If valve is going to put serious thought into improving the players experience through ranking and de-listing problem servers they should also consider applying a similar method to players. I'm part of a community that tries to cultivate only friendly players and we've had a surprising draw because of it. The problem is we have to constantly monitor our servers for people being disruptive and ruining other players gaming experience in order to keep the players we want. That causes other problems like having too many admins and finding out some have been abusing their powers.
Now if Valve's ultimate goal is to have the best player experience around they should not just consider the servers but the players as well and give server operators some more tools to help provide the proper experience and eliminate trolling. So if we apply similar rules we get this (a rough proposal): -Players start off with 10 points -Every hour of playing without incident they get another point -Every kick they lose 3 points, every votekick they lose 5 points and every ban they lose 6 -Server operators get a cvar (not default) that lets them set the minimum player score up to 0 -Servers get a modest penalty to the server score for kicking or banning a player to keep them from abusing it. They do not get penalized for vote-kicks. -Players that fall short of the minimum score needed for a server do not see it in their server lists -No one can see another players score This is something that should not be done without a lot of thought as to my knowledge no game has attempted this and it does bring up some worries. But this would encourage people from harassing players and using racial slurs. It will allow operators to set the tone of their servers and give them the tools to create the experience they want without having to give too many people admin privileges. And it will discourage admins from kicking or banning without reason due to the penalty. I'm not saying that valve should run out and do this immediately, but in improving the player's experience they should focus just as much attention on players as servers as both can do a lot to ruin a game for an individual. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds