That's what the "server score" system is for. If player's constantly leave a server as soon as they are placed in it, that server's score will rapidly decline, and it will get less and less traffic - which is the best way to do it. Valve has had the wisdom to (for the most part) allow the players to decide which are quality servers and which are not. They already tried a "custom" tab in the server browser years ago, and it was a disaster.
Letting the players decide which servers deserve their traffic (by way of sustained playtime) is democracy in action. Players are voting with their playtime, plain and simple. Quite frankly, if more server operators focused on creating a unique and valuable playing environment for their players, as well as actively supporting their servers through active seeding efforts (as opposed to worrying about what the "other guy" is or isn't doing), most of them would have alot more success filling their servers. I frankly don't give a damn if some of those shady operators want to use bots, fake slots, "premium" crap, or any of that other junk to try to trick players onto their servers. The vast majority of players are far smarter than that, and they eventually find servers like ours that stay both compliant with Valve's rules, AND maintain a unique playing space. Quite honestly, I find the whole "my servers are more vanilla than their servers, so I should get more zero-effort traffic!" argument tiresome at best. Quickplay has lulled a whole new generation of server operators into thinking that building a gaming community is as easy as throwing up a few vanilla servers and pressing the easy button. As soon as that traffic (over which they have zero control) is interrupted in any way - they go looking for the "competition" whom they feel has no right to "their" (un-earned) traffic unless they are just as "plain-jane" as they are. That's not to say there's anything wrong with Vanilla servers, of course (we run several), but as TF2 is a 5 year old game, if a server operator's only argument for receiving blind player traffic is that they are as plain and generic as they can be, I have to wonder what they are offering players that the hundreds of Valve servers do not? This is where, IMHO, Valve is sending the wrong message with Quickplay. While I fully understand that they created and optimized the game for 24 players, and they want to push people to play it "their" way....the fact is we are over 4 years in, and thousands upon thousands of players PREFER 32 player servers, altered spawn times, custom maps, etc. etc. While quickplay is an interesting idea, in the context of introducing it to a mature game like TF2, it is a flawed implementation. Again, it should always be all about letting the *players* decide. With that in mind, why (after a certain amount of time) does quickplay not offer the CHOICE of connecting the player(s) to a modified server? Again, this should be a CHOICE players can make simply by checking or un-checking a box that says "allow custom servers" in the quickplay interface. Valve could even incentivise that by only unlocking that option after X amount of playtime, or only as a feature for players who have spent X amount at the valve store, etc. Anyhoo the point is - the best judge of whether a server is "good" or not should always (IMHO) be left up to the players themselves - and that's a system that is painfully easy to implement. Long overall playtimes = good servers, period. On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Cameron Munroe <cmun...@cameronmunroe.com>wrote: > This is why I think there should be a Modded game tag for the servers. > Or at least some tag for the major plugins. i.e. Saxton Hale, Freak > Fortress. The fact is that were not trying to scoop up players into a mode > that they don't want to be in as they will instantly leave. > >
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