BEVAN
Resume

Exploring the tragedy of the Counter-Strike 2 server browser

August 25, 2025

For those who enjoy Counter-Strike community servers, the situation in Counter-Strike 2 is rather dire.

An avalanche of spam has rendered the server browser unusable. The transition from Global Offensive killed multiple small communities. And large server providers have taken advantage of these problems to monopolise the market.

Trying to find a server either involves capitulating to these big vendors, or trawling through a trench of spam.

Scraping the server browser allows us to have some insight into the state of the market.

Getting the servers

The first task was extracting servers from Valve’s master list.

This is not a trivial matter: Valve provide a REST endpoint for doing so, but the endpoint is restricted to ~10-50k results per query, and does not provide any pagination support. This is because the data is extremely volatile, changing on every single query.

You can provide query parameters to change what servers are returned. By performing multiple segmented queries (i.e. by polling for maps individually, querying by different regions), and polling over a long period of time, we can gather a lot more servers. We store the maximum player count, so that we can get a feel for how occupied a server is.

The best way to approach this technique would have been to replicate Steam’s server browser. However, this would still require segmentation (due to the volume of servers), and has a messier authentication story.

After pulling this data, I threw it into a DuckDB database to analyse.

The spam problem

Across an hour period with ~1.1m active players, we pulled ~92,000 community servers with ~500,000 players. We pulled ~144,000 Valve servers, with ~910,000 players.

There is already a problem here: there are nearly 400,000 unexpected players.

Our method of sampling does have double-counting issues: if a player moves servers, they will be counted twice in the data set.

However, another issue is causing us trouble: fake servers. These are servers that report high player counts, but in reality, they have no players at all.

For a regular user, this is the experience of trying to find a community server.

Counter-Strike is usually a 5v5 game, but community servers can go up to 32 players. If we remove all servers above 32 players from our data set, we remove 200,000 players from our data set.

This still only captures a portion of the spam:

This query eliminates many legitimate servers, but we can still find spam here.

Beyond fake servers, another form of spam is simply having a lot of real servers occupy the server list.

Here are a sample of servers that are spam, either by being fake, or by suffocating the list:

How, and why?

Valve requires game servers to be registered, using Game Server Login Tokens (GSLTs). These are associated with your Steam ID, and require you to have an account that owns the game and is in good standing.

But this system has been largely evaded. For one, this system requires enforcement from Valve to provide any meaningful results. The other big problem is that spammers have access to a lot of Counter-Strike accounts. Sites offer Counter-Strike 2 accounts for sale for less than a £1.

The main reason people engage in spam is advertisement. If players can only see your server… they might try it out. While the servers may be fake, they can proxy you to real servers, albeit without the player numbers that were advertised.

The big fish

Amongst the spam, a significant portion of the market has been captured by large providers.

To identify server providers, the server name was broken down per word (and cleaned up), common words (like “mirage”) were removed, and then for each word, a cumulative total of various statistics was gathered.

Rank Keyword Total Players Server Count Avg Players per Server
1 fb-csru 58,755 1654 35.5
2 cybershokenet 15,233 2177 7
3 napas 13,528 303 44.6
4 csbullnet 8,615 239 36
5 cybersm9s 6,033 159 37.9

From the get-go, we can spot some problems. If the average number of players per server is above ~30, the likelihood of it being spam is high.

“fb-cs.ru” report ~300 active players on their own website, a vast discrepancy from what we see in the server browser. That is nearly 58,000 fake players within our data set.

When removing all servers over 32 players, you get this slightly better, but still filled with fakes list. Nevertheless, it gives a good idea as to the lay of the land.

Rank Keyword Total Players Server Count Avg Players per Server
1 cybershokenet 15,162 2175 7
2 fb-csru 11,354 862 13.2
3 napas 4,349 153 28.4
4 legcs2ru 4,335 4144 1
5 xplaygg 3,462 905 3.8
6 tverpubspace 2,729 172 15.9
7 r0对战平台天梯服务器 2,097 500 4.2
8 csbullnet 1,678 129 13
9 r0对战平台天梯服 1,616 164 9.9
10 fastcupnet 1,549 328 4.7
11 cybersm9s 1,298 67 19.4
12 m9snoi 1,128 73 15.5
13 discordggcolateam 1,010 42 24
14 pracccom 961 457 2.1
15 hollycs 919 45 20.4
16 refraggg 908 937 1
17 gamersclubcombr 863 1293 0.7
18 registre-se 857 1292 0.7

CYBERSHOKE is the primary English speaking provider, and dwarf their competition in xplay.gg.

Whereas server providers used to target a small smattering of game modes, they have a smorgasbord of options:

Spam benefits these big providers

These big providers have every single popular game mode, a large user base, and an attractive website with all of their servers. As the server browser becomes less and less useful, users will gravitate towards one-stop shops.

While server groups have existed before, this is a whole new level in size and scope.

When you become this big, you no longer need to rely on volunteer work to maintain servers: you can hire full-time developers and administrators.

A translated screenshot of an advert from Cybershoke, searching for a C++ developer.

Job vacancy for a marketing employee on a Russian job board.

Small providers will have a harder time

If you invented a novel game mode, you had a first movers advantage. But if you are a small provider, this is no longer the case.

The CS:GO to CS2 transition is a large part of the problem. Previously, these game modes and server communities developed naturally, leading to many small minnows.

But as the transition required a total re-write, these big providers could quickly establish first movers’ advantage by hiring full-time employees to replicate all the game modes before everyone else could.

I was personally fond of a group called XGC, who had these wonderful execute servers (from what I understand, they mostly pioneered the format). The transition to CS2 killed them: first because they struggled to port over the game mode, and then they were outcompeted by these mega groups.

The two groups offering executes now are CYBERSHOKE and hjemezez. hjemezez operates similarly to CYBERSHOKE.

Alternative server browsers

In the wake of the spam, people began creating their own wrappers around the server browser.

One prominent one was cs2browser.com. After a period of unusable server browsers, this offered hope that the community could work around the lack of moderation. Alas, good things don’t last, and they were acquired and integrated by a gambling provider.

In Clash news, We have purchased cs2browser.com, we will be adding this tool to stash and make it the largest map/server database for all of CS2. More big updates coming to Clash, RustClash and CasesGG soon!

Twitter

Saido was a competitor launched around the same time, but never gained any traction and now lays dead.

From what I can see, CS2ServerList and CS2Browser.net serve as viable replacement projects.

FindServers is a niche project trying to replicate the look and feel of the Source 1 server browser. That being said, having used their code as a reference for this project, I suspect they’re only pulling 30% of the available servers.

Conclusion

When people yearn for the days of community servers, this is not what they’re expecting to see. Small groups, with admins so readily available, they could be your friends.

The biggest names in the space aren’t communities. They’re faceless corporations.

For communities to grow, the environment has to be acceptable to it. The old environment, with a usable server browser, keeping the costs of advertisement low, no longer exists. To compete in this space, you have to reach your users somehow, and the big providers have all of the weapons to pummel you before you even start.

Evidently, Valve should do something, at least about the spam. But they’ve been asleep at the wheel for years now.

This should be a warning sign to any game wanting to have community servers. This is not a feature you leave running in the background. It requires maintenance. When your game becomes big, bad actors will emerge into your space.

Leave it too long, and community servers cease to be a community at all.

Post-script

Skin changers: !ws

!ws is a command that allows players to change the skins on their guns. This was a standard plugin for many years, until Valve banned it in 2015.

However, looking at the server list, you wouldn’t realise this. CYBERSHOKE actively advertises it as a feature of their Premium subscription.

Valve never actually enforced this in any meaningful way. Outside of a wave of bans in 2015 and 2016, this has mostly been ignored.

Economics

Historically, server networks were paid for in the following ways:

An example of a MOTD loading a HTML page. Pinion was an infamous group for using this vector to serve adverts.

In the modern meta, big server networks have “premium” subscriptions, and have advertising from gambling providers directly in-game.

Counter-Strike