I felt a little bit of nostalgia toward the game, so I opened it up to play a little bit.  I played this game for about 8 years on and off (2001 to 2008 inclusive) and participated in a couple leagues such as CAL, CEVO, and CEGL. The last time I played, the community was still pretty strong – I could find a game pretty quickly and play.  Not anymore.

Public servers are almost extinct.  Most public servers that remain are Romanian.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but there is no point in joining any of these games.  They are filled with bots.  I looked at the detailed game information and it shows 19 players that all “magically” joined the server at the same time and have been playing for some ridiculous amount of time.  Playing 306 hours of Counter-Strike and earning a score of 10000+ is not possible for a human.

Out of curiosity, I joined one of these Romanian servers.  It turns out that these servers just redirect me to an actual server where people play.  The downside is that these servers are actually in Romania, which means I that pinged > 200 to the server.  A minute later I am kicked for going over their ping limit.  I still can’t play.  At least there still is a community for CS1.6.

Playing pubs seemed out of the option.  The next thing I looked at were pugs.  I looked at #findscrim and #findringer.  I remember people posting in these channels constantly to organize matches.  Not anymore.  The frequency of posts has definitely decreased dramatically.  It was hard enough for me to find a match on the west coast.  People living on the east coast and west coast both post in these channels and of course there would be more east coast games happening simply because more people lived there.  Now, with less people playing, it is even harder to find a match on the west coast.

Of course, it is normal for a game to reach a peak in popularity and then lose it over time, but I expected Counter-Strike to have a strong player base.  In comparison to other games similarly old, such as Day of Defeat (released in 2000) and Team Fortress Classic (released in 1999), they seemed to suffer a similar fate.  These games have been reduced to just servers that redirect people to different countries.  Why run these servers at all if people will lag on them anyway?  If a game is unpopular anymore, it would just have no servers at all.  Despite all of that, Counter-Strike was one of the most popular games ever made and it definitely left a mark for many gamers of this generation.

However, LC won’t tell you that your Warcraft III port is blocked.  Google a port scanner tool and have it scan your Warcraft port (default 6112).  Also make sure that the LC config file has the same port that you forwarded.  The game port that you set in-game have no bearing on the LC port.  The only requirement is that it must be different than the LC port, but that port number is not important for hosting games.

The last issue is quite obscure.  I ran into an issue where one of my friends couldn’t join my game, but everybody else could.  Warcraft simply gave him a gray screen.  I immediately thought that it was a problem on their end and not mine.  However, upon closer inspection, it appears that if I set my LC hosting port to default, everybody can join.  The reason I didn’t use the default port is because someone else was using the 6112 port and I couldn’t forward the same port on multiple computers.  I don’t really know why that is, but it works beautifully.

Once I fix it, I can use it as a file sharing, remote desktop, and print server.  More importantly, I can delegate high memory tasks that don’t require my constant attention.  I can even play Warcraft on it.  One problem though is that I won’t be able to get Internet on that computer unless I move it downstairs or use a bridged connection.  If I move it downstairs, I can’t play Warcraft, and if I use a bridged connection, I can’t get Internet computer if I’m not home.  Maybe I can get a wireless stick.  I don’t know how good network transfers are going to be on that though.  I must do research.