While many players wait patiently for Counter-Strike 2 beta access, those lucky few that are already in and grinding have been struggling to find matches.
It seems player numbers in the CS2 beta have plummeted recently, with some citing lack of map diversity and match variety as causes. There is also just a small player base to begin with, despite thousands waiting to get into the live test—and these issues have compounded into players waiting up to an hour to find games.
One CS2 player revealed in an April 10 thread on Reddit that they have been suffering lengthy queue times in the last few days, and it sent the rest of the fandom into a frenzy.
Some gamers jokingly called for CS2 to shut its doors due to a “clear” lack of players, while others suggested we’d see other Valve titles hit shelves before more players were allowed in to lessen the queue time problems.
Overall, however, most players settled on one thing: They just can’t understand Valve’s logic when it comes to letting so few people in to fill the test server queues.
This has been made even worse by the same clutch of CS2 players facing regular bugs and issues (to be expected from a beta, of course) and the map options being quite limited; right now test players can only load into unranked Dust 2 matches. All of this has come together to apparently empty out the CS:GO update’s lobbies.
Among claims CS2 is already a “dead game,” others hypothesized Valve may have all the data it needs so it’s not worried if people are playing or not.
Either way, Valve shared that CS2 would bless our screens sometime in Summer 2023, with only months separating gamers from the new-and-improved CS title. Before then, the developers have multiple bugs to tackle, and hopefully stamp out, so it could be a while yet before we all get to test out new features for ourselves.
Counter-Strike 2 will be in all of our Steam libraries soon after and when it is, the queue times test players are currently facing will quickly become a thing of the past.
