[en] As a result of experiments it was found that for counters of any type the Geiger plateau is the more, the lower are the potentials of excitation and ionization of the filling gas. It is shown that in luminous gases the formation of secondary discharges is mainly due to resonance radiation and metastable atoms. The effect of such a radiation is that the false pulses caused by it are delayed for 10^-5 to 10^-4 s. It is concluded that the main role in the discharge self-quenching in the counter should be attributed to the low potential of the additive gas ionization and the absence of resonance radiation rather than the additive molecule dissociation when neutralizing near the cathode