On 09/12/2011 09:55, Peter Reinhold wrote:
My servers have gained a (small) contingency of regular players, but, when one of these join and finds the server empty, maybe idles for a minute or two, and then leaves (and who can blame them), they are unwillingly punishing a server they would like to play on, and having 10-15-20 of these players doing this over an afternoon punishes the server HARD, as I understand it.
You really do want people to join when it is empty because this is one of the criteria that will send quickplay players to your server in preference to completely empty servers, so it's not a good idea to discourage people from joining your server based upon fretting about how it affects the score.
If you get regular players, perhaps time to think about other community things you could do to try and get more regulars or to keep a few around on the server. Most of the servers that are full 'all the time' have lots of regulars. (Although I don't think there are many genuine servers that are full 24/7 except perhaps immediately after a big update) So this should happen to everyone, meaning your score is no different than it would be compared with others.
The only use of the score is quickplay, so if you have a lot of regulars you won't need quickplay players, so your score won't matter. (It's true to say that if your server is nearly full people will join from the browser too)
I believe it only counts each player once too, so if you have the same person joining and leaving to see, it won't impact it each time.
But, it's not a question of whether your server is 'good' or 'bad' in terms of what your intentions or the intentions of the people joining are. It's a simple measure of how long each player stopped on the server used to roughly gauge their experience.
We have to take the negative scores with the positive, but this will happen to everyone using quickplay, not just you.
My experience is that the only interesting numbers to look at at are the time of day and the current/peak players for TF2 on the stats page. If the clock suggests most people in your timezone are awake and the current / peak numbers are high, then it's more likely your server will fill.
The rest of the time, it's pretty moot what your score is. Not the least because I think anyone playing TF2 at 3am in their timezone isn't using quickplay. And the popular servers that fill first are not getting those players from people hitting 'start playing' either.
At the moment, I think TF2 numbers are affected by the skyrim effect (with maybe a slightly smaller dota 2 beta effect as well)
-- Dan. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
