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It's been a couple of weeks since we posted, so we thought it'd be good to do some housekeeping. The next class pack will focus on the Sniper. It's actually shaping up to be the largest TF2 update yet, with multiple new maps and a bunch of gameplay tweaks. In addition, we've got another update in the works that should be done before the Sniper, and that one will include some new content for all classes.
The XBox 360 update is still being worked on. If you're wondering what's taking so long, since the content is "done" on the PC already, it's mostly been around fitting it all onto the XBox. The original version of TF2 in the Orange Box was very close to the XBox's memory limit, and all the additional TF2 content we've produced has pushed well beyond it. We've found a couple of nifty ways to get back a bunch of that memory, but it's turned out to be a lot of work, and that's what most of our time is being spent on. In the meantime, we're going to get a code update out to address the server cheating that's going on.
Like many other folks online, the TF2 team has been loving the Top 10 TF2 Plays of the Week videos that Push Gaming has been doing. If you haven't seen them yet, you can catch week 1, and week 2. We're hoping for a third one soon, but we can't really complain. If we were doing them ourselves, you'd probably see the third one sometime next year. While waiting though, you can check out the exploits of some of the Sniper's countrymen in the second frag video of Aussie clan Mad Dogz.
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:
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.
Honestly.
Please, do take a cursory glance at the missive directly below this one. Take care to notice its author, and the dismally recent date of its posting.
Now imagine how profound my disappointment, to be called back again so soon to administer justice to the melon-headed few of you who persist in fraudulence. I'd just sat down with the two things I enjoy most in life — the most recent issue of Punishment Monthly and a carton of cigarettes — when the alarm sounded. I feel like a dog owner who's rubbed her pet's nose in a mess on the carpet, only to turn around and discover it setting fire to the drapes.
This time it seems a number of you used an external application to unlock all of your achievements in order to get items unfairly. Coming as a surprise to no one with the ability to retain memories of the recent past, I have taken these items from the perpetrators for one week.
Can I trust that this episode has finally taught you a lesson? I should live so long. Having watched how the sorry lot of you comport yourselves on the battlefield and in the forums, I would consider it a small miracle to trust one of you enough to lick stamps without asphyxiating.
My magazine awaits.
The Administrator
It saddens me that despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, some of you insist on finding new ways to fail.
We have sounded the alert and released a quick fix for an exploit that some unscrupulous players were using to wield items on invalid classes. I have considered an appropriate punishment for the good-for-nothings responsible for this horrendous breach of conduct. Death, of course - but death is too good for disappointments such as these. Instead, their unlockable items have been removed for a month.
To the majority of you who did not see fit to cheat, you have my congratulations: I await the countless other ways you will inevitably disappoint me in the future.
Yours,
The Administrator
