Bad server providers
Scatter
Join Date: 2012-09-02 Member: 157341Members, Squad Five Blue
Join Date: 2012-09-02 Member: 157341Members, Squad Five Blue
An issue that has plagued the Australian community since release is well known gaming communities such as *snip* providing very bad servers for NS2, typically with a 10 - 15 tickrate within the first 5 minutes. Unfortunately because of the well known names and the high player counts these servers are always full and often monopolise 75% of the community, despite there being other good servers available to play on. Email after email to these providers never amounts to anything, usually with a "if they are popular we see no reason to reduce the player count" response.
How do you deal with server operators like this that don't really care if they are wrecking the community?
Please can we require servers to be modded (like the 32 player servers) to go over 18 slots so that only clued in operators can run them and bad operators wont bother?
Also, does UWE actually care about this issue ? New players think performance is worse than it should be and will then tell their friends to not bother buying it because of the performance.
Name & shame is a nono, allso in reguard to server providers - GISP
How do you deal with server operators like this that don't really care if they are wrecking the community?
Please can we require servers to be modded (like the 32 player servers) to go over 18 slots so that only clued in operators can run them and bad operators wont bother?
Also, does UWE actually care about this issue ? New players think performance is worse than it should be and will then tell their friends to not bother buying it because of the performance.
Name & shame is a nono, allso in reguard to server providers - GISP
Comments
But yeah in fact you can't do anything about those servers as long as most ppl just tend to join the next best server with less free slots instead of picking a well running and maintained server.
This behaviour hasn't changed since the beta and i think will never change.
And i agree with the hosters why change anything if not needed? Most users seem to be fine with laggy servers etc. .
Most users don't come to the forums, so will just uninstall or moan to their mates about performance. It seems to me (true or not) that server performance has been steadily slipping down and down since the nice peak we got to with the luaJIT update.
You are totally right, with the last updates the server perf hasn't got really better. But i want to explain why we have the current situation with ns2 servers really:
NS2 needs high perf. hardware (cpu i7 2600k and better) to run properly with 30 ticks at 18-24 ppl.
Now think about it: ppl want to host servers as cheap as possible. Do you think they will get the ns2 server for 16$ monthly or the root for 56$. ?
Ofc those cheaper server have perf issues, but as long as the server gets full there is no reason for the hosters to use the hardware they could also use to host e.g. a 64 ppl bf4 server.
And all those high perf servers normally never get full so ppl shut them down after a short time because yeah it's expensive to run these.
When i started with my server i had alot problems to get ppl on it even as it uses pretty descent hardware and has a good network connection. This is mostly because ppl behave like i explained before. They do not watch out for mods, server setup or avg server perf. .They only look after slots left.
And so the situation won't change, because for those hosters there is no reason to change to better hardware or limit player slots as long as their servers get full.
1. Atm you can't unlock the linux server software which would force us to move to windows servers again (not good).
2. "Bad server" still perform "bad" at 18 players in endgame. A server which drops to 10 ticks at some point will also have problems at any other player count.
2. Barring a base rush a 10 minute mid game will always occur, while a 20+ minute endgame structure spam will occur less frequently. So if the bad servers are now only performing poorly at end game, whereas before it was at mid game, I would count that as an improvement to the situation.
If the quality of the experience doesn't matter or isn't worth doing anything about, then we might as well jack up the player limit to 32.
Also while many think the game must be played in 24+, it simply isnt. I dont mind folk playing on huge servers, but directing rookies to a more reasonable nr would be nice.
That way high slot servers are still possible (because they might make sense for mods / different game modes), but new players wouldn't get noob trapped.
At that point you might as well just remove the hard coded max slot count of 24 players all together.
This "soft cap" should be lowered to 20 slots, though. Not because of performance reasons, but soley because of game play reasons. Neither the general balance, nor the maps were designed to be played with 24 players. Even 18 players feels way too clustered on certain maps (Summit).
The way I see it, this magical number of 24 is just there because the servers at the time could somehow handle it.
If the server performance at the time would have been the same with 32 players, I bet the hard cap would have been 32 players and we would have dozens of 32 slot servers, instead of 24.
Best route is to get a real dedicated server box, you can ensure everything works fine there.
They could fix the performance indicator so it show some sort of low avarage (NOT lowest tickrate, NOT spikes, because the server software is so bad it simply goes 0 tickrate some times with spikes, also on map changes and round ends it likes to do this) then simply filter by performance by default, so that the server with 10tick at endgame are filtered out of the list by default.
Otherwise, they could make it harder to "unlock" 24+, simply change slot stuff in the engine every few builds and make it sightly more annoying to reverse engineer. 24 is about what the game can handle properly anyway, unless running OC'd hardware.
As I said, from ns2's side they could rework the performance indication in the server browser, so rookies don't end up in those servers.
As for the providers, the one hosting/owning the NS2 can avoid them if they care, if they don't, a reworked performance system will help. Now for you or any other unstatisfied aussies, I'd recommed grouping up and buying/renting a dedicated server box and putting up a server (or multiple), so you can play in a lag-free envrionment.
tldr; we're screwed.
I can think of two west coast US servers that do this and it drive me nuts, because they've even had people complain in their own forums. Its a terrible first impression!
Every now and then i get the itch to jump into these when 1-2 slots are left just to spam to everyone that this server cannot handle the player count...
I realize this would piss off the server owner and make me look like a terrible person, but i feel it does more good than harm to educate the playerbase so that they may stay away from such places.
1.) Fix the performance index in the server browser. (So it displays the average performance over X time.)
2.) If the current performance index is below a specific number, show a message box to every connecting player (before he connects), that this server has problems maintaining the game flow, probably because of weak hardware and that the user should search a better running server.
This way you educate the users instead of forcing them to a specific player count. And this change is nothing big that needs hours of development.
Once they've been seeded with a few players, servers tend to fill surprisingly quickly.
just have the performance give back the worst performance rating for the previous match maybe, or average for the previous match. a lot of servers are ok until the 15 minute mark, then they tank.
On the topic of censorship I have much more to say. What annoys me most about this censorship is the lack of foresight it shows. It seems as if there was no assessment of "will this information cause more harm than the harm caused by censoring it". Perhaps mods aren't even aware that any act of censorship is a trade-off.
Censorship should be applied consistently. Are forum mods going to have the vigilance to censor any time someone writes something negative about another company/group/person? What about borderline, subjective calls? More importantly, what is gained by pretending that is the case?
Censorship irritates the community. Don't do it unless there are serious consequences for inaction.
On the other hand, is Scatter's goal furthered by naming and shaming operators? No. It's a distraction from the proposal he is trying to make.
Does that performance tag even work? It use to show servers below 100% a long time ago, but now I've never seen anything besides a 100% in a very long time.
I see the OP now..
It won't stop people from setting up servers on hardware that can't handle the load. Like in CSS/TF2, where server performance is (or used to be) significantly better, there were still bad servers that couldn't handle their tickrate. People simply often don't notice though, as having 50 tickrate vs 66 isn't as noticable as 10 vs 30.
Regardless of course the server performance should be significantly increased, and it also needs improved scaling on multi-core system though threading (including lua bits), it's a bit of a bad joke that only the fastest (per-core) intel processors can run a 24 slot server without overclocking.
- People think the more the merrier.
- Serverbrowser sorting by Players shows highercount servers first ofc.
- More players on each side gives less meaning to the individual performance. A really good player is less able to wreck havoc singlehandedly or a couple of derps in team isn't automatically a loose.
I personally settled to 10v10 servers.
- People join the lowest ping servers that are populated
I think it's mostly just a matter of what is available. I will never join a server with high ping, limiting myself to an absolute maximum of 150. Thus when I hop on to play NS2 my only option (unless I want to spend a lot of time trying to seed a server alone) is the 20+ player servers that are populated.
If I had 12-18 slot servers to choose from I doubt I would ever join a 20+ server.