I agree that going out of our way to abuse quickplay & break the rules is pretty shortsighted and ill-conceived.
Having said that, there are always people that say "it was not about ads" or "they made the change because of THIS", but the truth is no one really knows, because the TF2 team never TOLD US why they thought the drastic change was necessarily. The most I heard from Fletcher Dunn at the time was that it was "getting bad for the players". Of course, he said that in the same sentence that he told us that the change was a temporary solution (I'm paraphrasing here, as I don't have the direct quote saved). I have my theories, and I'm sure they conflict with those that love the idea of pinion ads plastered all over their servers, but that's neither here nor there. I like the idea of Valve charging for a server hosting license, I've never thought of that before, but it would probably be a great way to keep the more nefarious folks from throwing up those terrible anonymous "TF2 ad-farms" (the ones that used fake clients/bots to trick quickplay, etc.) that plagued quickplay prior to the change. Even if they only charged $5 per year per server, it would probably do the trick (the same way charging for TF2 kept more hackers out, etc.) The thing that gets rattles me most about quickplay is that TF2 was flourishing before it came along, with the "good" community servers rising to the top (traffic-wise) while the "premium" and low-quality servers languished. It wasn't until the "easy" quickplay traffic came along that we had the 100+ server "ad-farms" and "premium" operators launching server after server in order to cash in on the easy traffic. I think they need to really step back and ask themselves if quickplay has actually improved the game. There is a "culture" that TF2 brought with it in its first few years of operation that the "random games with random strangers" that quickplay encourages is destroying. The days of server "regulars" are on the wane, and all the high-quality teamwork & camaraderie that it created is going with it. New players never get to see how great TF2 can really be, and that's the biggest casualty of the quickplay system. I wish there were some member of the TF2 team that still understood that and would advocate for it, but the lack of any kind of communication from the TF2 team outside of update announcements make me doubt it. On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Robert Paulson <thepauls...@gmail.com> wrote: > Abusing quickplay is the dumbest idea I ever heard. The entire point of > these complaints is that almost no one is using community quickplay because > the UI is so bad and skewed in favor of official servers. > > Since everyone else is putting forth their own solutions and theories, I > will repeat mine. Default to community servers after 1 hour of gameplay. > After 1 hour new players should know how vanilla TF2 is and be able to find > a proper community server. > > This is not about the complete distrust in community servers for all > players because they would not have bothered to add a community servers > option. \ > > This is not about ads because they were already completely blocked from > people joining through quickplay long before the official servers change. > > Short of removing community servers completely or charging for a hosting > license, someone will always have something to complain about. Everything > is a trade-off and having community servers is better than idiot-proofing > the game for the whiners who can't even figure out how to use the server > browser. > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds > >
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