2023, and still. RIP Quickplay. I miss playing Prop Hunt, FortWars, Dodgeball, and various other custom gamemodes.

RIP Quickplay

http://Browser.TF/ A web-side Server Browser for Team Fortress 2. I am still working on it, but I believe it is stable.

Thanks.

OMG ... http://v1.steam.hlxgame.cc/groups/fixquickplay/discussions/0/613956964581218222/

Thanks for the article!

http://www.pcgamer.com/valve-on-customer-service-support-we-have-to-do-better/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUGJpyeMRiA
Saw your post explaining the problem in Valve.
Spread the news and link in comments (you can see my top comment).
Hopefully, it will raise some awareness.

@Darth Kreamer, last time I checked they were hidden behind a small cog. When I first tried it I knew of the problem and that I could change how it worked, so naturally looked for the cog. If you had no idea what a server is, let alone notice the fact you are always using Valve servers and that community ones exist: you'll only by chance click the cog.

It isn't really good for communities. Quickplay in its current form has massively reduced the traffic to them. These are people who play, support the community, and in some cases donate and help financially. There are plenty of other ways for us to make servers that are only available for community members.

Besides there are plenty of other disadvantages of quickplay.

See here for more details:
http://redd.it/2xkyad

@grump, thank you! Indeed I don't think they care enough to fix it properly at the moment. However groups like this have succeeded to an extent before. It is all a matter of numbers and coverage. So any publicity you can give this would be great!

I joined to show what little support I can give. I'm fully behind the sentiment of this group but at this stage, I really don't think Valve are going act on anything suggested here, if they even pay it the slight bit of attention in the first place. I have no doubt they're well aware of the situation but simply do not give a flying ♥♥♥♥. Still gonna spam all my friends with invites tho!

@Chicha, good question! When this group has become noteworthy and rallied a lot of people, I intend to notify Valve in anyway possible. I feel they will only grace this with a response when we've had plenty of coverage in the community.

Question: how do you propose Valve to take some action? Waiting for them to see this group, or are you going to send something to Valve?

How to find and INTERESTING TF2 server:
http://v1.steam.hlxgame.cc/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=247865390

Invite your friends, do your thang. Get this problem fixed asap!

Support

@Dr. Fallen, Believe me I have been in that horrid situation of trying to convince my admins to just sit there. I think QP only sends players when you have over 10 on the server. I can't be sure. Before when it first started, if you could get 6 or so admins to play a bit, a new server would be full within the hour and stay full for most of the day.

The most popular servers of most communities would get favourited enough that they wouldn't even require a kick start.

When you say vanilla lobby system, how do you mean? The one where it shows you a list of servers?

To be honest if they were going to make quickplay effective they should of kept the vanilla lobby system instead of keeping it in beta for ages. In there they could of added the option to either search through community or Valve servers.

What's funny are the communities that make their administrators sit idling in servers hoping they will get that magic 12-16 player count that in itself isn't a community.

Matchmaking is effective for MvM and also you could again change it so instead of being "Valve vs Community" You could set it so that it's broken into different modes. So if you want play say Saxton Hale or do some trading you would have a catergory for each.

While I do like the server browser to an extent, it had some serious flaws. It can take ages to refresh. Some routers would conk out with the excessive amount of traffic (there's a steam support article on it somewhere) and not only that it wasn't very nicely formatted and laid out given the real estate on modern monitors.

I don't think being given a selection of the 15-20 best servers for you at that time is a bad idea like on QP, however I feel the selection should be a lot broader.

Either that or the server browser really needs some work. A search facility would be nice too!

Completely agree with n0:name. It should be like the old days of Team Fortress Classic where we didn't have this quickplay nonsense. People searched for a server and made use of the server browser's functionality (such as favourites). Quickplay (or matchmaking) makes sense for mann vs machine of course.

I really do hope Valve takes action sometime in the future.
I know that their time measurement is off, but "temporary" means temporary, not an entire year..

In my personal opinion, quick play should simply be removed alltogether (with exceptions on mann up, where it does make sense) and new players should be instructed how to use the server browser.
While on that, Valve could improve the training too (some classes are still missing or some training is just straight out missing - such as RJing).

Yeah, if you leave within a certian amount of time after you join it will ask you if you want to blacklist the server you were just on. However, I and probably many others have ticked the checkbox to never be asked again. It gets rather annoying being asked if you want to blacklist a server you joined for a second so that you could check on someone with a fishy name (variations of ♥♥♥♥♥, lmao-box, etc).

Pointlessness, yeah there are several external ranking systems. What I'm referring to and was suggested by others on the mailing list is to improve the internal ranking system. There is one for QP, however generally the only information given to server owners is whether the server's rank is rising or falling, fast or slow. How this is determined isn't really stated.

What I for one would like to see is some indication of how the rising fast etc affects how a often a server is offered as a QP choice.

Either way what I meant by ranking system should really be changed to rating system. It would be nice if players were asked to rate a server maybe based on a few things (or for simplicity possibly one overall rating on a scale of 1-5). This could be used to improve internal server rankings.

I can't quite remember and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but currently users who join a server to instantly leave it are asked if they want to blacklist it? I can't entirely remember now.

This has already partially been done: 3) Some form of comprehensive rating system that could be used to rank servers.

https://www.gameme.com/gameservers?game=tf2&country=#masterlist

Completely agree with the above and hope Valve eventually takes notice before it's too late to make a turnaround.

I agree with you, Crash. I'm going to check out this group's forums now.

Thanks for your input Crash. I feel it would be better in the pinned thread so that it doesn't get lost. Out of all the people, I feel for custom mappers even more than server owners. At least before last February we had a chance of success (maybe a little before, things started to go downhill before Feb with some owners syphoning huge amounts of traffic). But ever since QP came about it must have been impossible for mappers and that's been a lot longer than a year or so.

I'm not entirely sure how or why certain community maps get selected to become official ones. In fact I'm not even sure how the more recent ones get tested thanks to the lack of custom map servers as you have mentioned. But if we want really high quality maps again we need to support the map developers and QP has all but killed their testing grounds.

Custom mapper here, I have a bunch of maps (trainsawlaser, wubwubwub, glassworks, stoneyridge) that have a lot of people interested in playing my maps, but most people have a hard time finding them anywhere. Custom maps are few and far in between these days, and even if you can find them, the server hosting is probably empty.

Serious custom maps and the custom mapping community as a whole are being hurt by the current quick play enforcement. It was a ham-fisted attempt to wrangle servers that is doing more harm than good.

@Diskette, I would disagree in saying that most communities run servers for community members only. They may have a few servers like that, but most have public ones too.

With regards to your particular case, the only question left lingering in my mind is why is it on QP in the first place?

It was likely a conscious decision from the people who run the community you play in to allow random people to join through QP, who will adapt to the new mode. However I might add that running game mode servers on QP currently goes against Valve's policy of truth. However this change only happened more recently. When QP was first launched, there were no rules against game mode servers, only custom maps.

What if a community doesn't want a buncha random players joining a custom gameplay'd server, not only being confused and whining towards the confusing new mode, they start crying over "why does it have this in it?". Our servers (note: I'm just a member, not an actual admin) received that case some time ago, where on normal Central times, the annoying randoms came, and at Pacific time, where most of the members are at, started joining.

Most community servers are made for community members only, where you know who you're playing against or with, and ours are one of them. That is why i play on those servers only nowadays, cause i know these guys, and are friends with them.

I know i should be saying the above to my community's leader instead of here, it's just i got invited by a veteran moderator friend of mine from the community to this group, wanted to share my thought, hope he sees this.

Hi UncleMark2248!

2-D, I'd definitely like to reply to this more formally, but the comments section isn't the place to do so. Would you mind making a thread?

Also TF2 is..., there are pros and cons with decent matchmaking system (if I am thinking what you are thinking). However as long as it would be fair to all servers, I could see it being useful. There are ones for competitive play online currently.

Valve should just implement a fast and reliable matchmaking system already. It could even be used to organise competitive events.

I joined this group, just to voice my opinion.

I like the way it is. Valve servers provide a stable, good server. Online followings, public websites and forums are all good ways for servers to expand. I understand they've been ♥♥♥♥♥♥ around, but the only servers I'd join are ones for custom modes or effects. For example, VSH, or 100% crit. Which are easily access through the server browser. The only problem with allowing them back, is that when I selected to go play KOTH, I got put on a random russian trade server, valve can't be 100% sure of what you'd get with a community, server, and with no custom modes (i.e. VSH is classed as KOTH) it's hard to moderate.

2) A big button to select between community server suggestions and valve server suggestions.

Something like this makes sense.

Anyway, that's my opinion on the matter.

Hi :D

Don't hesitate to add me on Steam if you want to get involved :)! Also, this group is for administrators and players alike, from groups big or small, all are affected.