EA killed gameplay and teamwork when they added “Ranked” and “UnRanked” servers with Battlefield 2. The only way you were allowed to run a Ranked version was if you payed an insane price per month from “authorized game server providers” which were basically “in bed” with EA. You could rent a dedicated server and host several BF2 servers but they were all unranked thus very unlikely to be played on unless you ran a very popular mod also being only a few that did it. That is basically what Valve is doing here by only allowing THEM to run official servers which gets the majority of the traffic. Hell, even the developers of Ark Evolved are doing the same damn thing by only allowing certain providers to run “Official” servers.
The retraction of the changes was two steps backwards and yet nobody there has addressed it as to the reason why. The biggest beef I have with the whole thing is lack of communication to the server owners/community owners. From: hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com [mailto:hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com] On Behalf Of 1nsane Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2015 3:15 PM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] Optional TF2 update released You gotta remember that for a while hosting servers for valve's games was a great way to get a community going in an online game. But now it's completely different. Even EA let's you host ranked games which allow players to rank up on them. Where you can compete for traffic with official servers. While valve does nothing like that. We're locked out from all that. Valve only let's you run second tier servers. You could run all the same settings as they do and yet no one would play on such a server without the advantages (quick play defaults) and the incentives (contracts) that valve servers give to players. On Aug 4, 2015 2:03 PM, "Robert Paulson" <thepauls...@gmail.com> wrote: If no one at Valve really cared, then official servers wouldn't have been removed from the browser, even if it was only for a few days. From what I heard, there are only a few people left on the TF team, and at least one of them is anti-community. The removal of official servers from the list was probably done by a junior employee which is why it got reversed. I agree there's not much chance something will change, which is why I only bothered to reply to this thread a month later. But we know there's at least one person that might care. And at the very least, we can keep reminding people not to devote too much time and effort into anything related to Valve because they will wipe out community servers built up over years without hesitation just like they did in TF2. If you are involved or thinking about being involved (workshop, websites, servers) in the Valve ecosystem (Dota2, CS:GO) you might want to think twice about spending too much effort into what you are doing. On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 6:34 AM, Andreas Willinger <aw...@gmx.at> wrote: Yea, also got one. Von: hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com [mailto:hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com] Im Auftrag von Paul Gesendet: Dienstag, 04. August 2015 15:06 An: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Betreff: Re: [hlds] Optional TF2 update released Although off topic, is anyone here getting any spam or similar email from someone named 'Amy Happy'? I've had two emails via this mailing list from this person in the last few hours. On 4 August 2015 at 12:41, Andreas Willinger <aw...@gmx.at> wrote: Oh look, another ignorant person. Guess you never ran any TF2 servers then. Von: hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com [mailto:hlds-boun...@list.valvesoftware.com] Im Auftrag von Brian Riedel Gesendet: Dienstag, 04. August 2015 13:03 An: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Betreff: Re: [hlds] Optional TF2 update released Seriously, this. If your servers can't retain people, then that's a problem with the strength of your community, not with the updates to quickplay. On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 6:58 AM, Rovanion Luckey <rovanion.luc...@gmail.com> wrote: Is there an email list on which I can get the update announcements and without the constant whining? 2015-08-04 12:54 GMT+02:00 Rowedahelicon <theoneando...@rowedahelicon.com>: Can I get a confirmation my emails go in? Anyway, wait until Dota II stops being popular, that's where the money is and that's where the focus is! Thing is is that the TF2 community as a whole doesn't seem to understand why TF2 is as bad as it is, far too many people think that everyone Valve does is for the best and that they're never wrong ever. The response may be more effective if a much larger portion of the community raise their voice about it. On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 5:32 AM, Paul <ubyu....@gmail.com> wrote: Since Valve appears to have more or less confirmed their lack of support towards communities these days I haven't bothered spending a single penny/cent on games such as Team Fortress 2, especially not on these contracts. I also asked a good number of my friends to see what their opinion was and quite a number of them aren't either apparently. It's so disappointing to see that a company who originally developed great games has gone from being open and fair to being closed and apparently mostly interested in ways to pull more cash from their games. There are so many good ideas here which are being ignored, as workarounds. If things ever changed for the better then I, along with quite a number of other people I'm sure, would be motivated in buying items on games such as Team Fortress 2 again. Come on Valve, open your mind to us - the community which made Team Fortress 2 towards what it is today (prior to it beginning to lose support for the community servers)! Somewhere you must surely care about them still? On 4 August 2015 at 04:40, Rowedahelicon <theoneando...@rowedahelicon.com> wrote: Oh they know the setup is unfair, they said so from the very start a few years ago, and last year they promised they'd give us a middle ground. They don't care you see, Valve employees have said how money drives direction at Valve now, and Valve servers mean less modding means more money. On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 7:08 PM, Robert Paulson <thepauls...@gmail.com> wrote: The TF2 team, in a misguided effort to silence all complaints, ended up making poor decisions that are killing community servers. The truth is, whatever you do, someone is going to complain about something. You blocked ads from being displayed for people connecting through quickplay? One down. But now there are people complaining about contracts and saying they don't want CS:GO garbage in their game. Are you going to remove that too? Of course not. So far you have been unfairly accommodating to the type of players that can't even be bothered to type "valve" in the server browser at the expense of everyone else. What happened to letting people decide for themselves? If people do not like a server for having reserved slots or ads, then they will not return, and the server will have fewer players. The fact that you hid official servers from the browser, at least for a couple days, proves that you know the current setup to be unfair and not the best experience for the players who don't like official servers. Please don't wait another year to fix this. If people are actually use the browser to find official servers, then I would suggest having a toggle for that on the browser, defaulted to off. However to see any real change, the official server toggle on the quickplay GUI should automatically be turned off after a few hours. That would still guarantee that new players know what a vanilla experience is. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds -- *Matthew (Rowedahelicon) Robinson* Web Designer / Artist / Writer Website - http://www.rowedahelicon.com/ _______________________________________________ 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 -- *Matthew (Rowedahelicon) Robinson* Web Designer / Artist / Writer Website - http://www.rowedahelicon.com/ _______________________________________________ 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 _______________________________________________ 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
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