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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
The news you've all been waiting for: The Scout Update!
Also, we released an update yesterday with a change that needs some clarification. The update notes said this:
From the response we got, there's some confusion around this, so we thought it'd be good to do a post that explained what's going on here.
In TF2, almost all damage done to players is modified based on the distance from the player to the enemy who did the damage. There are several reasons why this is done, but the general purpose of it is that it makes close combat resolve faster than long range combat, giving approaching players more time to make tactical decisions (like whether to engage or retreat). The ramp centers around the 512 units (roughly 40 feet) range, and linearly remaps damage done from 150% at 0 units down to 50% at >1024 units. So if you're fighting someone closer than 512 units, you're doing extra damage.
Sticky bombs have an additional complexity on top of this: they use the distance modification for the first 5 seconds of their life, and then turn it off. This is because it's generally a dual purpose weapon: used offensively like a rocket launcher, and defensively to create traps. The 5 second rule essentially means distance matters in the offensive mode, but not at all in the defensive. So if you're a trap laying Demoman, you don't need to get near the stickies when you set them off.
So, yesterdays update reduced the amount of bonus damage that the stickies earned at close range during that first 5 seconds of their life. Their old distance-based damage ramp range was 150% -> 50% variance around the base 120 damage, and the update reduced that to 115% -> 50%. Here's a handy graph with the details, and it shows how the remap only affects damage closer than 512 units.
Why did we do this? We didn't think that the Demoman was overpowered at medium & long ranges, where the charge up time provides an existing penalty. If we did a straight damage reduction across the board, we would affect that. In addition, by weakening the Demoman specifically at short range, we've created a weakness that enemies can take advantage of in combat, and makes the Demoman wary of specific enemy classes (like the Scout and Pyro).
On Tuesday we shipped an update that added a bunch of features / bugfixes / balancing tweaks that came out of the community's feedback. In particular, it made some changes to the underlying TF damage system, and as part of that, it modified the way critical hits are determined. We thought it might be interesting to dig a little into the change, and hopefully give you some insight into our thinking.
First, a quick primer on how the critical hit system works. Each player's chance of successfully rolling for a critical hit depends on two factors:
There are two paradigms used for when to roll, and what happens on success:
We had a few things we wanted to change with the old system:
Here are the actual changes we made, taken from the release notes:
Lets dig a little deeper into these. First, the base critical hit chance was reduced from 5% to 2%. This means that if you haven't done any damage to an enemy, your crit chance is now just under half what it was previously. Secondly, the size of the bonus range was reduced by a third, but the amount of damage needed to earn that bonus was halved. To understand the effect of that, it's useful to graph it:
As you can see, the new crit chance is slightly lower across the board, which we wanted. More importantly though, is that the rate at which the crit chance increases based on the amount of recent damage you've done. We like to think of that recent damage total as a rough measure of your performance.
In thinking about the change we wanted to make to critical hits, we decided that there was a point on the graph of particular interest to us, and that was the point at which your critical hit chance was as much a result of your performance as it was the base chance. If you look at at (A) on the old line, you'll see that point isn't reached until you've done 550 recent damage, a feat that occurs about as often as our backstab code works correctly. That point is reached at (B) on the new line, around the point where you've done 175 recent damage. This means that if you've just singlehandedly killed an enemy Demoman/Soldier/Pyro/Heavy, your next 20 seconds worth of crit chances are already more a result of that kill than the base chance. As a result, if you're a highly skilled player, you're going to fire significantly more critical hits than those around you. And remember, if you've just killed 2 or 3 enemies, now's the time to push!
