Scoring System for TF2 Servers
Have you ever seen a server in the serverlist having 30 players on it, but when you join theres no players at all? Or when you join there’s 20 clueless bots walking around doing shit?
Valve can’t prevent servers from lying about how many players are connected. But they can look at player stats for each server and that way determine which servers people like being on.
After kicking around some proposals, we came up with a simple system built around the theory that player time on a server is a useful metric for how happy the player is with that server. It’s game rules agnostic, and we can measure it on our steam backend entirely from steam client data, so servers can’t interfere with it. We already had this data for all the TF2 servers in the world, allowing us to try several different scoring formulas out before settling on this simple one that successfully identified good & bad servers:
- New servers start with a score of 0 points
- Each time a player connects to a server, it loses 15 points
- For each minute the player stays on the server, it earns 1 point (up to a max of 45 points per player)
In short, servers that have lots of players joining & leaving rapidly will score badly. Servers that consistently have players join and stay on for long periods of time will score well.
Our first step in improving this part of the player experience has been to delist all the really bad servers. The master server will simply stop giving these to you when you fire up the serverbrowser.
This is a great move by Valve for all of us that like 30 minutes of brainless fun now and then. And don’t worry, password protected servers are ignored in the scoring system.
Source: teamfortress.com
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Yay, I’m gonna make your server not appear on anybody’s serverbrowser by reconnecting to your server a bunch of times.
Or valve wont overlook that either, and set a limit on how influential one account is towards this system, by either limiting the amount of times a single account can negate points from a server to 1, and/or adding a time limit (days) for how long you can apply negative points to a server.
I hope they put in an option to ignore this wonderful feature…
Why? I hate those shitty servers… specifically the “saigns.de” servers that allegedly always has 30 connected.
Because lots of popular servers have ppl join only for some minutes which will give penalties to the server. Besides it could really be used to ruin servers. A few buddies or even a steam group made only for that reason could coordinate attacks on servers to join and leave the server a few times until the server’s not listed anymore. Without listing he won’t return to the list in close future anymore because people won’t find the server to play on it if it’s not in the favourite tab.
Last of all I don’t like to have my game limited by the game I purchased it from. Sometimes I’m looking for a free public server to do some testing stuff I can’t do on my own servers. I don’t care if it’s lying because I know the usual suspects.
But I’d like to be able to choose if I use this feature or not.