We Now Disqualify CS 1.6 Servers That Fake Player Counts
Why We’re Taking Action Against Fake Player Counts
Open any Counter‑Strike 1.6 server browser and you’ll see servers sitting at 30/32 players all day, every day. You join… and the map is empty. Or there are four people wandering around a server that promised a full house.
You already know what happened.
Now we can prove it — and starting today, any server faking its player count loses its position in our ranking.
Why This Matters
A server list is a promise about where other players are.
When a server fakes its population, three things happen:
Players waste time jumping between empty servers.
Honest server owners get pushed down by servers that cheat.
The ranking stops being a measurement and becomes a scoreboard of who is willing to lie.
The vast majority are honest.
Our goal is to keep it that way.
Bots Are Fine. Hiding Them Is Not.
This needs to be said clearly:
We are not targeting servers that run bots.
Bots are a legitimate part of Counter‑Strike 1.6.
Many good servers use them to warm up an empty map.
The protocol even includes a dedicated field: bot count.
If you fill this in correctly:
we subtract the bots,
your listing shows the real number of players,
nobody is misled.
But a server that declares zero bots while its slots are full of them is doing something else:
It is counting bots as real players in the number the ranking reads.
That is what leads to disqualification.
What Disqualification Means
A disqualified server remains listed.
We do not delete it — deletion only encourages operators to relist under a new address and hides the outcome from players.
What the server loses is its ranking position.
The rank number becomes a red D
The server sorts below all ranked servers
Its page shows the date and the reason
Ranking points remain untouched
This is a flag, not a removal.
Nothing is automatic.
A human reviews every case.
A refused connection, a quiet round, or an unusual pattern is not enough to disqualify anyone.
If Your CS 1.6 Server Was Disqualified
Check two things:
Remove any plugin that inflates your player count.
If you run bots, make sure your server reports them correctly in the bot count.
In most setups, this is a single configuration setting.
Then email us at info@derax.gg with your server address.
We will re-check it, and if everything is correct, your ranking position is restored with one click.
Where This Applies Today
For now, this applies only to Counter‑Strike 1.6.
This is where fake‑player manipulation is most common and where our detection system is fully built.
We plan to extend this to other games we list, but we prefer to run one game perfectly rather than five games halfway.
The first servers have already lost their positions.
All of them were on the same machine, run by the same operator — which shows how this usually works:
It rarely happens one server at a time.
If you find a server whose player count doesn’t survive contact with reality, use the Report button on its page.
Reports go directly into our review queue.