One of the things we've been thinking about for a while now is how to improve the player experience around finding a server to play on. It's a tricky problem because our master servers need to ask a game server for its details, and that server can lie to us if it wants to. We decided we needed to find a way of scoring servers, with a goal of finding and delisting ones we considered "bad". The scoring system had to penalize lying without penalizing custom game rules, because some players like custom game rules. Best case, the system needed to work entirely from data that didn't come from the servers themselves, so they couldn't lie to us in any way to affect it.

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:



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)
In short, servers that have lots of players joining & leaving rapidly will score badly. Servers that consistently have players join and stay on for long periods of time will score well.

Here's a graph showing server scores for all the TF2 servers in the world as of last week. For the purpose of scoring, we ignored all password-protected servers, and all servers that had fewer than 200 connections a day. The blue line in the graph represents the scores for all the TF2 servers. The red line is the matching player connection count for each server.

As you can see, the bulk of servers in the world are doing a pretty good job of providing an experience that's expected by the people joining them. More importantly, it's really easy to see what servers are bad. Overlaying the number of players connecting to the servers illustrates how nasty an effect these bad servers are having on players. The very worst servers attract a large number of connections, mostly because they're lying in ways that make them look like a very attractive server at all times.

Our first step in improving this part of the player experience has been to delist all the really bad servers. The master server will simply stop giving these to you when you fire up the serverbrowser. After that, we're going to keep improving our ability to measure this kind of problem.

Hm okay...
I think the SpA server are doing pretty good in that aspect.
Would be funny to see a list with the ranking scores of the servers.

Tough break, GTFO-Gaming.

?

Each time a player connects to a server, it loses 15 points

They use fake client thingies to lure people into connecing to their empty servers (and even the ones that do have real players on them). Well-deserved.

They manage to waste my time every morning.

I'm very curious how this system will work out as well. I believe we have a slight advantage with our awesometastic SpA-point system that makes people stay on the servers and collect credits. ^^

I know the feeling. This morning the first 5 servers I connected to were empty altough the serverbrowser stated there are players on it >.<

Do it like little bird: I play on SpA exclusevly because the other servers plainly SUCK

the SpA servers tend to be populated by the amazing 0 people in the wee early mornings... unless Saint is idling, then it's 1....

Right now, we're not trying to provide a finely tuned quality difference between servers to players looking for a server. Instead, we're focused on finding and removing the very worst servers. This is why we're not showing server scores in the serverbrowser. If we did that, we think it'd be very hard for new servers to build communities, which a number of you have already identified as a problem. Our first pass was a manual one, so we knew there wouldn't be an exploitation issue. Going forward, we'll be making this into an automatic process, with the following additions:



- Each player will be able to negatively affect a server's score only once per day.

- We'll add a new message printed to the server console that tells the server where it stands score-wise. It'll be focused on warning you if you're heading towards being delisted.



Some minor notes in response to questions being posed on the list:

- Reserved slots won't result in any scoring implications if you're using them correctly (i.e. have set sv_visiblemaxplayers properly, or are using a SourceMod method)

- Bots aren't counted in the scoring.

- Delistings are temporary (1 month right now)

- Level changes do not affect scoring (i.e. players are not considered as having disconnected & reconnected over a level change)

- Servers with low connection counts are not subject to being delisted. This means if you're testing something on your new server you don't have much to worry about.


At least for now, this isn't meant to be a method to tell us or the community as a whole how good a server is. It is strictly for identifying servers that are doing really bad things like lying about their player count or redirecting.