I believe the change is going to stay in place because TF2 is just not a high priority any longer. By ensuring the vast majority of players end up on Valve servers they don't have to worry about abusive servers mucking up the experience (of getting people into the game and hooked into the Mannconomy ASAP) with weird MOTDs, "Premium Plugins", etc.
However: there must be some better options than what currently exists now (disabling MOTDs and stuff is a start, sucky, but it's something), but I'm not sure Valve has any real financial motivation to care.They don't make money off Community server, UGC highlander teams, or the number of maps being played. From an economic perspective I don't think TF2 as a whole would experience a drastic paradigm shift if ALL community servers were suddenly shut off. I think it might be the intention all along to slowly ween the TF2 community off the importance of community-ran servers, and that's tragic. On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Tim Anderson <[email protected]> wrote: > To the TF2 team, > > It has now been over a year since the decision to essentially ban community > servers from quickplay by defaulting to official ones. Here are some facts > of what has happened since then. > > - Player gain dropped 4% from the year before. > - UGC highlander teams dropped 17% > - Highly reduced map variety from community servers. > - Even top non-quickplay servers have drastically fewer players than in > 2013. > > You may have guaranteed new players a vanilla experience, but this is > ruining the experience for the rest. > > Maybe nothing is being done because you do not see enough complaints about > this from reddit or spuf. This is because the problem is obvious when > someone connects to a pay to win server while it is not as obvious when a > server is dying over the span of several months because official ones are > getting all the new players. > > Most of the people that I talked to even knew about this change so the > thought about complaining about it never crossed their minds. But just > because they never knew about it doesn't mean it wasn't a problem. > > I hope you realize that this change is doing more harm than good. It may > have stopped some complaints but this is hurting TF2 in the long run. > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
