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This is an interesting bit of news that surfaced yesterday. I am curious to see how it will impact the ability of players to find servers. This could be a beneficial/detrimental thing for WCU depending on what is done to cater to the general public.
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Valve has announced a new scoring system for Team Fortress 2 servers that it hopes will help improve the “player experience” by weeding out the bad apples.A good Team Fortress 2 server is a bit like a good auto mechanic: Finding either can be tricky. Valve has been considering ways to make the process easier for “a while now” and has finally settled on a remarkably simple method of rating servers that won’t penalize games with custom rules and isn’t susceptible to “lies” from the servers themselves.
“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,” Valve programmer Robin Walker wrote on the Team Fortress 2 blog. “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.”
The formula in question assigns every new server in the master server list a score of zero, then deducts 15 points from that score every time a player connects. For each minute a player stays connected, one point is added to the score, up to a maximum of 45 points per player. Servers that have a large number of players joining and leaving quickly will score badly while those that keep keep people connected and playing will move up on the rating list.
“The bulk of servers in the world are doing a pretty good job of providing an experience that’s expected by the people joining them,” Walker said, referring to server data from the previous week. “More importantly, it’s really easy to see what servers are bad. Overlaying the number of players connecting to the servers illustrates how nasty an effect these bad servers are having on players. The very worst servers attract a large number of connections, mostly because they’re lying in ways that make them look like a very attractive server at all times.”
Valve has delisted the “really bad servers” so players will no longer see them in the master server list, but Walker claimed that’s only the “first step” in the plan. “After that, we’re going to keep improving our ability to measure this kind of problem,” he said.
Further reading at http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2338
What are your thoughts?
-Dice
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Valve has delisted the “really bad servers” so players will no longer see them in the master server list, but Walker claimed that’s only the “first step” in the plan. “After that, we’re going to keep improving our ability to measure this kind of problem,” he said.This is a VERY bad idea. No matter how bad a server is it should never be excluded from even being listed. What happens when someone else takes over or the IP is resold to another clan?
I though this would be perfect for L4D where ppl get “dumped” onto a random server… I think its a good idea overall, just not so great for servers getting “off the ground”. i hope im wrong
but hey, it might really help us out. time will tell i guess.First order of business “Remove the AFK kicker”
I like this idea, simple and no way to get around it really.
But I agree with MasterP on his point that even bad servers should not be delisted.
But what if people just go around joining and d/c just to be jerks?
Perhaps there should also be a way to rate the players themselves.
And on the AFK kicker, it should only affect people who aren’t regulars on the server.
That’s how the [PbP] server works and it’s quite nice.
Mr. Domo said:
But what if people just go around joining and d/c just to be jerks?oh gwad, dident even think of this.. yeah that would suck.. alot :/
and Dlisted means they jst dont show up in server list, but prob still can connect of you have the ip, or in your fav/history tab, but dunno for sure
Yeah but if it’s not in the main list it won’t be long before the only people who join are the regulars. It’ll eliminate the ability to pick up others.
As for plugins, feel free to put any you want on there. Like I said earlier, if they cause problems I’ll let you know.
wonder if their will be a way to view each servers “score”
edit:
I don’t think they are ranking servers to say “here are the top 10, and here are the bottom 10, and here are the scores for each one.” They are only computing a score so they can see who the suckiest of the suckiest are and getting rid of them.
lets hope
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