Comment by caymanjim

There's not a lot of difference in gameplay, but CSGO destroyed the sense of community and enabled toxic players. Prior to CSGO, there was a vibrant community of player-hosted servers, run by clans. The best of them had active admins who would kick/ban cheaters, trolls, and toxic people. It was hard to find good community servers, but once you did, it felt like home. It's much easier to get into a match now, due to the automatic matchmaking and different playstyle and skill grouping options, but the communities are gone. You can still run a private server, but hardly anyone does. I used to be in a half-dozen clans and now I'm in zero.