dirty laundry

From Valve’s Team Fortress 2 site:

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. […] 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.

• 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.

This is why Valve (and Blizzard) will always have my money. They have amazing support, patches, and updates to their well-built games and actually cater to their users.