Server listings
Loading servers…
NA coverage is thin right now, and we would rather say so than pad the list. The public trackers we verified our launch listings against are dominated by European and Asia-Pacific communities; the North American retake scene runs largely on private and Discord-invited servers that never appear on them. If you run or play on an NA retake server, send it in — it is free and it is the fastest way to fix this.
How the North American retake scene is shaped
North America has a harder geography problem than Europe. The continent is wide, the player base is spread along two coasts with a thin middle, and there is no single city that serves everyone at a low ping. A server in Frankfurt covers most of Europe acceptably. A server in New York does not cover Los Angeles acceptably — the cross-country round trip alone puts you around 70 ms before anything else goes wrong.
The practical consequence is that NA retake splits into regional pockets rather than one national pool. Chicago and Dallas are the two most common central choices because they minimise the worst-case ping for a mixed national population. New York and Ashburn serve the east coast, Los Angeles and Seattle the west, and Toronto and Montreal cover eastern Canada while also being genuinely good for the northeastern United States. Mexico is usually served either from Dallas or from a Mexico City host, depending on how a community's players are distributed.
Ping you should expect
Approximate figures on a fixed-line connection to a Chicago server: 10–25 ms across the Midwest and Ontario; 25–45 ms from the east coast and the south; 55–80 ms from California, Oregon and Washington. From a Los Angeles server, the picture reverses — under 20 ms on the west coast, 60–80 ms on the east. Dallas splits the difference at roughly 40–50 ms to both coasts, which is why so many community servers land there.
Anything under about 50 ms is workable for retake. Above roughly 70 ms you start to feel it on peeks and trades, and no amount of tickrate compensates for it.
Tickrate in North America
NA community servers skew toward 128 tick for the same reason as Europe: the third-party platforms most competitive players use run at 128, so practice at 128 transfers directly. Where NA differs is that a much larger portion of its casual player base lives in Valve matchmaking, so 64-tick retake servers stay genuinely popular and are the more faithful rehearsal for that audience. Pick to match where you actually play.
Choosing between NA servers
- Coast first, then city. Never pick a cross-continent server for a marginally better feature set. Distance wins.
- Central options are a compromise, not a default. If you live on a coast and there is a coastal server listed, take it over Chicago or Dallas.
- Check population against your timezone. NA servers empty out and refill on a narrower daily curve than European ones. A server that looks dead at 09:00 Pacific may be full at 20:00.
- Map rotation. Single-map servers give you far more repetitions of the same site; rotating servers keep the whole active duty pool warm.
Hosting an NA retake server
Owners here face the same trade-off players do. A single box will always underserve half the continent, so established NA communities often run two — one east, one central or west — rather than trying to find a magic location. Retake is not demanding at 10–12 slots, so a second small instance is usually cheaper than the players you lose to a 90 ms ping.
Cutting the directory another way? See the European list, the 128-tick list, or the full directory. New to the format? Start with what a retake server is.
Running a North American retake server that is not listed? Add it for free.