I think there are several reasons Valve has stopped listening about this issue....first and foremost because some of the largest communities took it upon themselves to encourage their members spam the dev's in-boxes with complaints. A few hundred of those, and I'm sure they simply started filtering anything with the word "quickplay" straight to the trash bin.
Having said that, I DO think there were so many more elegant ways that problem servers could/should have been handled - the best of which would have simply been to fix the client server blacklisting system to work with quickplay (i.e. once a player blacklisted a server, they would no longer be sent there via quickplay). It is certainly sad to see so many years of creating unique content and special events for TF2 be ignored in favor of doing the "easy wrong" over the "hard right"....but I think the TF2 team is largely only in "maintenance mode" at this point, and the time and effort it would take to implement a truly fair and balanced system that gives equitable treatment to community servers while putting the power back into the palyer's hands is probably more work that they think it is worth. It's a pity, really. Valve led the way in creating community involvement in their games, but it seems they are going the route of nearly every other developer out there, and slowly but surely "locking down" their games to emphasize the "vanilla" experience. I have no doubt in another year or two, real custom content (i.e. new maps and game modes) will rarely be found at all. On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 5:13 PM, Andreas Willinger <aw...@gmx.at> wrote: > Can’t agree more. > > Our 2Fort server barely got empty before the change (even was full for 5 > days straight), but nowadays, I am happy if there are players on it for > more than 6 hours. > > Side note: I have also made such kind of E-Mail a while back, but it seems > like Valve doesn’t give a f* anymore. > > > > *Von:* hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com [mailto: > hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com] *Im Auftrag von *Gamemann > *Gesendet:* Donnerstag, 05. Februar 2015 22:53 > *An:* Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list > *Betreff:* Re: [hlds] Rethinking the community quickplay ban > > > > Finally, somebody made a mailing list post about this major issue. > > Honestly, one special feature Valve had that many other gaming companies > didn’t, is that they had good support for community servers. With this > change to TF2, it completely destroyed that feature Valve appeared to > always have. Before the major change, my DustBowl server always filled up > daily (sometimes not dropping at night), after the major change, well, > there is no DustBowl server due to the lack of activity. > > I do know Valve’s support for community servers is still strong, but I’ve > been noticing a decline for a while now with the popular Valve games. > > I hope Valve realizes this change destroyed something they were known for > (in TF2). > > Thanks. > > On 2/5/2015 4:11 PM, Tim Anderson 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 > > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds > >
_______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds
