Valve's Robin Walker (aka Bro, who you can see here after he roundly thrashed yours truly in a Quake duel at Armageddon 3 back at the dawn of time) has posted to the Team Fortress 2 blog detailing a new strategy to try and help improve the player experience when it comes to finding good servers to play on:

In short, servers that have lots of players joining & leaving rapidly will score badly. Servers that consistently have players join and stay on for long periods of time will score well.
...
Our first step in improving this part of the player experience has been to delist all the really bad servers. The master server will simply stop giving these to you when you fire up the serverbrowser. After that, we're going to keep improving our ability to measure this kind of problem.

Not sure if I am a huge fan of this scenario - I've always liked the complete democracy of servers available in games like this, and I'd be concerned about how people could abuse the system (eg, if I wanted to de-list someone's server, could my douchebag friends and I just join it and leave it over and over?). At the very least it'll be an interesting experiment. Stay tuned!

ahaha ok everyone in this thread lets pick a server to join/leave rapidly and screw them over!

God seriously was this thought over?

This already exists with the number of players connected. MANUALLY! if I see a server with no people I wont connect if i see a server with lots of people I will. If I see a server with lots of people with a high ping I won't Simple. This just opens the server to a ddos type situation which would result in it being de-listed. I like the idea of just listing every server and then letting the player decide.

/Signed not a fan of this system.

I'm not sure what his actual goal is here, I mean most people will just join a server their friends are on. One with good a ping and one with maps they want to play on. So I don't know why there has to be any other server "ranking".
I think people in his position lose touch with the real community and what people actually want out of a game. (and he probably listens to too many of the noobs on the steam forum)

yeh waste more time on meet the team videos

Instead of doing this they should make improvements to the server filtering & options.

Seems pointless for players like me. I am just going to join a populated AUS server... regardless of how toey the players are.

I believe that Valve has simply made a marketing mistake here.

As everyone knows Valve collects server stats like kids collected basketball cards in the 90's. They would have solid statistics to make these decisions. If they have made the decision on statistics they should state the reasons.

If they have made the decision just based on some manager who is looking for some 'ground-breaking' decision to make then that's a mistake, but I believe the former.

*EDIT*

I wanted to add: it's hardly high-priority considering the lack-lustre server browser support. Particularly in L4D which makes me want to punch myself in the face (even with 'openserverbrowser', but especially without).

So now the list easy to join Aussie servers grows short. I really can't see where they're going with this, people drop in and out for all sorts of reasons.

I wanted to add: it's hardly high-priority considering the lack-lustre server browser support. Particularly in L4D which makes me want to punch myself in the face (even with 'openserverbrowser', but especially without).

It's not as bad once you join the GameArena, Games On Net and Gamespace groups so you get a list of servers accessible from the main screen. It's still pretty dodgy in that they'll reorder themselves constantly based on changing pings, which is annoying to view, but it's still better than the server browser that omits many servers (or did last time I used it).

It's a neat idea for TF2, if they implement it in a way that doesn't reward abuse, and I hope they include it in their other games (like Left4Dead) if it works out to be successful. Servers that are modifying the experience then still showing up as normal servers should be de-listed really, they're deceiving players.

Would be fine if it were an filter/option you could disable from inside the server browser, as opposed to being forced on everyone. The 24/7 2fort servers are going to get insanely high scores.

The only issue that I cans see from this revolves around those of us that are casual gamers. I might, if I have the time, play for 15 maybe 30 minutes at a time. There need to be dedicated servers for the casual gamer that don't fall under the "Bad" server label.

I want an opt-out option.

I wish the valve guys would focus on important things...

I think this system is total rubbish. What for the poor bugger who's spending a decent buck starting up a server, only tho have it not even make it into the server list.

Jerks me off to see Joe Bloggs at home running up a local server full of bots and at like 700ms ping, while Honest Jake; paying a wad of cash each month, doesn't even see his own server in the list.
The server I'm referring to has a ping in the top 3 servers in this country (no. 3 from Brisbane and no. 1 from Melbourne).

When the servers full, most people have a ping between 10 and 70... But it rarely is...
Looks like it'll be pulled down sooner, rather than later.

Sad story is... How many other people are in the same position as myself?

You're a s*** admin then.