Servers manipulating ping/player counts, should they be globally blacklisted?

[craZy_y0™]

Hey, this topic has stuck around in my head for a while and I've felt like addressing this because this has began to get incredibly irritating to me. Therefore I'm mostly addressing this to our developer, Rebel_Y, since I'm unable to contact him without adding him on Steam.

Since about June when GFLClan began hosting their Fistful of Frags server, I've noticed that the ping is always very low and the player counts are very high. By this stance, it means that it's a consistently populated and good server but on top of that, it's normally the first in the main menu. This server roughly has between 5 to 25 ping in the legacy browser and can hold up to 32 players, this is unlike most servers which can normally house up to 24 players.

However upon connecting to the server, I join with 150 ping coming from Southwest England. Normally this is the ping I get when playing on Eastern/Central North American servers so this server is in North America. As I said earlier, the server has between 5 to 25 ping but connecting to the server I get 150 ping. So you're not connecting to the server with the advertised ping. As a result, GFLClan manipulated how much ping the server has between the player.

Unfortunately I previously complained about this to someone on the GFLClan discord server and I was told that it was a bug they were going to fix, except I can't make myself think that it could be an accident if they know how to manipulate the server's ping.

In fact, Garry's Mod had this problem a few years ago as servers were able to manipulate how many players were playing on a server. I witnessed this problem as I joined a few nearly full servers to find there was nobody on or just a small fraction of the players that the server said it had on there.

If anything, I would like Rebel_Y to look into this and see if anything can be done besides globally blacklist the server since it's one of the most popular servers at the moment. It's just incredibly annoying getting on a server to play on a higher ping than you're used to, so it can be used as an excuse not to be able to hit your shots.

[꧁Jay꧂]

The player manipulation is in their control however the ping being displayed may not; some hosts like GMCHosting with their DDoS filtration and their anycast setup will display the wrong ping on the server list than whats ingame.

[craZy_y0™]

My internet tends to be very consistent so usually I get a close enough ping when connecting to what I see in the legacy browser. On most European servers I get about 20-50 ping but North America as I said in the OP I get 150.

I might have exaggerated a few points but yeah, I didn't know some of the hosts could control the ping. As far as I know GFL do use GMCHosting to host servers although I guess with the ping it attracts tons of people knowing they're expecting a smooth game.

[k2nod]

No.

[[S³] Rebel Judge]

I agree with Crazy here, GFL servers ping for me aswell an avarage 60-70 and when i enter to play it ranges from 177-220, i never get this kind of ping rise on any EU server, never !
The ping of the servers makes me think that they are USA based and i think it's a certain since some friends of mine from the US play and they have incredibly low ping on GFL. lower than 50 that is with no spikes, it's been like that since the beggining. It needs fixing cause it draws in EU players and we have to advertise to get people for the EU ones, which might get us banned on GFL. so either fix or be prepared for lvl99 boss like adverts !