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

A real annoyance:

[Wilson_6500]

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.

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:A real annoyance:

[Wilson_6500]

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.

If anyone ever wins me over on DRM, it'll be them

[spazdor]

Once again, Valve has managed to find the upside to that god-awful Trusted Computing bullshit.

Trust.

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)

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:Great!

[gid]

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.