Alright, here’s the deal, I’ve written a number of articles, columns, and even editorials about a number of different things involving games, gaming, and the communities revolving around it, generally these are based around games I play. Anyway, often these editorials are can be very long. So what I am actually starting to do is break up these longer, previously written articles into smaller parts so you can get a glimpse into the psychotic mind of a person like myself. I do this for your benefit, as, if I were to write about every bit of information cycling through my mind your brain would most certainly explode. Take note though, that my opinions are absolute and there is nothing anyone, other than myself, can do to sway me from these opinion. Now, on to the actual article.

FlyingMongoose’s Rant #1
Topic: Counter-Strike/Counter-Strike: Source Maps
Issue: de_dust2 is not the only map in the game.

That’s right, I said it, there are actually other maps in the game other than dust2, now I can already hear your minds rattling: “Yeah, but it’s the only one that doesn’t suck.”, no, it’s the only map you don’t suck at because you are scared of change and are unwilling to try to make yourself adapt to new environments. Now you’re going, “That’s not true! I play custom maps in leagues!”, that is because you are forced to, if you were not forced to play these maps in leagues I doubt you would play them at all. Also, those of you “pubbers” (pubbers is a slang term used by people of the community to reqpresent those players who play near exclusively on public servers) out there are probably saying, “I play office and Italy too!” That’s great, you still fall under the same criteria, that’s only 3 maps, of about 19 included in Counter-Strike: Source, all of which, I might add, were very well done in my, personal opinion (which includes PC Gaming way back to the days of Commander Keen). Now we have people whom are part of this community or whom may just be reading, who might say, but wait, I don’t play Counter-Strike/Counter-Strike: Source, that’s fine, most of you still fit under that category, for Natual-Selection players on the Half-Life 1 engine you’ve all sifted into only pubbing co maps, for Day of Defeat players, Day of Defeat 1.6, dod_caen (sometimes dod_charlie), Source, dod_kalt or dod_avalanche, this even happens in non-source games, BF2: Strike at Karkand. In my opinion, this takes away from the overall gameplay because every time you hop into a server it’s always the same style players doing the same style stuff, no one “doesn’t know a map” or “hasn’t played this one before”, so you get no uniqueness, no enjoyment in the actual play because you have no one doing anything really unique to get anywhere or do anything, it’s all the same old stuff. You can’t tell me that doesn’t get boring, because it gets boring to me quite quickly, it has actually gotten to the point, when playing Counter-Strike where I actually LEAVE the server if it goes to de_dust2. Now, I barely even play at all because I can’t find a server with people in it, has a full rotation, and isn’t playing dust2, for a while, that was the Steamfriends US Counter-Strike: Source Server, but, sadly, that’s even wavered recently.

Custom maps, and before you stop reading here, hear me out, a lot of you think “custom maps suck” because they either take too long to download, or they’re not enough like dust2. First of all, there are already too many dust2 map copycats, and secondly, there are some great custom maps out there, but no one gives them a chance because they think just because they don’t know the map they aren’t going to do well, even so, it still took you time to learn dust2 didn’t it? That is how all maps are, custom or not, also, what if it was the mapper right there in front of you when you played he map and you said to him: “Your map sucks.” before you actually played it? How do you think he’d feel? The other deal is, people leave when a custom map finishes downloading, immediately after joining the game, they don’t stay and wait for others to finish downloading, this diminishes the total number of players in a server and often times diminishes the game play quality, stick around for a while and wait for people to download the map, it’s really a slap in the face to mappers, other players, and the server administrators when you leave like that. Now, the next part of this argument is game play modified maps, maps like fight yard (fy_), aim (aim_), surf (surf_), and climb (kz_) maps, I’m sick and tired of finding the only servers with people in them that aren’t playing dust2 are playing these stupid gameplay modified maps, in the end, I want to play Counter-Strike, not Counter-Strike: Team Deathmatch, or practice my aim in a public server, or even “surf” or “climb”, I wanna play Counter-Strike, the way it was built, the way it was meant to be played, nothing else. I don’t mind Knife Arena (ka_) maps though so long as their played properly (king of the hill style), I just like knife fights.

The conclusion:
This has become a problem in most games today, but you, as the player, should attempt to alleviate the issue, and stop being a moron and throw some variety into your life, you may be playing the same game all the time, but you don’t have to play the same maps.

Information gathered after the rant:
Thanks to the web site Game-Monitor I’ve done some research about this issue, here’s what I came up with.

• Counter-Strike Servers
  • 32,623
• Counter-Strike Servers Running de_dust2
• Counter-Strike: Source Servers
  • 26,774
• Counter-Strike: Source Servers Running de_dust2

What do these statistics illustrate? These basically prove my point, in essence, 1/3 of all servers at any given point in time based on these statistics are playing de_dust2, and in my opinion, that’s about 18% too much. (If you don’t know math, 1/3 = 33%, 33%-18% = 15%).

I hope you enjoyed this edition of FlyingMongoose’s Rant, next, we’re delving into more fun arguments, weapon restrictions.