On 08/06/2011 09:38 PM, Jay Singh wrote:
It's Valve's fault for setting up all these blasted quick play servers. I can put money on the fact that if Valve would shut down at least half of their servers, there would be less complaints about people and their servers being empty all the time.
They were necessary when free-to-play first came out due to the absurd number of players added to the system. Now there aren't as many, and eventually Valve will wind down some of their servers to compensate. There is presently more supply than demand, and some servers sit empty as a result. As I understand it the player count factors into the quickplay equation so servers that are populated tend to stay populated while those that are empty stay empty. Frankly this is better for the players, but ideally there would be fewer servers so all of them could stay populated.
For what it's worth, I initially saw a huge drop in traffic right after one update (on the 28th maybe?), perhaps because my update notifier failed and it sat empty for 40 minutes before I noticed and updated it. But since then it's built back up and is usually full in the evenings. I don't know what percentage of traffic is coming from quickplay because it isn't logged. Normally right after an update, within 5 minutes of restarting the server it will be full again, often within 1 minute. I assume this is because there are fewer servers operating with the new update.
As for the reputation messages ("downward fast" trend), Valve has already stated that it is normal once you've hit the upper range of reputation and that perhaps the messages are scarier than they need to be.
-- m. tharp _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
