Mopar Madness wrote:If observers aren't counted, then servers that want to manipulate the sorting will just change their names since it sorts by alphabetical name next. random.server.com:5154 will just rename itself 00000000.server.com:5154 and so on. Servers already do this (looking at you BZTank.net).
I also said that servers with the same amount of players are sorted randomly. This means that the hostname no longer influences the sorting of servers. So if you have ten servers with 3 players, they will still show up lower than servers with 5 players, but they will be randomly sorted within each other each time the list loads. This will help bring other servers to the first or second page of the list that normally were buried 10 to 18 pages in.
Mopar Madness wrote:If you insist on not counting observers, then I propose, if its possible, that you just check how long an observer has be sitting idle on a server and stop counting it after a certain amount of time has passed, maybe like 6 hours or something. Observers that have been on a server for under that amount of time could be counted then.
Unfortunately the list server has no concept of how long someone has been on a server, nor does it even track
who is on a server. It only has snapshots of "this is how many players the server has". It's something I would certainly like to fix in future iterations of our public services, but it's all we have right now.
Mopar Madness wrote:Personally, if 2.4.4 was released with its current method of server list sorting with no changes, I would be sticking with 2.4.2, and while I can't speak for all league players, it would not shock me at all if a majority of the league players felt the same way. Being able to easily see accurately which league servers are active is too important of a feature to give up.
Here's some possible ways that 2.4.4 could be just fine for you even with the observer changes:
Mark the servers as favorites (+ to add, - to remove) and then press f to show only favorites.
Or use the search function to search for GU or Ducati.
Also, speaking of the search function, there's actually a lot of powerful search functions that we don't actually document. For instance, if you search for:
It will show you only servers with at least 4 observers ('op' short for 'observerPlayers'). And you can customize the search presets by modifying the config, and then switch to them with the 1 through 9 keys, with 0 returning to a blank search (showing everything).
Now, combine the 'favorite servers' thing with /op>=4, and you could do:
That would show servers on your favorite list with at least 4 observers.
Or you could search for servers with "GU League" or "Ducati League" in their description with more than 0 observers:
So, let's say we better documented the list search, reworked our defaults to possibly include the last one above (or one that also included whatever the combined league will be called), and added a menu to edit these filters in-game (similar to that of the quick keys menu but with only one column)? Would that be acceptable?