On 14/02/2013 22:23, Robert Paulson wrote:
Bring the facts, not your assumptions. Step outside your quickplay bubble
once in a while and notice that there's been a huge drop in players on the
server browser.
No there hasn't, not really.
You can see the number of players on the stats page. TF2 is always in
the top 3 or 4 games.
It's 2nd right now.
51k peak today. It's not the highest it's ever been, but it's not the
lowest either.
Player numbers have always risen and fallen in between big updates
appearing. That's nothing new.
There is probably some seasonal variation, variation based on school
holidays, and variation caused by other games being released on steam too.
Case in point, it wasn't so long ago, just after Halloween, that
Fletcher pointed out that some of the Valve servers were empty
the lux ones they'd added. These servers are generally full now (with
the exception of over night)
I hop from one to another for hours and hours at a time.
So I'd say your rumours of TF2's death are greatly exaggerated.
Given the few complaints about it until now, very few people care, and I
don't think I'm alone in not having our rights further eroded
What "rights" are these?
I think this thread exists because someone at Valve was reminding people
about these tags,
which I imagine precludes your idea that no one is still abusing them
(I'm not sure why you think anyone needs to be smart or rich
to do it? It's just a plugin and any buffoon can write a plugin. If
people have paid significant money for them they must be out of their tree)
Nor that there are no complaints about them. How do you suppose you
would hear complaints? Why would someone complain
to you?
to the point where we can't even change the number of slots on our server.
Changing the number of slots occasionally is not a problem I'm sure.
Dynamically changing it to game the quickplay system or fool people
browsing for 24 slot servers clearly is.
This is my opinion. But I see no reason that won't be the rule though
because the client lets you restrict servers listed by slot count and
tells you, if you try to join a server with 32 players, what a load of
crap it will be (so don't tell me that's my opinion - it's part of the game)
I'll tell you why I think it's in the game. There are or were big long
threads on SPUF moaning about
how badly TF2 is optimised and moaning about how sentry guns should be
removed or
such and such are overpowered - and 9/10 times, after about 17 pages of
back and forth you'd discover it's someone playing on 32 man instant
spawn servers that's
decided the game is unbalanced or that is getting performance issues.
So that's why I think the game tells you that 32 slots is a waste of
time. But you can still do it,
the game tells you that you're an idiot if you do. Not me, the game.
But, how would the above work if the server you join can change the
player count?
Answer : it wouldn't. It would suck for anyone looking for 24 player servers
if servers changed to 32 slots after they'd joined.
So you can't cheat with your player counts. They should be legit.
If you want 32 players on your server, run a 32 slot server. If you want
24, run 24.
It's not that difficult to do and there's absolutely no reason at all
to do otherwise.
Many of us
bought into TF2 knowing it would be moddable just to have the custom tab
ghetto, quickplay favoritism, and the loss of attachable models all forced
onto us.
The server software is free so I'm not sure what you bought. Was it some
magic beans
in exchange for a cow? :)
Faking tags or player counts with or without plugins to game quickplay
or to trick people using the server browser is not "running a mod"
so I don't really see what your point is here. There's nothing stopping
you from running a modded server.
--
Dan.
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