Just my 2 cents from Saigns ...
Before Valve patched their Quickplay to "Valve servers as default": - It was not officially and strictly forbidden by Valve to run pay2win plugins. - It was still possible to exploit the motd to bring ads to quickplay players (@Robert: You are completely uninformed) any many hosters still used it. I have to admit, Saigns servers were pay2win to this moment. We never used ads, but we gave gameplay advantages to donators. Quite simple. With the patch Valve has fixed the last exploits and they also updated their Quickplay rules. New for us was: - Giving or selling gameplay advantages (Our usual pay2win bullshit) - Modifying stock maps (We modified round timers, added additional health and ammo packs) - Granting or modifying economy items (We modified a lot) (See https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2825-AFGJ-3513&l=german#truth under "Modifications not allowed in quickplay" ) Since that patch we have removed all gameplay changing and pay2win plugins from our Quickplay gameservers. By the way: I have ASKED Valve if it's allowed to activate my bot engine on AFK players BEFORE I have installed that plugin. They gave me their ok, I just had to add a special tag to the scoreboard, that people see active autopilots. Even if I would shutdown this functionality, it wouldn't make any difference to our playerbase. People would just idle in spawn instead of being a running frag for others. We don't fake anything - Why should we? Just to risk another server ban for at least 2 months? No thanks ... It's already hard enough to fill gameservers which run unpopulated maps. In my opion it was absolutely correct and needed to add an "official servers only" button. But with the exploit fixes and the new strict rules for Quickplay I don't think, that it needs to be turned on by default anymore. - Andreas From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Paulson Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2015 6:22 AM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] Community Servers and the Gun Mettle Update Nothing to do with competition. I've actually never paid much attention to what other server operators are doing as I'm more concerned what the players are saying...and if you think that ads haven't given community servers a bad reputation among the general player population (deserved or not), then you haven't been paying attention. They were abused by some groups that spammed them on every death and forced them open for 30 seconds. Now they aren't an issue anymore and it was already literally impossible for them to be an issue months before Valve blocked quickplay. Ads on TF2 existed quietly for at least 2 years before the new people started abusing them. Why do you keep harping on something that isn't an issue anymore? Should Valve blacklist pay2win servers just for all the players they drove away from TF2 prior to quickplay? No. Yeah, this pretty much goes back to the OT of this conversion - the fact that the default quickplay setting negatively affects ALL community servers, regardless of how "great" they may be. No it really doesn't. You said this would be a positive change even if Valve doesn't bring community servers back to quickplay. Which means you want the ad supported servers not on quickplay to die so you can get their players. If your servers being ad-free was such a benefit, then you would have all the players you wanted from the non-quickplay pool. And then your suggestion would be useless. I think you might have a bit of tunnel vision when it comes to these Saigns folks. I've never really thought along the lines of "if this community goes away, then mine will do better." Maybe because they are filling over a 100 TF2 servers a day while everyone else is shutting down servers? And they are doing so by tricking people into thinking they have more people playing than they actually do? And the fact that they do so without ANY ADS which single-handedly ruins your theory that people abuse the server list only because of ads. Valve has already blocked quickplay players from seeing the MOTD, and no one here is asking to have that reversed. Your wild goose chase into completely destroying the MOTD is unhelpful to put it mildly.
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