I think there is a distinct lack of common sense floating around at the moment, as for I'm pretty sure faking player counts in a way that makes people join (effectively) empty servers on the assumption they are populated wouldn't be something Valve would take kindly to. It degrades the effectiveness of the server list, is unfair to other server operators and is agitating for players who fall victim to it.
Those operators who do fake player counts are running numerous risks. At present Valve are taking a passive approach to the problem. The more servers that abuse the server list, the more it drives players into using Quickplay, where Valve have much more control over who plays where. The servers abusing the player count should be (in an ideal system) haemorrhaging their server rank because players who join don't stay on empty servers long enough to offset the join penalty. With that being said, the greatest risk still comes from Valve. Ergo: If a Valve employee joined your server thinking it had players on it only to find it was a faked player count, do you honestly think that they would do nothing? Of course they would, though it might not be immediately noticeable. These technicalities are reason enough not to do it. But for those who remain unconvinced, I guess the bottom line comes down to your own morals and why you run servers in the first place. Do you run servers to benefit the players or do you run servers to benefit yourself? You don't benefit players by faking player counts. -Leon PS: I've come to notice that most operators who fake player counts don't know where to draw the line between right and wrong. quite often they do other things that further agitate players (such as 'premium' style benefits). It's always those operators that get DDoS'ed and hacked. Food for thought. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of ics Sent: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 6:41 AM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] New quickplay is in the real Team Fortress, not TF beta You can press f7 while on that server to make a abuse report or propably directly contact someone at Valve, like Fletcher. Yes, i was aware that if bots appear like real players, it isn't tolerated but i ment the plugin that just makes server look like 22/24 players. Then once you connect and go ingame, those people are all in spec mode. That wasn't previously bannable. -ics 24.7.2012 0:01, Smellyfeetyouhave . kirjoitti: Where would we report these servers? Here on the list? On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Fletcher Dunn <[email protected]> wrote: Actually, if a server bots appear like real players in the server browser or in game, we just ban them. We don't take any action particular to quickplay for those types of hacks, it is a global ban. We have banned people for this in the past and can certainly do it in the future. If anybody wants to gather evidence of a server operator using these plugins, we will investigate it. We cannot police things to keep all 15,000 servers spotless. But we can follow up on the biggest offenders. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of ics Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 12:47 PM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] New quickplay is in the real Team Fortress, not TF beta I guess i should elaborate before someone says something. With fakeplayers, i mean the plugin that lies to players that there are players on the server. I do not mean mask bots as faked players etc, faking tags and such. No, i don't use that plugin but some people do and it is allowed since they aren't getting boot from quickplay. -ics 23.7.2012 22:44, ics kirjoitti: Sounds, models, decals whatever are fine. Also fakeplayers are fine and plugins and addons that do not rapidly change the game or affect in it at all. There is a thin line that is allowed and what is not. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2825-AFGJ-3513 -ics 23.7.2012 22:13, HyperionGaming.org Admin kirjoitti: Hello, I just tried forcing the quickplay beta on my computer to test the system. It sent me to a UK based TF2 server (I'm in CA; I'm guessing the quickplay beta server pool is so small that's why it sent me there), and I had to download a whole bunch of sound files (at least 30), which I'm guessing are used to play random sounds in-game or at round end. Is Valve OK with that? I was under the impression that a server labelled Quickplay had to be as Vanilla as possible, including not having to download extra sound/models. I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed, I'm just curious since it's probably a bit strange for new TF2 players (we get so many new-ish players that are amazed there's a Respawn Timer in TF2 Payload mode.) (Maybe the current quickplay already works like this? I admit I don't use it at all). Thanks. HG On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Devin O'Malley <[email protected]> wrote: Thank you, I had a moment of stupidity. Sorry about that. On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Ross Bemrose <[email protected]> wrote: One is a server cvar and the other is a client cvar... On 7/23/2012 2:15 PM, Devin O'Malley wrote: What is the difference, rather. On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:15 PM, Devin O'Malley <[email protected]> wrote: That is the difference between that one and tf_mm_servermode? On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Fletcher Dunn <[email protected]> wrote: Since the weekend went without any significant problems, we're going to increase the percentage of people who are asked if they want to participate to 100 soon. Also, we'll increase the number of players needed to seed a server, since the player pool will be a bit bigger. (It's really low right now.) In the meantime, you can set the client convar tf_quickplay_beta_preference = 1 to force into the beta. -----Original Message----- From: Michael Tharp [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 11:05 AM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Cc: Fletcher Dunn Subject: Re: [hlds] New quickplay is in the real Team Fortress, not TF beta On 07/23/2012 12:41 PM, Fletcher Dunn wrote: > Correct. Shipping this particular feature to beta would not get us > the type of testing we need. So we ship it as a beta feature. If > it's broken, server operators and users can opt out, and we can > quickly turn down the percentage of people who get prompted "do you > want to participate" to zero. Hey Fletch, Is there a way to opt in to the client side of this feature? It sounds very interesting and solves the #1 problem I had with quickplay, which is that it punishes servers that are already empty except when there's a supply shortage (e.g. immediately after an update). I'd like to play with it, but it seems like right now only a few randomly-chosen players get the golden ticket. My #2 issue is that there's no love for nocrits, but hopefully a lobby system will pave the way to having more knobs for players to tweak. Sorry if this was already answered elsewhere, I'm discarding mail not from Valve employees because the signal-to-noise ratio is regrettably low. -- m. tharp _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds -- Plasma HyperionGaming.org Admin <http://www.hyperiongaming.org> _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds
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