My friend is being haunted by some sort of Dutch ghost in the matchmaker.

[zmkirtley01]

For some reason, my friend is being forced to be put in Amsterdam severs despite being NA. This has happened every game, in a row, for the last several weeks. Restarting doesn't help. Any fixes?

We aren't playing with anyone from Europe or anywhere other than NA. My friend has tried using the Cs2 server picker, and the matchmaker just outright ignores it. He's tried playing with people who have Amsterdam servers blocked, and the matchmaker just goes through the blocker. He has even tried to use a VPN to force his location to be the Western US, in case it had something to do with him living on the east coast, and it made his ping even worse because it started rerouting him THROUGH the west, and INTO Amsterdam. I want to play with my friend, but even if we 6 stack with 5 other Americans, we are ALWAYS forced to play with the Dutch. I like the Netherlands as much as the next guy, but the 120 ping is hard to stomach. Please help!

 

[van17ino6]

CS2 Server Picker manages your Firewall rules as far as I know, tell him to try and disable completely the firewall before running the game. If you both join a party and it's not in EU servers, you should be good to go. You don't need to get into an actual game, you can try bot games that you can leave if not working.

If that fixes the problem he could look into whatever is ruling NA servers out and delete it from the firewall, so he can still have the firewall running.

If disabling his firewall doesn't work maybe it's this kind of IP block but coming from something else like another software maybe his router configuration.