I've had my server up since the demo, and then, on release day(night). What
I notice is that the Matchmaking system is working how I believe it was
designed to work. During the day, when most people in my region are most
likely either working, at school or otherwise occupied, my server generally
sits empty, though not always. When prime-time rolls around, it stays full
until ~2AM local time.
To me, this makes sense. During the day, the demand for servers in this
area probably should be low. Like I said, the occasional Campaign or Versus
match happens, but that's rare. If everyone in this region is off doing
their real life thing, then why should Matchmaking drop people in when the
probability that they will all have high pings is greater?
During the night-time hours, why shouldn't it be full? It's when everyone
has finished their daily tasks, homework, chores, etc. They now have time
to sit down and play.
According to what ics said, we should all pretty much be thrown into the
servers hosted by Valve if we choose to use Matchmaking. Remember, there
are ~5,000 of them and they've all been running longer than any of ours.
Today's peak in Left 4 Dead players was/is 26,155. Assuming that no Versus
matches took place and everyone went Campaign mode during that peak time,
that means that close to 77% of those players would have been on a Valve
server. I don't even remember the last time Matchmaking put me on one of
those, so I can't imagine that they're being given preference over servers
that are closer to me, geographically speaking.
Furthermore, when I choose not to use a search_key to drop myself into my
own server and just let Matchmaking do its work, the ranks I see on those
servers has never been consistently high. I've been on servers ranked lower
than 10,000 and servers as high as 3.
The rank is just an arbitrary number that only denotes the number of players
served. At least, that's what I've noticed. It's never had a bearing on
whether or not I'll end up in a higher ranked server.
There was a recent discussion on the list here about the Server Browser(not
L4D specific). If you read through that, you'll get a feel for how the
server browser does it's searching/querying. While Left 4 Dead's server
browser is different, I can't imagine that it, or that Matchmaking system,
for that matter, would operate much different.
My guess is that Matchmaking does a quick Geo-locate of all the members of a
lobby, then queries servers that will be equally sufficient for each member,
with exceptions. Because players come from all corners of the globe and
play at all times of the day and night, there will always be that case where
the whole lobby might have a great ping/route to the server, but one person
might ping high to it. In that case, there are tons of other factors
besides their geographic location that come into play. The obvious factor
being connection quality.
Or not.
-Richard Eid
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Cc2iscooL <[email protected]> wrote:
> A lot of those extra servers have some type of sv_search_key set, but I
> usually have at least 3-4 of my own public servers that are empty during
> the
> day at any given time.
>
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 3:29 PM, ics <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Not really for this list but this includes issues for running a server
> > and i'm pretty sure some of you are thinking why your servers sit on
> > empty while some people complain that there are no free servers to play
> on.
> >
> > I am wondering how lobby system picks the servers that it keeps
> > assigning people? Random? Based on some ranking system? Right now there
> > is a rush time on Steam network Passing over already but this seems to
> > have impact to L4D and finding a server. It's PAIN right now, atleast in
> > this part of the world. I checked the servers count, there are over 5500
> > servers that my server browser found in-game. Only _half_ of them have
> > players and still i just spend 30 mins trying to get into one free
> > server. Alone, with other people and so on. Different guy hosting lobby
> > but no.
> >
> > Ive been monitoring servers in my country out of interest (23 total for
> > L4D) and only 3-4 of them have players per day. 1 has players almost all
> > the time, the other has players most time of the day and then the few
> > random ones. This leaves 19 free servers and the goddamn lobby system
> > seems to ignore these and 3000 other free servers completely and doesnt
> > let me play on any server or it gives me a server with high ping from
> > around the world if it for some reason happens to find a server after
> > all. I dont know how the system works but i would say that this is a
> > major issue.
> >
> > Now, i've been tracing the thing and looks to me as if the servers that
> > have been there from the start, are the ones that are given to players.
> > For those who just started hosting servers, they are sitting empty and
> > no players are on them because lobby seems to ignore these completely.
> > In my opinion, the system doesnt assign nearby servers to you, it uses
> > Valves own ranking to do that. So if that in-game ranking which shows on
> > "server banner" is used, the system fails to give free servers for those
> > who need it when there are lots of people.
> >
> > World wide server rank #225, Total players served 5945. These are the
> > stats that most popular server in this country gets and its almost all
> > the time full. The 19 others which have no players at any time are just
> > sitting there, ready to serve but lobby system does not assign people to
> > these servers. Why is this? If i where to host a lobby and lobby selects
> > server according to my own ping, it should throw me in to one of these
> > servers, right? No, doesnt seem to work that way. Anyone got more
> > "inside" information about how the system really works? Game seems to be
> > unplayable right now at this hour of the day and the past 3-4 hours too.
> >
> > -ics
> >
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> >
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