Valve Engineers Weed Out 'Lying' TF2 Game Servers

billlava writes "Tired of Team Fortress 2 servers that lie in order to attract players, engineers at Valve (creators of the Half Life franchise) have come up with a way to weed out servers that give false information about the number of players online, or custom server options. 'After kicking around some proposals, we came up with a simple system built around the theory that player time on a server is a useful metric for how happy the player is with that server. It's game rules agnostic, and we can measure it on our steam backend entirely from steam client data, so servers can't interfere with it. We already had this data for all the TF2 servers in the world, allowing us to try several different scoring formulas out before settling on this simple one that successfully identified good & bad servers.' Of course, this only works with their games running on Steam."

Comments

Re:A real annoyance:

[Ailure]

You can easily hide server slots from the public anyway, so this point is moot. You can have a 24 players server with two reserved slots to show up as 22 player one. Infact it might be useful to have a extra reserved but hidden slot just for admins to be able to intervene on a full server. People with reserved slots who wants to join have to use the console to join, but that's hardly a problem anyway.

Re:Abuse

[Norsefire]

From TFA:

* New servers start with a score of 0 points
* Each time a player connects to a server, it loses 15 points
* For each minute the player stays on the server, it earns 1 point (up to a max of 45 points per player)

"The Administrator"

[troll8901]

The most obvious difference between

• Valve improving end-user experience, vs
• Google improving end-user experience

would be, we paid for the Valve product, but IMO Google gives us more.

---
Besides, please take a look at these two posts in the same Team Fortress 2 Blog:

• "Now imagine how profound my disappointment, to be called back again so soon to administer justice to the melon-headed few of you who persist in fraudulence. I'd just sat down with the two things I enjoy most in life — the most recent issue of Punishment Monthly ..." (Feb 25, 2009), and
• "It saddens me that despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, some of you insist on finding new ways to fail." (Feb 18, 2009)

Sounds to me like an Administrator who enjoys his powers a little too much. Not everyone would take kindly to being in the receiving end of these words, even if these words don't apply to him.

Re:"The Administrator"

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

Sounds to me like an Administrator who enjoys his powers a little too much. Not everyone would take kindly to being in the receiving end of these words, even if these words don't apply to him.

I don't even play TF2, but a simple cursory glance at the blog in question will show in a matter of seconds that "The Administrator" is doing her writing "in character".

So... is she a grumpy and gruff war monger who, as the post states, was taken away from the latest issue of Punishment Monthly and a carton of cigarettes to deal with cheaters.... or an admin working for Valve who decided to add a bit of levity to the announcement that some cheaters were caught?

Re:A real annoyance:

[realcheese]

I don't have a problem with it being off by 1 or 2 but lately I've been joining servers that say 31/32 and when I log on, there are 4 people...

Re:Great!

[Ash-Fox]

There is a connection option to join a server that is associated with a group that you are a part of.

It's broken, it doesn't give you a lobby. I had to make a horrid workaround using sv_search_key crap.

Re:Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Example event/db system:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=822087