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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."
Reserved slots--or, really, the way the server browser handles them.
I don't actually have a problem with reserved slots themselves. They have no value to me, and I've never been kicked out because someone else who had a reserved slot joined. My problem is that the server browser doesn't understand reserved slots, and shows servers whose "public" slots are full as having free space to join. Steam has a rather good server browser that refreshes quickly and has other nice features, but joining servers only to go through the entire motions of connecting and _then_ being told that I can't play because there isn't actually a slot for me is annoying. It also breaks the functionality that auto-retires full servers, which is a very nice feature.
Maybe it's a pet peeve of mine. On one other site I go to once in a while, pretty much everybody complained about getting into this kind of server once in a while--one of the ones that reports being full but is actually empty. I haven't once ever had that particular problem. It's a strange situation.
Popular servers tend to have about 30 people online at once. At a turnover rate of two people per minute, you break even. I'd expect it to be less than two people per minute though (probably more on the order of one person per minute or less).
As long as the server isn't below that negative threshold, it won't ever get de-listed. If it does drop at times, it should have enough points "built up" to not get de-listed for some time anyway. Also, presumably, it would be bast on averages from lengthy time periods (weeks/months), not just on a hourly basis or something.
Once again, Valve has managed to find the upside to that god-awful Trusted Computing bullshit.
Trust.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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)
Outside of a couple instances of 4chan-ing it, there's absolutely nothing to gain from doing this. The TF2 community is already highly compartmentalized with only maybe 100 truly active servers and/or communities. The rest are either empty most of the time or empty most of the time and employing these awful tactics described above. This fix just makes it easier for people new to the game to find a non-shit server that's actually populated. Plus they already have a several week baseline that they've been monitoring.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
While it is simple, it also has problems. What if I connected to a server and a minute later my PC crashed? Or there was a power outage and I turned off the game so my UPS would last longer? Or I thought I had time to play the game but it turned out I really didn't? Or ...
Those kind of effects would spread quite evenly on all the servers.
Even if some servers would have more restless players on average, isn't that exactly what the system is for, to warn players about a bad playing experience.
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?
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
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.
L4D server searches don't seem country limited to me at all. I play with 3 other friends all in the US and we get connected to German servers all the time, or some other server with a 150 ms ping. A manual server selection feature for the lobby leader would be a big step in the right direction.
Another big desire for us is some way to merge lobbies for versus mode, so I can create a lobby of 4 people, and then connect us to another lobby of 4 people so we can play some decent players, not just the 4 random yahoos that clicked auto join.
If you really dont cheat, then you arent the target of those words so suck it up and stop being offended by nothing. Noob.
It's broken, it doesn't give you a lobby. I had to make a horrid workaround using sv_search_key crap.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
If this is the problem (I think it's more complicated than this one factor), it could be solved another way. A "Quick-play" button, steam takes an empty server and puts the next 24 players into it. Steam could regularly cycle through servers, or just pick empty ones at random.
Anyhow, I think the root problem is too many people have servers up. It's so easy, valve is basically a victim of their own success. Now they have a bajimmillion(10^13.5) empty servers for players to filter through.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
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.