Remember when I analysed all of 1.6’s servers a while back?
Now, I’ve done it for all 3 main Counter-Strike games.
Thanks to Kinsi for creating a plugin that made getting data from gametracker so so so
so sooooo much easier!
But there is just one issue- on gametracker, players on official CS:GO servers aren’t
recorded, making the game look far less popular than it really is.
By comparison, Source has about 9,000 players, Global Offensive, 30,000 and 1.6, 53,000,
even though Global Offensive should be by far the largest- perhaps 10 times larger than
1.6.
This omission is disappointing since it restricts how much anal I can probe from these games.
I investigated this by tracking a friend’s matchmaking game and the site showed his server
as being offline.
This could mean that official Valve servers always show up as being empty for whatever
reason.
But hey, the community servers are still shown.
I’ll do what I can with the information that I can see.
But just remember that it only includes community servers, which means that Global Offensive
is very different to the older games, with official defuse, hostage, deathmatch and gungame
modes being excluded from the data!
This means that although Defuse remains by FAR the most popular mode for the older games,
in Global Offensive it’s challenged by Surf mode, which only trails behind by a small
amount.
And whereas Hostage mode sits at third place for the older games, it’s in at 15th for
Global Offensive.
I thought it was interesting that FY maps are popular for 1.6 with gungame trailing
far behind, but this is reversed for Source.
Could it be that it’s the naming scheme of the maps rather than the gamemode that’s
changed in popularity?
Third place for Global Offensive goes to 1v1 maps.
Other things I’ve noticed are that surf and bunnyhop modes become more popular in
later games and zombie mode less so.
It’s sad to see achievement maps, a mode for AFK players to ‘rank up’ their accounts
and stats, ranking 6th most popular for CSGO.
And quickly, this image shows how popular each game mode is for every game, with the
rest of the gamemodes bundled together as ‘other’.
If all 3 games were equal for a gamemode, they’d all be 33%.
But you can see that this isn’t the case.
Surf is most popular in CS:GO, fightyard in 1.6, $2000 mode in Source and so on.
If one of the games isn’t shown for a minigame, DON’T TRUST THE DATA.
It doesn’t mean that it isn’t played, it just means that it’s not that popular
and is probably bundled together in ‘other’ instead.
The most interesting bit in my opinion is that the ‘other’ minigames are most popular
for CS:GO, making it the game with the most diverse number of custom gamemodes!
This surprised me a bit.
Though I guess It makes sense, what with so many of the main modes excluded from the data
that I could see.
Back to defuse mode and I’m surprised by how accurately CS:GO’s limited data reflects
my experiences with the game.
This data was collected just days after Operation Wildfire was announced, so Nuke’s results
are probably boosted a bit by this.
You’ve got to be proud of mirage and cache, 2 maps that the other games didn’t have
/ hardly play.
I never considered Dust and Aztec to be very good maps but they have been well and truly
buried in GO.
I have no doubt that their placement in reserves has something to do with this.
I bundled custom dust2 maps separately from default.
For 1.6, these were the third most popular maps to play defuse on.
Source players don’t enjoy custom dust2 at all and it’s not that popular in GO either.
And have you noticed how there are now more servers than there are players on Dust 1 and
2?.
Could this be because they’re the default map for official servers hosting the reserve
and main map pool?
Still doesn’t explain the issue I covered earlier about whether they’re idling or
if this is how they’re displayed on gametracker by default.
Let’s move on again.
In my earlier video on this topic, I asked whether Dust2’s popularity was stopping
other maps from becoming popular.
Clearly, it still stands well above the rest, with second place mirage holding just 20%
of the popularity of the front runner, but this is better than Inferno’s 14% and 7%
in the older games.
It looks as though new maps can shuffle through the ranks, and old ones drop, even when there’s
still such a dominant first-place map.
But this graph shows that CS:GO’s map-pool is actually less diverse than the others.
If we look at just the MOST popular map, in all cases, Dust2, we can see that 70% of CS:S’s
players are on it.
64% of 1.6’s are and only 54% of CS:GO’s!
This means that more people in GO are likely to be playing on other maps other than the
most popular.
But this changes as we move across.
If we go to ‘4’, in other words, we’re counting the 4 most popular maps for each
game, then 78% of Source players are on these maps, 81% of 1.6’s and 82% of CS:GO’s!
In other words, although fewer CS:GO players are on the most popular map, more of them
are in the top 4 most popular than with other games.
And you can see that things only get worse as we move along.
CS:S is the best game if you want populated servers across a diverse range of maps.
Whereas 95% of defuse community players for CS:GO are on just 11 maps, the same 95% for
CS:S are spread across 25!
But I don’t blame this on Dust2.
I blame this on Valve’s official map pools, which have no doubt stolen people away from
this custom community and has made it more difficult for amateur map developers to have
their creations played- unless they’re selected for an Operation.
But there’s still hope: the likes of Portugal, Astramania and Aurelia aren’t official maps
and yet are still being played.
There seems to be a handful of large, popular servers that are keeping these custom maps
alive!
But other than that, official maps rule the roost.
And lastly, countries!
Gametracker ranks servers based on popularity.
Here are the locations of the top 20 for each game.
You can see that top places are held by the US and Russia.
And if I count up how many times each country is shown in this top 20 list, THIS is what
happens.
Russia dominates, thanks to the country holding 12 of the top 20 servers for CSS.
The US actually has more servers in the top 20 for Global Offensive, though.
But that’s just considering the top 20 servers.
If I add up all of the servers for all of the games… 1.6 appears to be played mostly
in Eastern European countries.
Counter-Strike Source shows a kind of balance between different places and America and mainland
Europe rule Global Offensive.
It’s interesting to see how many people there are for every server, but I can’t
draw any real conclusions from it.
In conclusion…
…yeah.