Hmm, well, seems like they can take care of that very well. But how are servers identified? Being able to get negative scores seems like a very bad idea to me. All servers starting at 0 and then good server can go higher should enough, but if it’s more beneficial to start from scratch than running even an unsuccessful server for an extended time then those servers are going to make sure they get back to 0 by changing IP or whatever identifier is going to be used.
If you want to know about something successful that already works this way, look at the best P2P technology available, the BitTorrent protocol. P2P is very similar in many ways because you want to classify unknown sources that cannot be trusted with any information. For example it, gives new connections a chance and then rewards peers that behave, basically. However it does not give anyone a negative review because that would be exploitable and there will always be someone that will abuse it. For example one could close the connection and start from scratch, thus getting an advantage over less successful peers, but honest peers. The same would apply to TF2 servers. There is an exception though, if a peer sends false data and then is banned, much like faking player stats and getting delisted. The eMule client also works like this and it does have a long term memory. Every client got a unique identifier and other clients remember that identifier after they have received data from that client so that they can pay extra attention to that peer next time they meet. Again, negative scores cannot be obtained, because then it would be beneficial to a leecher to periodically delete the file in which the identifier is stored. Negative stats are not the way to go. Not even if an account with a fee would be required it would work, because then the bad guys will just use another one when they get delisted or low ranked. On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Donnie Newlove <[email protected]> wrote: > Sounds very interesting indeed! They just have to make sure it is > absolutely impossible to fake that statistics or it will be much, much > worse instead and that might not be very easy. Maybe we can even get > rid of faked players and even tags while they are at it? I believe > they would have to or hacked servers dominate the top. > > On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 12:14 AM, Andrew Armstrong > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Check out http://teamfortress.com/ >> >> >> >> "One of the things we've been thinking about for a while now is how to >> improve the player experience around finding a server to play on" >> >> >> >> . >> >> >> >> "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." >> >> >> >> "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." >> >> >> >> "Our first step in improving this part of the player experience has been to >> delist all the really bad servers. The master server will simply stop giving >> these to you when you fire up the serverbrowser. After that, we're going to >> keep improving our ability to measure this kind of problem." >> >> >> >> This sounds very cool, and I look forward to see what Valve can come up with >> in using these stats. >> >> >> >> - Andrew >> >> _______________________________________________ >> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, >> please visit: >> http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds >> > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
