Lately, there have been more and more reports of players not being able to use the community servers in CS:GO at all or with difficulty because of a glitch or exploit. For two months now, the server browser is so broken, it mostly shows high ping servers which makes it really difficult to use. The problem has been posted on Reddit, but there is no solution in sight yet and Valve hasn’t commented on it yet either.
Russian servers with a ping of over 150 ms.
Even though it is not known why, it seems that mainly Russian servers are displayed that have a ping of over 150 ms. The local servers don’t even appear in the list of available servers. Valve has not done anything about this issue in classic Valve-manner. Two months ago someone has already posted about the problem on Reddit, a user linked to the old thread as proof of the existence of the issue two months ago. The user has also provided screenshots showing the problem. More than 60 people have replied to the thread and verified that they also have the issue with the servers.
Problem in different countries
The problem with the servers is widespread and the users who write about it are from Central Europe, Iceland and India, among others: “I’m from Central Europe and I can’t find any servers when I set the maximum ping to 50,” writes one user.
“Same in Iceland,” says another. “This has been happening for a while, a result of redirect server spam. We’ve tried to point it out, but usually these threads only get a maximum of 100+ upvotes. This is killing the community servers and the different game modes on CS,” complains another user. “I live in India and it’s the same here,” says an Indian player.
Exploit ignored because of CS2?
There is a solution for this case, but it is not optimal for everyone. Affected players can visit an external website where they can manually add servers as favorites. Later, they will be able to find the bookmarked servers again via the tab.
So if the game will be actually rebranded to Counter-Strike 2 / CS2, what devs would do with social media links? It's currently @csgo for Twitter and TikTok and @csgo_dev for Instagram 🤔
— ‎Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) March 18, 2023
By now Valve should be aware of the problem. Fans are worried that the developers won’t take care of this exploit because Valve is currently preparing for the launch of Counter-Strike 2 anyway. So noone really knows if a community server browser will exist, but its a mainstay in Counter-Strike history and we certainly hope so! During the beta phase, both games will probably coexist before being merged later on. When we know more, you’ll find out here!