There are many possible ways for Valve to solve this. - Say this practice will not be allowed and rely on reports to have the servers delisted. - Ping the server from 2-3 different continents and see if they are artifically low. - Every minute while in-game, ping the current server with a2s_info and see if its drastically different from the in-game latency. - Use their new ping estimation API https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/api/ISteamNetworkingUtils and see if there are any anomalies.
I am sure Valve is smart enough to think of other solutions if these do not suffice. Yes it is going to take some effort to fix this but it is not unsolvable. As for your suggestion: 1. People are not going to be happy seeing 200 ping servers lumped in with 10 ping servers. 2. Valve already does something similar by only showing 5000 servers around your location as determined by ip2location. So it doesn't work. Chances are fairly good that there is "malice" behind this action from GFL. Sure not having to switch IPs is useful, but Valve already persists your server across IPs with tokens. What ddos are $5 vpses with 1 shared cpu and 1 tb bw going to save you from? These are all fake excuses to give them a cover for faking pings. They wrote a large amount of code just to cache a2s_info packets, and are planning to aggressively expand in games/modes they've failed to get into before. But anyway, whether or not GFL is being malicious does not change the fact that this is a bad practice that needs to stop before it spreads. If this is not dealt with, the browser will be filled with fake pings and any servers not using anycast will be dead. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/
