Spoiler

Over the past few years, I (and pretty much every other “legit” server host in TF2) had to watch how Valve more and more drove people away from player-hosted servers over to their own, resulting in the death of, for example, Dustbowl, 2Fort and (to an extent) Randomizer - basically all our “standard” servers.



The process started in January of 2014, when Valve decided to make Quickplay default to their own servers. While the effect of this change was not immediately noticeable at first (at least for us), it showed more and more as time progressed. Over time, I saw player numbers drop by at least 50%+. This also caused the “great server purge” of 2014, where a lot of smaller-sized communities already closed shop.



Now, Valve (somewhat) did that with a reason. Back then, a lot of “communities”, or rather, server farms existed whose sole purpose was to farm money, used certain plugins to fake player counts and direct traffic from Quickplay to their servers, thus producing revenue. Instead of actually solving the problem (e.g. actually banning those servers or making the requirements for entering in Quickplay more strict), Valve decided to take the lazy route and lock everyone out.



Even though this change was a pretty drastic one, some of our servers (2Fort) still managed to somewhat survive.



As time went on, Valve added more and more features which were exclusive to their own servers, such as the whole contract system, which, again, only grants rewards on their own servers. This eventually also caused me to not host any halloween servers last year, considering noone would join anyways.



The eventual final nail in the coffin was put when the MyM update came out, which entirely scrapped Quickplay and instead added today’s MM system. This system, by design, only connects to Valve official servers, thus cutting off pretty much all newer/lazier players who do not wish or are too inexperienced to use the server browser..



However, this problem is not only limited to TF2. A similar turn of events happened in CS:GO with the whole fake econ items debacle.



Back in 2015, Valve asked all server owners to stop using any plugins which alter a player’s econ items. I immediately (well, on the next day at least), decided to take measures and removed the !knife and !ws plugins from our servers. Unfortunately, similarly to TF2, certain bad actors still continued to run those plugins and “avoided” bans by using so-called token services, where you can buy GSLT tokens for cheap. Instead of simply patching out the “exploit” (similarly to how you cannot see unowned hats/items in TF2), they decided to simply do.. nothing. Thus, if you want to have any stable population and be able to compete with the bad actors, you have to run those plugins yourself.



This is the reason I re-enabled the plugins several months ago.



There have also been made several attempts to get Valve to talk with server owners about the whole community server situation. with low success rates.



All in all, I don’t really think anything is really going to change any time soon.



Now, some of you may say that our servers still get a lot of players. While that’s true, the player counts are still quite a bit lower than some years ago, and less stable. Additionally, I don’t host any “base game” servers anymore, such as 2Fort, DB, etc.