Amusingly this is exactly the problem that community servers help with.
Community servers run community made maps - free, fresh content.
Community servers have... communities. No one talks about games like
soccer dying. The rules rarely ever change, there's no new content. But
the game survives because it's simply a fun game to play with your friends.
Ironically Quickplay is supposed to be better for new players but its
current implementation is causing TF2 to lose old players at the same
rate, hence the stagnation in total active players.
On 7/02/2015 3:08 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Not as much as games like CS do, I mean. What has kept it alive thus far
was mostly the steady stream of major updates, drawing new players and
pulling the old ones back in. Lately, it seems to be slowing down.
On 7 February 2015 at 04:56, Albert Davis <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
It doesn't have staying power? How so?
On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 6:01 PM, [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
A large part of the fact community is waning comes from the
natural life cycle of a game. TF2 has been around for almost 7
years now, and truth be told, it doesn't have the staying power
that games like CS do. That is not to say Valve's mishandling of
quickplay doesn't contribute to it, though.
On 6 February 2015 at 23:10, E. Olsen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I agree that going out of our way to abuse quickplay & break
the rules is pretty shortsighted and ill-conceived.
Having said that, there are always people that say "it was
not about ads" or "they made the change because of THIS",
but the truth is no one really knows, because the TF2 team
never TOLD US why they thought the drastic change was
necessarily. The most I heard from Fletcher Dunn at the time
was that it was "getting bad for the players". Of course, he
said that in the same sentence that he told us that the
change was a temporary solution (I'm paraphrasing here, as I
don't have the direct quote saved).
I have my theories, and I'm sure they conflict with those
that love the idea of pinion ads plastered all over their
servers, but that's neither here nor there.
I like the idea of Valve charging for a server hosting
license, I've never thought of that before, but it would
probably be a great way to keep the more nefarious folks
from throwing up those terrible anonymous "TF2 ad-farms"
(the ones that used fake clients/bots to trick quickplay,
etc.) that plagued quickplay prior to the change.
Even if they only charged $5 per year per server, it would
probably do the trick (the same way charging for TF2 kept
more hackers out, etc.)
The thing that gets rattles me most about quickplay is that
TF2 was flourishing before it came along, with the "good"
community servers rising to the top (traffic-wise) while the
"premium" and low-quality servers languished. It wasn't
until the "easy" quickplay traffic came along that we had
the 100+ server "ad-farms" and "premium" operators launching
server after server in order to cash in on the easy traffic.
I think they need to really step back and ask themselves if
quickplay has actually improved the game. There is a
"culture" that TF2 brought with it in its first few years of
operation that the "random games with random strangers" that
quickplay encourages is destroying. The days of server
"regulars" are on the wane, and all the high-quality
teamwork & camaraderie that it created is going with it.
New players never get to see how great TF2 can really be,
and that's the biggest casualty of the quickplay system. I
wish there were some member of the TF2 team that still
understood that and would advocate for it, but the lack of
any kind of communication from the TF2 team outside of
update announcements make me doubt it.
On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Robert Paulson
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Abusing quickplay is the dumbest idea I ever heard. The
entire point of these complaints is that almost no one
is using community quickplay because the UI is so bad
and skewed in favor of official servers.
Since everyone else is putting forth their own solutions
and theories, I will repeat mine. Default to community
servers after 1 hour of gameplay. After 1 hour new
players should know how vanilla TF2 is and be able to
find a proper community server.
This is not about the complete distrust in community
servers for all players because they would not have
bothered to add a community servers option. \
This is not about ads because they were already
completely blocked from people joining through quickplay
long before the official servers change.
Short of removing community servers completely or
charging for a hosting license, someone will always have
something to complain about. Everything is a trade-off
and having community servers is better than
idiot-proofing the game for the whiners who can't even
figure out how to use the server browser.
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