Thanks for the information. I can't speak for everyone but my main
concern is what makes our score go up or down. Without knowing and
only guessing, it makes it very hard to stay on top. Some of our
admins are worry that kicking or banning a player for bad behavior
brings our score down which would be unfair because it's the type of
thing that brings the overall experience up for others who stay.
--
Ravnox
Quoting Fletcher Dunn <fletch...@valvesoftware.com>:
If you want to know if matchmaking is working or not, looking at
your own server will tell you very little. You have to play the
game. Our current goals for quickplay are pretty limited: to match
players (especially new players, who we expect to be the ones using
this feature) to the best server for them. In other words, we
define success solely from the client's perspective. We don't have
any criteria that attempts to optimize results from servers'
perspective, with the exception of reducing unwanted traffic (in the
form of query pings or quickplay player traffic in general).
Last weekend (July 2) all of the Valve servers went down. This
undoubtedly sent a lot of quickplay traffic your way. Then, on
Monday, they came back up. This almost certainly resulted in less
quickplay traffic coming your way. Our overall player counts are
reduced since the initial surge, but we still have a pretty large
number of Valve servers up. I'd guess that ratio of Valve servers
versus players using quickplay is the single largest factor in
determining how much quickplay traffic comes your way.
On the other hand, last week's update reduced the scoring advantage
that Valve servers get. We are still tweaking this. We may make
the scoring advantage a function of player experience, to get
totally new players on Valve servers, but over time transition them
into the general population.
Payload is the default game mode choice. You might get more
quickplay traffic on payload maps.
We are experimenting with certain rules changes being score
penalties rather than deal-breakers. (nocrits is the first test.)
But right now, there are so many good Valve servers available,
unless your server is vanilla with a good ping and 15-20 players in
it, most clients will score the Valve server higher anyway, so
pretty much any scoring penalty can effectively rule you out. This
is just a function of the number of players and the number of
(Valve) servers.
The fix for the replay off-by-one player count bug should be in the
next update. We have received some helpful reports about zombie
players and hopefully will have that fixed, too. We also read the
suggestions for how our codebase could be improved and features
implemented more simply. Rest assured that those suggestions are
being given all the attention they deserve.
The reputation scoring system will take some time to tune.
Currently it can be dwarfed by the other factors. We are not
certain it is the best long term solution, perhaps creating a more
persistent server identity at the Steam level is better. For
example, so you can change your IP and not lose all of your loyal
players who added your server to their favorites list. We have
heard you loud and clear on this point and it is something I
personally am very interested in working on. Having a less
anonymous system will benefit good servers and players and is a good
thing all around.
Your humble servant.
- Fletch
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