Community servers are not obsolete, they just require more work to setup, which TF2 already has the infrastructure for. Most modern games are short lived so they do not want to spend the time upfront to support community servers, but in TF2, the work has already been done.
Community servers have many benefits over official ones, besides moderation, server hardware is one example I am surprised to see you bring up. Valve uses commodity hardware. I've seen official servers lag even with only 24 players. There are quite a few communities out there that splurge more than Valve would ever bother to, for example, higher tick servers in CS:GO. On TF2 this is not so obvious since ticks are capped at 66, but there is less stuttering. There is also no ddos protection. Script kiddies can just ddos the server before they start losing. Even if you don't believe community servers did (and still do) any of this, just remember before quickplay defaulted to official servers, the top 100 servers on gametracker were all community servers. I didn't screenshot this because I had no idea Valve would remove community servers from quickplay, but I believe people here can confirm this. This is unbiased proof that community servers were worth having. I can already hear some of you bring up that a few server owners will cheat? I don't see how this would be an issue if you kept the original quickplay instead of replacing it with casual mode which is useless. What's the point of gaining xp for losing, or recording stats when your team don't care about winning? Is this not basically the same reward system we have for item drops? As I have said repeatedly, all you need to do to ensure that players know what a "vanilla" experience is like is to force them into official servers for the first 10 hours. Many community players have told me that they aren't moving back to official servers when community ones die off. They will just play Overwatch instead. If they are forced to deal with teleport griefers and hackers, they will do it in a game with better graphics, new characters and mechanics, and devs that talk to the community. It is baffling that Valve would kill their stickiest player-base built up over almost a decade to try to copy Overwatch's success. As a reminder, here is how TF2 is doing. October 2016 45,910.1 October 2015 55,256.6 October 2014 57,977.0 http://steamcharts.com/app/440 Community servers are a positive thing for the game. I hope John and Eric realize it before the last few die off for good. John, if you have any plans to actually make use of the Game Sever registration system so that community servers have a reasonable chance at getting players, time is running out. For some, it is already too late. The last few community servers are dying right now. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
