Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yeah, I realize that. The problem is that I don't run the servers. I join them, and if I ever join a server that's down by one or two people it seems to always be one or two reserved slots.
I mean, I'm not going to quit playing or anything, but it'd be nice if Valve would realize that people have been using admin plugins to do this kind of stuff since--what? The Quake 2 days? It seems like just the kind of thing they would implement into their otherwise intelligent server browser system. Then again, the reason the plugins exist is because the games don't have features like voting and ranking and stuff that people want. It's really extremely bizarre. For all the other innovations that Valve pushes, they don't have these basic features that most modern FPSes have. And they've shown that they can roll out changes to all their Source-engine games at once.
Once again, Valve has managed to find the upside to that god-awful Trusted Computing bullshit.
Trust.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The other dozen or two players will balance out your erratic behavior. Or, you'll undo the damage you did by reconnecting to the server after whatever knocked you off is handled.
This isn't about a server getting a high score or tracking points it is owed. This is about providing a tool that can provide an impression of the server's "quality" at a glance.
Add to that the unwillingness of many communities to host servers for L4D. Since people join a random server every time communities have no hope of establishing a regular player base and increasing the community size. Nor can they really justify using their resources and money to host these servers when their own community members will most likely end up joining a random server anyway. Also if the community is funded by donations or selling reserved slots or similar, then they have no chance of getting any money from the server to pay for its upkeep. There are also problems with the way Valve is controlling TF2. I'm too tired to list them, but the hlds mailing lists are usually full of mostly legitimate complaints if you're interested ;).
Personally I think Valve is losing sight of what made their games great.
If you really dont cheat, then you arent the target of those words so suck it up and stop being offended by nothing. Noob.
Because nobody joins a server with 3 people in it.
It's really a tough social engineering situation.
If the server is empty nobody joins. If nobody joins then nobody else joins. If you've never played on the server before you don't know if ayone will be coming in soon so you think the server is abandoned.
As a result lots of new servers advertise that the server is active and a full of people. The idea is that enough people do join to 'seed' the server and hit critical mass to become self sustaining. The problem is most people join... see nobody is playing and immediately disconnect.
Hearing all of this is making me more and more glad I chose to get the Xbox 360 versions of both TF2 and L4D. I did so in order to avoid the hassle of Steam, but apparently the PC versions have other problems.
There's not going to be enough kicks and bans versus active users in that situation to be significant. If you attract a consistent playerbase the score will be high. Just by the nature of TF2 I've seen vanishingly few cheaters able to make a noticeable impact on gameplay and you can't really screw up your own team short of just sitting in spawn to deny them a player.
Anyway I doubt "score" will become favored over ping and player count in terms of players choosing where to get in a quick game of TF2, it's mostly an effort to weed out the servers that are especially terrible. You don't really need to worry unless you're booting more people than stick around to play, in which case there really is something wrong.