[ghostofmybrain]

Let me paint a picture of the North American CS scene for those like guawong who don't quite understand the issue still, and think people are complaining about nothing.

The NA CS scene is a set of mutually exclusive subsets of players. For example, there is the set of players who don't even know community servers exist. These are the idiots who cry on reddit for Valve to create servers that already exist in abundance in the community. ("Valve, make scoutzknivez! Valve, unranked competitive!") These people will never play in community servers.

There is the set of people who only play CS for a very specific mod. These people surf, play Jailbreak, alternate between CS:GO and CS:S, play Garry's Mod when their favorite CS:GO TTT server is empty. These people will never play in community pubs.

There is the set of people who think they're going to become a pro, and keep giving ESEA money every month even though ESEA keeps fucking them right up the asshole and playing in 100 pugs with friendly fire off isn't going to make you good a the game. Those people will never play any community server.

But there is a key set of players in the CS:GO community that is currently disenfranchised. These are the players that migrated over from CS 1.6 (or CS:CZ) when those communities died. They don't want weird mods, or they would have been playing Source a long time ago. They don't want to play in an anonymous Valve server. They're the type of people who spent years of their lives playing only in Lobby of Laugher, Clandestine Uprising, NcB, Brass Monkey Militia, MEAN. They played those servers every day at the same time, knew all the admins, knew all the regulars. They cared about how much fps a server ran, and refused to switch to Source because it just didn't run as well. These people currently have nowhere to play.

The reason they have nowhere to play is because of !ws plugins. For every one community pub server, there 30 pub servers that only exist to generate ad revenue off of afk people sitting in spawn looking through a !ws menu. These servers are immensely successful at generating that ad revenue. They generally have 6-8 people in them at all times. If you go into one of those servers, you'll see 6-8 people at 0:20, and 2-4 person at 10:0 who is about to leave the first time an ad is played. Those 2-4 people are members of the set of players I just mentioned above. They hop from one pub to the next, trying to find one where people are actually playing the game, where a community actually exists around the server, but constantly missing each other like a scene from a bad RomCom. These people are constantly missing each other because the community is currently flooded with servers that only exist to generate ad revenue.

If !ws were properly enforced, most of those servers would disappear, but that would actually be beneficial to the community. The people in the first three sets of players wouldn't be influenced at all. The community of reddit users would still not realize community servers exist and still whine at valve to create some 64 tick bastardization of a mod that already exist. People who play for certain mods would still continue to play that mod. People who think playing with friendly fire and team chat off will make them a pro and enjoy taking it up the butt with no lube will continue to shell out money to ESEA. People who are only playing for weapon skins would just browse gambling websites instead, or maybe pop into a Valve server once in a while. But those players who are looking for a real community pub experience would now only have real servers to choose from. They would be able to actually pick a community, instead of having to mindless join and leave servers that are just ad boxes. There would be fewer of those servers, so the community would naturally become tighter and actually start to grow again.