On 31/10/2013 18:46, Marco Padovan wrote:
Proabably that's like they do with csgo: all their servers get "priority"
so the users firstly fill theirs and eventually the rest
AIUI that bias to their TF2 servers is only for new players (i.e
accounts that
have played under a certain number of hours)
Unless that has changed.
I suspect though this will cause the effect you're seeing, because
if you play 2fort on Valve's servers you notice myriad "powerhouse offence"
achievements at the end of a 3-0 round.
It probably explains the general TF2 community view that
folk on Valve's servers cannot play too.
The thing is, for sure on a Valve server you'll see more of
those "new account" giveaways, but you see quite a lot on other servers
too.
Suggesting the community, in general, is now biased towards newer players.
Bans probably serve to create more as well.
So yeah you'll be fighting for the same players as Valve simply
because the players that, in theory, are supposed to be
put on your quickplay servers either don't exist, join servers manually
or have played enough Halloween events to know that they suck :)
I don't think the mid ground exists much these days
i.e I suspect the community is now made of new players
and people who have played forever.
Why? Everyone is new at some point, so you get a big pool of new players.
Especially for a game that is free for anyone to try, well publicised
and updated
relatively frequently. So long as the game attracts new people Valve's
servers
will be full. And there is always a new generation of kids every year
getting
older and discovering these games.
Most people will play a game for a few hours and then
move on to another game. So this mid ground is
where most of your players will quit playing.
Beyond a certain point though, the longer someone has played,
the more likely they are going to keep playing it. Your TF2 addicts.
So eventually, if you plotted hours played in buckets, by
currently active players, I think you'd see a big spike of players that
have just started playing
and a big spike that play TF2 a lot and the bit in between them less so.
Now of course, Valve only run so many servers so
once full, new players will get sent elsewhere regardless.
So, if you ever get bewildered TF2 players that have barely played on
your servers
then you know the player base is biasing towards newer players and valve
servers
are full. I notice whole servers like this.
These longer term players though are probably far more likely to
stick to the maps they play ignoring the event, or type plr_ in
the browser, order by latency and join one of the myriad
servers with 15 ping. Rather than entering Valve's quickplay
lottery which, whenever I try it, usually gets a server I'd reject
based upon config, ping or server performance.
Simply put, quickplay sucks at picking servers compared with me
and yet, I just said what I do - I order the list by latency and click a
low number.
Whatever Valve do makes it worse. Perhaps they believed their
employee manual and figured the speed of light didn't apply to them? :)
"You have been specially chosen to work at Valve because the laws of
physics don't apply in your case.
You may notice other staff floating in the halls and ignoring ping in
their matchmaking code. Don't be alarmed by this. We're not like
other companies you may have worked at before."
Maybe they should stop the bias?
Throwing a couple more parameters into the data quickplay
and the browser gets might help improve it.
I'd happily get a random game but I don't use quickplay because it can't
pick servers.
Firstly, ping uber alles - there's absolutely no point connecting
someone to a server with a ping over 50 and the lower the better.
Then filter out servers that limit or change the rate below the 30000
default
you have set in the client. This is still a pain when you connect from the
browser.
Var is perhaps the next field it wants to check. Especially on this
Halloween event.
I don't know if the event map is particularly processor heavy or
something but
there seemed to be far more servers that were incapable of running the
game (a lot
like the early days of MvM) Let them down gently if you like but can't
the server spam
a 'you've got to be joking mate - am I running on a mac?" console message
when it detects it cannot maintain a specific level of performance?
--
Dan
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