Valve helps players and admis connect.

You can always tell who cares more for their customers and Valve is one caring developer and publisher. You know the one's who always seem to release fixes rather quickly, offer tools that actual help and provide support long after a game is released.

They have come up with a very cool way to help rank TF2 servers so you, the client can find the better ones.

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.

I guess they have a money tree and can turn coal into diamonds to support the 500K employees that is needed to provide quality support for all their games and services over a long periods of time... wait, you mean they don't have that many people working for them? How the hell do they do it? You say a passion for their games and a lot of , what do they call it... oh it's called talent. Who would have thought that, surely not 98% of the other game devs out there.

Head on over to the Team Fortress page to read more and see some cool TF2 inspired graphs.

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