Your version of events borders on white-knighting, in my honest opinion. Valve has a share of blame for allowing an environment where unscrupulous operators were rewarded financially simply by getting people to join thier servers. The rise of Pinion and the like was attractive to individuals who wanted to cash-in on advertising. And what better way to boost your profits then by tricking players into joining your servers thinking that they were fuller than what they were or that they had real people on them. MOTD Advertising is what made that deception attractive - it was the reward behind it all. Yes, the players would disconnect the second they realised that the server was empty or that they were playing against bots, but the operator still got to cash in on an impression.
So did Quickplay solve the problem? No. Why? Because it didn't remove the sugar from the table. Rather it just meant that instead of deceiving the player (Who would have likely remembered the name of a bad community) the unscrupulous operators were now deceiving Quickplay instead - How grand it must have been for operators intending to run cash-cow servers to have Quickplay steering unsuspecting traffic to them. In my view that made the situation worse and in a manner that was reasonably foreseeable. Yet somehow it escaped Valve. What they should have done was killed the notion of MOTD advertising from the onset so that a business model built on deception wasn't financially lucrative. Instead they had a knee-jerk reaction and banished all community servers (good and bad) from the primary Quickplay pool. Some people would say this response is a colossal non-sequitur and they'd be right. I wrote a 1400 word response on this topic but I decided that I could make my point with the summary above and that such would probably be more appreciated than a giant wall of text. Let me know if I'm mistaken. On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Phillip Vector <t...@mostdeadlygame.com> wrote: > >What you just said implies that *every *community server provides a > modified game-play experience, which is not only a dubious claim but one > that almost certainly stems from a distinct level of benightedness. > > A modified game-play experience, yes. Even if it's just placing a text ad > every 5 mins., it is a difference experience than stock. I did not mean to > imply that all community servers modify game play. But I would be > interested in seeing one community server that operates like the default > Valve servers do. > > >There are community servers out there, many of them, which offer a > vanilla experience in aspects of game-play. My question to you is why > should those servers be treated as second-class citizens to Valve servers > by "default". > > They shouldn't. However, I don't know how long you have been part of this, > but I recall when community servers weren't treated differently. Some were > terrible and cheated the system to trick players joining their servers. > When Valve tried to stop them, they cheated the system more. Even after > Valve constantly tried to help those community servers who played by the > rules, the community kept calling foul. > > So eventually, Valve (rightly so IMHO) said "Fuck it" and made all > community servers suspect. > > Valve is on the right track giving community servers who play by the rules > equal standing for valve servers. But I'm pretty sure that some community > is going to start gaming the system and Valve will have to say, "Fuck it" > again. > > >
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