Valve Engineers Weed Out 'Lying' TF2 Game Servers 97
billlava writes "Tired of Team Fortress 2 servers that lie in order to attract players, engineers at Valve (creators of the Half Life franchise) have come up with a way to weed out servers that give false information about the number of players online, or custom server options. 'After kicking around some proposals, we came up with a simple system built around the theory that player time on a server is a useful metric for how happy the player is with that server. It's game rules agnostic, and we can measure it on our steam backend entirely from steam client data, so servers can't interfere with it. We already had this data for all the TF2 servers in the world, allowing us to try several different scoring formulas out before settling on this simple one that successfully identified good & bad servers.' Of course, this only works with their games running on Steam."
Re:A real annoyance: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Abuse (Score:5, Informative)
* New servers start with a score of 0 points
* Each time a player connects to a server, it loses 15 points
* For each minute the player stays on the server, it earns 1 point (up to a max of 45 points per player)
"The Administrator" (Score:1, Informative)
The most obvious difference between
would be, we paid for the Valve product, but IMO Google gives us more.
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Besides, please take a look at these two posts in the same Team Fortress 2 Blog:
Sounds to me like an Administrator who enjoys his powers a little too much. Not everyone would take kindly to being in the receiving end of these words, even if these words don't apply to him.
Re:"The Administrator" (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds to me like an Administrator who enjoys his powers a little too much. Not everyone would take kindly to being in the receiving end of these words, even if these words don't apply to him.
I don't even play TF2, but a simple cursory glance at the blog in question will show in a matter of seconds that "The Administrator" is doing her writing "in character".
So... is she a grumpy and gruff war monger who, as the post states, was taken away from the latest issue of Punishment Monthly and a carton of cigarettes to deal with cheaters.... or an admin working for Valve who decided to add a bit of levity to the announcement that some cheaters were caught?
Re:A real annoyance: (Score:2, Informative)
I don't have a problem with it being off by 1 or 2 but lately I've been joining servers that say 31/32 and when I log on, there are 4 people...
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Abuse (Score:1, Informative)
Example event/db system:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=822087