I fully agree. I've seen some of my favorite servers drop like flies
over the past few months (and by extension the last 2 years), and the
assimilation of players into Valve-hosted servers is downright alarming.
Having a Valve-dominated server ecosystem only makes sense for three
things: Dota 2, CS:GO competitive matchmaking, and TF2 MvM Mann Up. It
doesn't make sense for PvP.
Truth be told, people are somewhat right about the game "dying", but
only in some very, very specific components of the game, one of those
being community-run servers. Here's an example: TrashedGamers' Chicago
server. A few months ago, it would fill up every night with players.
Now? You're lucky to find even 4 people playing on a good night. This is
illustrated very well by the HLStatsX graphs for the server, found at
http://stats.trashedgamers.org. Here's an image for people browsing
very, very far into the future: http://i.imgur.com/u8FCWMJ.png
What happened to the days of picking a server yourself through the
browser? Is it /really/ that hard for the community? I think at this
point the only real solution is having to make people go through hoops
to get to quickplay. All it has done is open a can of worms, which Valve
has tried to clean up after (with the Policy of Truth memo long ago from
Fletcher and other measures), but people were still trying to cheat the
system, which forced the hand of Valve. Reducing its exposure would make
it not worthwhile for people to keep trying to cheat the system. There
should be a better emphasis placed on the server browser. To make it as
usable, make scores visible in the browser, and let users decide for
themselves (unless they go through those hoops to get to quickplay).
That way people can pick a server that they believe looks good to them,
instead of chancing that the server they get placed on looks good. While
we're at it, add server grouping to the browser, so say if someone wants
to view all the servers "Organization A" has, because they look better
than "Organization B", they can pop open all of A's servers instead of
needing to scroll through all of B's servers, leaving them hidden.
Similar named servers that aren't grouped together by the server
operator would be given a score penalty.
On 2/5/2015 3:11 PM, Tim Anderson wrote:
To the TF2 team,
It has now been over a year since the decision to essentially ban
community servers from quickplay by defaulting to official ones. Here
are some facts of what has happened since then.
- Player gain dropped 4% from the year before.
- UGC highlander teams dropped 17%
- Highly reduced map variety from community servers.
- Even top non-quickplay servers have drastically fewer players than
in 2013.
You may have guaranteed new players a vanilla experience, but this is
ruining the experience for the rest.
Maybe nothing is being done because you do not see enough complaints
about this from reddit or spuf. This is because the problem is obvious
when someone connects to a pay to win server while it is not as
obvious when a server is dying over the span of several months because
official ones are getting all the new players.
Most of the people that I talked to even knew about this change so the
thought about complaining about it never crossed their minds. But just
because they never knew about it doesn't mean it wasn't a problem.
I hope you realize that this change is doing more harm than good. It
may have stopped some complaints but this is hurting TF2 in the long run.
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