If you want to know if matchmaking is working or not, looking at your own server will tell you very little. You have to play the game. Our current goals for quickplay are pretty limited: to match players (especially new players, who we expect to be the ones using this feature) to the best server for them. In other words, we define success solely from the client's perspective. We don't have any criteria that attempts to optimize results from servers' perspective, with the exception of reducing unwanted traffic (in the form of query pings or quickplay player traffic in general).
Last weekend (July 2) all of the Valve servers went down. This undoubtedly sent a lot of quickplay traffic your way. Then, on Monday, they came back up. This almost certainly resulted in less quickplay traffic coming your way. Our overall player counts are reduced since the initial surge, but we still have a pretty large number of Valve servers up. I'd guess that ratio of Valve servers versus players using quickplay is the single largest factor in determining how much quickplay traffic comes your way. On the other hand, last week's update reduced the scoring advantage that Valve servers get. We are still tweaking this. We may make the scoring advantage a function of player experience, to get totally new players on Valve servers, but over time transition them into the general population. Payload is the default game mode choice. You might get more quickplay traffic on payload maps. We are experimenting with certain rules changes being score penalties rather than deal-breakers. (nocrits is the first test.) But right now, there are so many good Valve servers available, unless your server is vanilla with a good ping and 15-20 players in it, most clients will score the Valve server higher anyway, so pretty much any scoring penalty can effectively rule you out. This is just a function of the number of players and the number of (Valve) servers. The fix for the replay off-by-one player count bug should be in the next update. We have received some helpful reports about zombie players and hopefully will have that fixed, too. We also read the suggestions for how our codebase could be improved and features implemented more simply. Rest assured that those suggestions are being given all the attention they deserve. The reputation scoring system will take some time to tune. Currently it can be dwarfed by the other factors. We are not certain it is the best long term solution, perhaps creating a more persistent server identity at the Steam level is better. For example, so you can change your IP and not lose all of your loyal players who added your server to their favorites list. We have heard you loud and clear on this point and it is something I personally am very interested in working on. Having a less anonymous system will benefit good servers and players and is a good thing all around. Your humble servant. - Fletch
_______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
