things would be missing the bigger picture.
I hope you’ve found this research interesting.
I’ve only scratched the surface of what we could learn from 1.6 and hope that others
will carry on where this study left off.