I guess it's clear enough that there are bots: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/436076195939633025/33DF487164DA824E57D7C6CF5B58A55A9EEBFD51/
From: hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com [mailto:hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com] On Behalf Of Robert Paulson Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2015 10:25 AM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] Community Servers and the Gun Mettle Update The custom tab was short lived and everyone agreed that the custom tab was wrong, even the people working on TF2 at that time. However everyone can agree that pay2win does not belong in quickplay. I mean even no-crit was banned, and you thought that pay2win was ok? Most people did not cheat to get no-crit on quickplay. I'm not going to comment on that rocket doing only 1 damage... I mean are you seriously suggesting you had no extreme pay2win? And I am not saying your servers are the best. They just happen to be filling better than everyone else and probably because you are tricking people into thinking there's more active players on them than there really are, and that there are no bots on the server. And the only way to know otherwise is if you've been on the servers and know how your system works. That is a clear violation of the policy of truth in my opinion. On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 12:37 AM, Andreas Grimm <h...@saigns.de> wrote: Who didn't broke the spirit? Do you remember the custom tab of the server browser? Nearly all communities cheated themselves into the internet tab. Our servers were nearly empty due to that, so we were forced to start that too as one of the latest. Every community has its own stack of plugins. Some has custom attributes, some others have things like !resizeme or what ever. We had dispensers shooting homing rockets (1 dmg only btw) and other mods. Valve just said "as vanilla as possible" without any details. So every community could break the spirit of the law just by having an addons folder. Sure, saigns servers were a major reason, why people started to complain, but we were not the only one and it has been fixed 1,5 years ago. But now with strict rules ... Is there really a reason left why players should get a bad gaming experience in Quickplay in general? I also never said, that our servers are better than others. We are just one community in the pool. Communties like Skial are also great for example. Most of our players know, that we have real bots and an autopilot plugin and they don't care about it. Both is clearly marked in the server's scoreboard and players could leave or blacklist our servers. We don't fake or hide anything and Valve knows about our setup and how to contact us if there are changes needed. From: hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com [mailto:hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com] On Behalf Of Robert Paulson Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2015 8:32 AM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] Community Servers and the Gun Mettle Update I know it wasn't specifically against the rules But you broke the spirit of the law rather than the exact wording of the law. You had to know Valve did not want new players to face donors with rockets on their dispensers. Yet you did not voluntarily remove yourself from quickplay until they forced you to by specifically declaring it unacceptable in quickplay. And I am not saying you should be blacklisted for that. But your saigns servers are a major part of the blame for these recent strict policies. 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. I doubt it. At least I doubt they would give you the same answer now. Your servers are not much different from anyone else's except they empty out much later and fill up much sooner than everyone else while there are 4-5 AFK human bots in the server. Your servers were doing poorly when Valve decided to remove pay2win from quickplay and has years of bad reputation for being pay2win. Now you expect everyone to believe that people join your servers because they are naturally better now? Most people sort servers by the number of players and they cannot tell how many AFK bots are actually on them without looking at the list of names. This is a violation of the policy of truth in my opinion. Unless someone from Valve says so otherwise here I will continue to believe so. On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Andreas Grimm <h...@saigns.de> wrote: 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 <https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2825-AFGJ-3513&l=german#truth> &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: hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com [mailto:hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com] 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. _______________________________________________ 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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