Well the issue here is Valve gets more money and more support from the community and the community servers than their own. This to me is a no brainer in how to react and to at least fix quickplay to help community servers from the start. You can then spend a little effort to punish those that are abusing certain things to go against how a Vanilla or near Vanilla server should run.
Now my biggest concern right now is trading. We all know that trading is huge with TF2 and other games. A few years ago they removed the ability to trade within the game itself to be only replaced by using the steam overlay. Now we have issues where people can't trade because someone needs to verify who they are or what they are doing by email. This is a failure upon failure!! To make matters worse I'm hearing reports that users must be "friends" of those they intend to trade with, I hope this is a major glitch and will soon stop or else my community and many others that reply on quick trades to enter events and other in game related features may end up calling it quits. To make this sorta change default is once again a shadow of how they developed Quickplay to only punish the communities, the very communities that are pumping money into a game that is now free for all to use. So someone by all means jump in here cause I'm either way off my rocker of the recent trading changes or Valve has completely and utterly said the heck with the community as a whole. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gordon Reynolds Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2015 4:37 PM To: Paul Lewis; Half-Life dedicated Linux server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds_linux] Rethinking the community quickplay ban Yes, I meant to imply that this change was a start to "fixing" abusive Community Servers without shutting the whole thing down. Not a great start but at least it's something. I don't know how one would ensure that you never end up on one of the "Premium Features" servers though. For every check you can put in place, someone would just program around it. On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Paul <[email protected]> wrote: > Disabling the HTML MOTD on Quickplay clients is already done. > > On 5 February 2015 at 21:26, Gordon Reynolds > <[email protected] > > > wrote: > > > I believe the change is going to stay in place because TF2 is just > > not a high priority any longer. By ensuring the vast majority of > > players end up on Valve servers they don't have to worry about > > abusive servers mucking > up > > the experience (of getting people into the game and hooked into the > > Mannconomy ASAP) with weird MOTDs, "Premium Plugins", etc. > > > > However: there must be some better options than what currently > > exists now (disabling MOTDs and stuff is a start, sucky, but it's > > something), but > I'm > > not sure Valve has any real financial motivation to care.They don't > > make money off Community server, UGC highlander teams, or the number > > of maps being played. From an economic perspective I don't think TF2 > > as a whole would experience a drastic paradigm shift if ALL > > community servers were suddenly shut off. > > > > I think it might be the intention all along to slowly ween the TF2 > > community off the importance of community-ran servers, and that's tragic. > > > > > > On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Tim Anderson <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > > To the TF2 team, > > > > > > It has now been over a year since the decision to essentially ban > > community > > > servers from quickplay by defaulting to official ones. Here are > > > some > > facts > > > of what has happened since then. > > > > > > - Player gain dropped 4% from the year before. > > > - UGC highlander teams dropped 17% > > > - Highly reduced map variety from community servers. > > > - Even top non-quickplay servers have drastically fewer players > > > than in 2013. > > > > > > You may have guaranteed new players a vanilla experience, but this > > > is ruining the experience for the rest. > > > > > > Maybe nothing is being done because you do not see enough > > > complaints > > about > > > this from reddit or spuf. This is because the problem is obvious > > > when someone connects to a pay to win server while it is not as > > > obvious > when a > > > server is dying over the span of several months because official > > > ones > are > > > getting all the new players. > > > > > > Most of the people that I talked to even knew about this change so > > > the thought about complaining about it never crossed their minds. > > > But just because they never knew about it doesn't mean it wasn't a problem. > > > > > > I hope you realize that this change is doing more harm than good. > > > It > may > > > have stopped some complaints but this is hurting TF2 in the long run. > > > _______________________________________________ > > > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list > > > archives, please visit: > > > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list > > archives, please visit: > > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
