On 17/12/2011 21:02, Robert Paulson wrote:
Valve is making a mistake by listening to the vocal minority. The people who complain on the forums do so because they aren't happy with the current state of affairs while everyone else that was satisfied did not feel a need to sign up on the forums.
Does that premise not apply to the vocal minority complaining in this subthread then? :)
If so, let me post that I think quickplay is one of the best things that ever happened to the game.
And, custom servers have exactly what they had before. Nothing less. Except F2P potentially creates more players.
The community grapevine advertises that kind of thing. If you have a wonderful custom map or gametype you shouldn't have much problem gaining the interest of the TF2 community in that mod, via reddit, youtube, SPUF, facepunch and so on. Look at the way the comp community advertises itself within the pub community, with comp v pub matches, long threads talking about what comp really is and things like that.
I think a much better argument is that people wanted "real" tf2 and simply couldn't find it before. Now they can. I'm pretty sure those who love playing, say, 24/7 instant spawn 2fort servers are still playing on them. But, equally sure there were people who played on those instant spam 2fort because they couldn't find an alternative. A full server playing vanilla. Now they can. That's thanks to both quickplay and f2p. Not only that, if someone who wanted to play on a vanilla server thought "I'll run my own server" he or she can now fill that server with players (if and only if there are players around)
And, really, the fact one server is like another is not a bad thing per se, is it? If I want to play cp_foundry over xmas, that's what I want to play. Why the need to make your cp_foundry different? I don't want to know or care whose server I'm on, no more than I want the owners of the routers my packets travel through to start jazzing up the webpages I see for no good reason. There's still plenty of opportunity for a server to say who they are on the welcome message and to build a community or advertise other servers they have. A modified server is fair enough, but complaining that servers need modifying simply for the sake of them being different from each other seems flawed.
If many of the full servers are "the same", that's for good reason. It's because the game is for 12v12 and thousands of people want to play it. Ergo, you need lots of the same server to accommodate those players.
I think ics is right to note the real problem that quickplay solves is servers that clearly do not attract people. So they go to various nefarious means to trick people into joining by pretending they aren't modded and to attract people when it's quiet by faking real players, or even faking the server itself. For no reason that's good to anyone, except perhaps themselves.
Perhaps this is because some server owners see running a server as either a business or a competition with other servers. To me that's not a good way to think of it because, attracting 25 or more people to your server is pointless (but you can see why people need to up the player limit to 32, just to increase the %age that give them money or to fruitlessly grab more players) At 33 players, you're back to deluding people that if they pay they "won't have to wait to join", as though the server list is bereft of servers they could join instead. I wonder how many of these servers have duped more than 32 people into paying "not to wait"?
That's the problem with the "donations" business model. It's that idea where you kid everyone something is "free" and wonderful, and better than those evil businesses because of the zero cost (open source, wikipedia, playing on your server) and then after it has been created you tell them about the costs involved (like, yeah, that's what evil Bill was saying all along) and ask them to "donate" as though they are giving money to starving African kids, or something worthy of donation, rather than paying for a service that doesn't even have the nads to say it's "$x/month" upfront but tries to kid you it was free and guilt you into paying after you've sat the kids down and are tucking into the main course.
Seems to me there are some running so many servers, in the hope of making a profit, they are putting themselves in a position where they are financially commited to exploiting their players and the game and the server software to avoid losing money.
Really the best thing Valve do (and can do) is to make servers as cheap, fast and easy to run as possible and to really discourage the idea that you have to get players on your server at the expense of everyone else's server. This would make (and to an extent it already works) running a server and getting players easy to do, for anyone, without putting themselves at financial risk to do it. If the software is efficient it becomes cheaper to do. If installing a server, choosing maps and updating it is simple and straightforward then no one has to feel like you need to be a computer scientist to run one or to wrestle with it even if they are a computer scientist.
Then quickplay fills the server, when there are players around, and you can build whatever community you want (or don't want) around that full, cheap server. Without feeling any panic or unneeded desire to fill the server at other times or to fret about it not being full or to have any angst about what your score or level is.
But the problem is, if you're writing a game you can't give players a good experience if you have a crowd of server admins whose interest is in exploiting the players of that game to make a profit.
If you have to do it that way, if you are going to say "well, people won't run a server for free" then it has to have a proper business model. Not "ooh what ideas do we have to make money from running a server?" "How about crit rockets for $5/month? Or $5/month and you can kick someone else off the server if it's full Or $5/month and you can play admin and kick the guy with the SG if you can't kill him", that stuff is obviously going to suck.
Th last thing a TF2 server should be, is something server admins feel they need to create a unique selling point to differentiate themselves from the rest of the "market" - that's the problem I think game developers have with releasing a game and relying on 3rd parties to provide the places where the game is played. Some see it as running a business (perhaps starting with selling servers, which isn't so bad an idea but clearly doesn't get money from most punters. It creeps to the point where they start subverting the game itself to make a return on their investment, hence all the mods created for that reason alone)
-- Dan _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
