Public Server List Reform!

[mauvebic]

Well the way see it... not content with regulating mods to death by telling people where to host and how to license, now ya'll wanna do the same thing with servers by knocking off populars ones you don't agree with and coming up with a magic formula that's garanteed to put certain ones at the top without being too obvious. I have pretty good idea which servers those are too because when I ran one I used to get player poachers all the time trying to plug the same ones.

Funny thing is, there's nothing stopping dead server owners from advertising on here, or redesigning their setup to offer the experience players actually want. However convoluted a (non)solution you come up with, anyone can look at the source and see what stats are being reported to serverlist and change them.

[WebWolf]

(...) Maybe some checkboxes could be included in the menu, so that today I could search for creative servers only, while tomorrow I might be only interested in servers that allow pvp.

This seems a good idea. It remembers the "old" CS (Counter Strike) game, where the player is (was) able to select what kind of list he would see (number of online players, ping/lag, what type of server [creative, survival, pvp and so on]).

Nice. :)

[Sokomine]

Client count sorting is bad, because it keeps servers that were recently added to the list at the bottom, which makes it harder for them to get clients and rise to the top. And servers that have gotten clients keep getting more and never drop.

There's nothing that seems to be more attractive to new players than other players. They have no means to judge quality of a server at the beginning and will base their decision on where most people are.

In its current state, the public server list provides very few helpful information. At least it's there and people can find servers - which is a great improvement compared to older versions of MT.

It's not easy to find criteria which might be relevant for the majority of players. The state of PvP (disabled, only on mutual agreement, encouraged), the suitability for serious builders (server maintainer knows what backups are, buildings are kept over map changes, tools useful for building installed, ...), the presence of mobs - all that might be more relevant in the end than lag. Players ending up on the wrong server won't have too much fun.

Something that might also help would be a flag indicating weather mobile clients are welcomed or not. Even the official android client does have issues with too much media data. Perhaps amount of nodes defined and size of media cache that needs to be downloaded ought to be displayed. The list of mods installed might also be pretty intresting. Perhaps even a tiny picture of the spawn area. In general, selecting a server ought to provide more information than that short text which is shown currently and which is cut off if one uses a larger font size.

[sapier]

It's quite easy to demand a better way of listing, but to all of those just doing +1 to this request, have you ever thought about **HOW** to do it? This is the real challenge!
If yes, write your ideas down, keep in mind that ALL information serverlist has about a server is:

1) Ping time from serverlist machine to server
2) IP of server
3) Some information provided by server itself

That's all (correct me if you find more) .. you have to consider that 3 may or may not be correct and it's no issue to spoof it.

[Sokomine]

Is it possible to let the server provide further information without too much trouble? A longer, readable description might be very helpful already. The symbols which are currently shown (by Freeminer at last) are not particulary intuitive.

[sapier]

Isn't there already a server description? I know it's been broken now and then but in current master it should work again.

[Wuzzy]

@sapier: I wonder how a server could spoof its latency. The master server can simply measure it.
But I’d prefer the clients ping the server instead, because the clients are not at the same spot as the master server. ;-)

[WebWolf]

Isn't there already a server description? I know it's been broken now and then but in current master it should work again.

Hi,
I tested the latest Windows version (build of minetest 0.4.9-dev, commit 2b9beead38,from 21.06.2014) by Fess and in his build the broken server description in multiplayer tab is already fixed. :)
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