I've been meaning to post about the whole subject of Server Scoring, but I wanted to read everything you guys posted, let it sink in and all that.
I'm glad you've been putting some thought into this - but I hope you take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I hope you'll read this and also let it soak in, even if it's just one man's opinion. Now - I own and partially run the Trashedgamers.com community. We're quite new, only around about 6 months. But in the golden days of old, I ran another gaming community called "Railbait" (www.railbait.com, now defunct). 10 years ago, things were a lot different. Running a gameserver means you were actually spent some money on bandwidth and hardware as opposed to today. If you ran a server and it was fairly decently policed, you were pretty much guaranteed it would be popular. At the height of Railbait's times, we had nearly 200 player slots filled 24x7 and it was nearly effortless to accomplish. We never had to work to fill servers, people would voluntarily pug some people and do it themselves. People were just HAPPY that they had a new place to play! Times are much different now. Bandwidth is cheap, and anyone with mommy or daddy's cable connection can potentially run a server, or they can pay a few bucks a month and rent one. Webhosting costs next to nothing. Symmetric fiber lines are $70/mo for 20/20 in certain areas, etc. So it's time you realized something, Valve - and take this to heart: There's such a huge surplus of servers out there now, it practically takes an act of God to actually make any given one popular. Players now have SO many choices (dare I say, TOO many choices) that they have become extremely jaded. A tight-knit community is so incredibly hard to form today, many server owners simply don't bother with the extra work that comes along with community building. The problem (and solution) you discuss on the Teamfortress blog is an interesting read and is absolutely a step in the right direction. However I think what you're seeing with these "Bad" servers is a SYMPTOM of the real problem - NOT the problem itself. Now, don't get me wrong - if I were to join a server advertising 30/32 players only to find it was empty or close to it, I would be annoyed personally - and we certainly don't use this particular tactic at TrashedGamers. But at the same time, I can see why others would do it. They are simply doing one thing - trying to attract players in this extremely difficult market. They WANT people to play there because they have put forth the time and effort to put up these servers, websites and what not in an attempt to run a successful, thriving community. While I might disagree with the method, I don't find any malice in its intent. I'm not trying to justify their actions, I'm simply good at playing Devil's Advocate. Now - you might argue that you made this SteamCommunity.com infrastructure to help build communities, but this is also flawed in a sense. I assume that you built this infrastructure so members who frequent certain servers, have similar interests (like cookies) and what not will have a common meeting place. Personally, we use it as a userbase for filling our servers. Toss up an event, and the server will be full in under 5 minutes, and for us - stay that way sometimes for several days. But this too has a dark side as I'm SURE you're aware. Man, we invite everybody. Since everyone's community ID is out there in the open for anyone to grab, inviting massive amounts of people in a fairly short time is trivial. We do it. That Kifferstupidwhatever group does it. I would argue that ALL the top 10-20 groups have done it or are still actively doing it. But is the SteamCommunity site really serving its intended purpose? I doubt it :) So - before you consider a mass delisting of servers that are using whatever trickery to keep them active, consider the actual root of the problem - NOT just the symptoms. Before doing anything crass, please consider that we server operators and community owners need the proper tools to make both your titles and our communities popular. In order for any solution to work, you must ensure that one thing remains paramount - the symbiotic relationship between Valve and the people who host your servers. I've said my piece, I won't say anything else about it :) _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
