Originally posted by kanezfan
I don't understand the CS obsession. I've tried to get into it several times, but each time i've come away with a feeling of wtf?

Did you start trying it during the betas? The community has really went to shit ever since 1.0 (retail). Think of it like this... during the early beta days 1999 - Aug. 2000 the CS community was as friendly and honest as the Icrontic community. Lots of teamwork, very very small amount of cheaters, mature players (would be very rare to see anyone under 17 playing... or at least they didn't act it if they were).

The community is really what hooked me to the game. I loved the updates, only useful things were added. Now everything that is added has to go through VALVe (big company) and be approved, so the only new features the game ends up getting are really gimmicky ones.

Unless you're a very good player, I can understand why playing in public servers isn't fun. If you belong to a clan though, playing competitively where everything is very organized and you can't survive without teamwork is still fun.

The only thing really keeping me playing it for the past year and a half is that I became part of a small community that admins a CS server. Basically, i'm the guy who does all the technical work installing and updating software, anti-cheat work, coding plugins, etc. This also means though the server environment can easily be moderated, no one is going to ruin my game acting like a dick because they'd be banned the first few seconds they tried. I shudder to think about playing CS outside of that server. If you don't believe me, here's proof: *shudders*

IMO, the future now lies in the HL2 mods created by small independent teams, though that's probably pretty obvious to a lot of people.