Counter-Strike is a video game that I've been playing off-and-on for more than half a decade.
The idea is that it is a terrorist versus counter-terrorist type game, either one team has to plant a bomb, or another team has to rescue hostages.
Generally you just shoot at eat other and accuse each other of cheating or being cheap.
What makes this game fun is the persistance of it, and that you can find a solid group of people to play with. I've done it all in this title, and for now, what works for me is playing online with the "Circle of Friends" group.
These are a solid group of fellows that seem to hold together pretty much, despite the bickering that tends to end these sort of things over time.
I started playing long-term with the T3Houston group ... quite some time ago, I want to say shortly after Steam came out of beta.
What I used to do is search for a game playing de_wallmart or similar, and just join up. Eventually I stick with a server that's fun and I ended up there.
The gent that ran that game, Paraas (?), had written up some scripts to permit you to purchase administrator access, which I promptly did and then exploited my knowledge of AMXX and the game to harass the other paid players.
This led to me starting up my own servers under the "Partycat.US" banner at the time, and attempting the same idea. Writing in admins and admin access was easy, running the game, was not.
So, when there are thousands of Counter-Strike servers, the only reason for people to play is because they like what you have to offer.
If that's personality, great. Perhaps your game has some good features, maybe the server is well connected. It's hard to say what it is, but, I found that if you could devote enough attention to the game, and be connected frequently, people came to hang out.
Like most online games, the servers occasionally are visited by socially unacceptable persons, and the ability to keep your game clear of these was pretty helpful.
I started running a couple of the Warcraft 3 mods, but, the big winner was the "Superhero Mod".
Superhero mod was not as frequently played online, since it seemed half the people that play CS are also sucked into some version of Warcraft.
I don't care for those at all, so I picked this. Basically, the idea was to earn "experience" points by completing objectives or shooting other players.
You could then choose heroes to add to your fold which either would give you some benefit (no reload, better guns, etc.) or had some sort of ability.
Given that I liked to tweak the game alot, this was perfect.
The amount of XP earned had to be monitored and balanced, so that new players didn't get demolished, and regular players didn't earn their way to the top of the ladder right away and lose interest.
This went hand-in-hand with monitoring the hero selection, since most of them were utter garbage that were all the same thing. 999 health, 999 armor, bunch of guns, etc. That gets old.
I went so far as to write my own hero, "Chubby checker", who made the targeted player "do the twist". It was popular with my group anyways.
So, you also had to make the game fun from time to time, and this included such favourites as:
Unfortunately, I tried to capitalize on the minor success I had, and looked into the game server market. The profit margins are about 0, as the fellows at VSK would indicate when they sold out to AoWC.
I had servers at LayeredTech in Texas, hosted games in Chicago at Cybercon, and a box somewhere at FDC, as well as in California. That all cost a ton of money and it took about a month before I had other things I needed to do and just dropped it. It did pay for itself for a bit, but, I don't have time to deal with the complaints from internet children who are trying to do... something to which I could never figure out.
Today I play at [COF] and utilize the shotgun liberally. That's about as far as I'm going to go for the time being, because my time is limited.
That's the story anyways.