This is an update from an earlier post, but I wanted to set it properly to the end of the year. There has been a big upset in the rankings, as you might see.

1. [ES] Half-Life Campaigns

The [ES] Half-Life Campaigns server continues to dominate the top spot and is #3 in Half-Life server rankings. It has a very consistent population average of 12. There are players in it at every time of day. Basically this is the only server where you’ll see upwards of 20 players at 3 AM in the morning.

2. [PE] LeTongue

The huge upset comes from a new server on the block, straight from Peru. LeTongue seriously outperformed the old 2nd-place star, Twilight Zone. This server is basically classic Sven Co-op with some novelty plug-ins.

3. twlz | Twilight Zone

Twilight Zone used to be one of the “two titans” of ...

Here’s a yearly top listing. I decided to do something nobody has really done before. It took a while to keep tracking of the numbers, so tell me if you like it. Here are the top 10 most popular servers in Sven Co-op. My popularity rates are based on player averages from GameTracker.com and GameServerDirectory.com as well as trend lines.

#1: [ES] Half-Life Campaigns

Player Average: 16
Peak: 28
Trend: Up

[ES] Half-Life Campaigns is basically the go-to server for playing Half-Life cooperatively. It’s the behemoth of Sven Co-op. It’s also the 3rd most popular Half-Life Server* and the most popular Sven Co-op server of all time. Players here are from all over the place and it’s a very universal server in that sense...

Map series are usually fairly difficult challenges overall in Sven Co-op. However, there are a few good (or tolerable) ones that are particularly difficult. Here are the most challenging series in Sven Co-op history as far as I’m concerned. Most servers don’t dare play them because most of the players will leave after the first map, since they’re even harder for casual Sven Co-op players and newbies. I can actually vouch this for the top three. I’ve seen quite a few servers go from a dozen or so players to two or three because most players leave in the first map. Difficulty in this case is measured by the overall combat intensity and the difficulty of travel throughout the series.

5. Case Closed by EraSerX

The original conversion for Sven Co-op of this map series is a good challenge to bea...

I’ve been playing through some older custom maps to prune out the good ones. I came across a cluster of weird, hard, or just plain bad maps. Here are the hard ones. Basically by “unreasonably hard,” I mean that a group of 2-4 players can die around 10 times before you can even think of getting to the next part of the map. Right, because not everyone has a server with 10+ players on it 24/7. Oh, and I wouldn’t say this is a good list to be on; you have to be a pretty bad mapper to go overkill…

5. Crood Co-op (croodcoop) by Headz

Immediately you’re greeted in spawn with a mouthful of bullets by a turret. You go from block to block in the map sweeping up monster “cells” where a bunch of random medium-difficulty monsters are clustered together randomly...