It wasn't because of ad systems why this change took place. A good several months before the changes that ruined QP, Valve made it so that players joining through QP didn't see the motd and it couldn't be forced upon them by a plugin.
This change happened BEFORE the Über-update that changed the QP default settings to Valve servers only. Overnight this cut out advertisements. In addition Valve themselves apparently ran servers with Pinion advertisements for a while. The main problem with Pinion is the adverts couldn't be skipped, not that adverts existed. So what you had were servers that would spoof players/player count to get people to join and be forced to watch an advert. This is no longer possible as far as I'm aware. A decent working blacklist and reporting system would help prevent this in the rare cases that anyone ever overcomes it. After all, servers are now tied to your account when you register them for QP. Or rather they started to implement this. Not sure whether they finally did. While you could just keep making accounts to make new servers to dupe players, that would require a small financial outlay each time plus time to set up the accounts. You'd also have to build up your rank again. One of the main reasons for the change was to ensure new players had a stock experience rather than end up on premium servers which made the game pay to win. I'm not going to debate the legitimacy of those servers because I'm sure some like them. However I'll say that numerous options on that Reddit post look to put the player back in control and give them the option to select from a range of servers when using quickplay. Valve servers would still be offered, however they'd be offered along with others. That's the point. We want to redress the bias and give players a choice rather than funnelling them onto Valve servers.
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