I haven't played HL online very much. Mostly play on local area network servers and haven't really got into the online community.

With that said... when I click on Internet Games after NS is load as a mod onto HL, it lists all the servers... I update.. spends 30 minutes updating all that jazz etc. Then I go to filters and select filter by game NS. Then I hit refresh and it leaves me with about 30 servers.

From what I gather online there are more than 30 servers for this game.
1) How do I find them? Are there other server locator programs or server connection programs? Or is it all done in Half life?
2) When I have the servers filtered and hit refresh... does it only refresh the 30 odd servers that show on my screen.. or does it reconnect to the valve server to find additional NS servers and add those to my list also? (in other words.. If NS servers are added, do I have to unfilter, then update/ then refilter? OR can I just update with the filter on?)

Help would be appriciated as I am returning home to my cable modem in 2 weeks and am going to start playing online again. Anybody know a good server without any hopeless NS new players where the marnes actually work as a team and there is only 1 (maybe 2) gorges on the alien team??

Try using ASE, Gamespy or Gametiger to connect. Saves the hassle of using the HL launcher, and you can find your friends to play with.

where ASE= All Seeing Eye

google it, i think it's made by udpsoft.com

ok dude heres what I do:

Instead of getting the whole list of every game of every mod (which takes forever) and then filtering, try filtering first then click update.

Use these filters:

- Have people currently playing
- Are running game :::::: NS
- Are not full


then when you click update it will only get the list of games you can play in, which takes about 10 seconds, oh and dont wait for the whole list to download. Cancel the update when it has about 20 servers left, these are usually slow anyway. At most I've seen about 170 servers online at once (with these filter settings)

the All Seeing Eye blew me away when I first used it. I knew in a second I would never go back to the HL launcher again....

I just downloaded All Seeing Eye. I haven't tried it yet, but I've grown to be fed up with the HL in-gmae server browser, and gamespy arcade is crappy and slow, GS3d is just WAY too complicated, HLSW is, well, I'm not really sure what the hell it's suppoed to do, it hasn't really done much for me so far. I hope ASE does the trick!