Primarily, there’s casual matchmaking, which actually is full of new players. Sadly, especially in off-hours, there’s also a lot of bots hosted by some mentally unstable script kiddies (no joke, they buy in a bot hosting framework and just pop that on a VPS somewhere) dedicated to ruining the game for everyone with aimbots, mic and chat spam etc. They abuse the fact that Valve hasn’t updated the anticheat in what feels like years. Regardless, there are still tons of healthy games to be found and bots usually are kicked within seconds.
Additionally, there are community servers which, depending on the actual community playing there, can have bonkers veterans or absolute noobs. These servers often are modded, too.
My experience about a year ago. Try to hop into a game and find people complaining about bots and just vote kicking people constantly, then I got vote kicked. Join some more games that vary from people just standing around taunting, to more vote kicking, and everyone wearing stupid looking hats and shit. I used to love the game back in the day, but I gave up on it after a short time, it just felt unplayable.
In what state is the game nowadays? Is it just the veteran players and nothing else?
Depends on what mode you’re playing.
Primarily, there’s casual matchmaking, which actually is full of new players. Sadly, especially in off-hours, there’s also a lot of bots hosted by some mentally unstable script kiddies (no joke, they buy in a bot hosting framework and just pop that on a VPS somewhere) dedicated to ruining the game for everyone with aimbots, mic and chat spam etc. They abuse the fact that Valve hasn’t updated the anticheat in what feels like years. Regardless, there are still tons of healthy games to be found and bots usually are kicked within seconds.
Additionally, there are community servers which, depending on the actual community playing there, can have bonkers veterans or absolute noobs. These servers often are modded, too.
My experience about a year ago. Try to hop into a game and find people complaining about bots and just vote kicking people constantly, then I got vote kicked. Join some more games that vary from people just standing around taunting, to more vote kicking, and everyone wearing stupid looking hats and shit. I used to love the game back in the day, but I gave up on it after a short time, it just felt unplayable.