[homebrewer]

I recently looked at 1.6 servers for the first time in maybe 10 years. There are tons of active servers out there now, far more than there were ten years ago, and they're filled to the brim with bots, which definitely was not the norm back then. You used to see just a few active servers filled with real players, and the rest were simply empty, with either zero or just a couple of players who knew each other.

What changed? Was this lunacy adopted from CS2?

[beckthompson]

I'm pretty sure the bots are farming "Drops" which they'll sell for money. Every week you get a free case (or skin I think) which the bots are taking advantage of

[squigz]

Err, no. Bots (in the context of 1.6 at least) are not tied to a Steam account and can't earn anything.

Anyway, GP's is not my impression of 1.6 back in the day: lots of bot servers back then too.

[dankwizard]

Not bot in the traditional sense of the game's AI, but bots as in accounts loaded up with the bare basics to join games and AFK - They level the account, get the steam free drops, and then sell that drop + the account eventually.

There is decent money in it. Back in CSGO I had a VM running two full bot servers at a run cost of ~$3.xx per week to earn ~$30 fully automated.

[password4321]

I'd heard of https://github.com/JustArchiNET/ArchiSteamFarm for Steam cards but was not aware there were CS2 drops.

[matheusmoreira]

Farming game drops via custom clients is prohibited since the TF2 days. Farming cards doesn't seem to be though. The support pages recognize the existence of "Steam idlers".

[Ekaros]

My understanding is that farming cards is just some minimal application masquerading as some game running to Steam Client. Which then updates server and occasionally drops cards. Which then can be sold or crafted to badges.

From Valve viewpoint this might even be preferable as alternative is users actually downloading those games and just running them. Not to mention the 10%-33% tax they take on their market trasnactions.

[Aeolun]

Just another variation of Eternal September?

[brazzy]

No. Eternal September is about large numbers of new participants overwhelming a community's ability to maintain standards of behavior.

This is case of Tragedy of the Commons, where individuals can profit from ruining something that benefited everyone, because their individual profit is larger than their individual loss.

[Aeolun]

I was thinking that that’s only worth it if there’s something to gain. E.g. you need a maximum mass of people to be playing CS to make fucking with the server browser worth it. When CS was relatively unpopular, say the 1.6 era, nobody would bother with it.