I'm going to amend my previous pessimistic view of Valve's likelihood of
at least taking a stab at compensating for remotely-proxied query responses.
Valve has at least /tried /to address many behaviors that they saw as
client-antagonistic in the past, including:
- Server operators taking advantage of the fact that the browser loaded
in order by last octet
- Server operators falsifying the region setting
- Fakefull
- The use of custom knife skins
- Server redirection / forcing commands on clients
- Monetized servers with ads in the MOTD
They have also changed the browser over the decades to query in order by
GeoIP instead of by similarity to the client IP (after changing the
last-octet order loading behavior).
The changes that they've made that server operators can fight have led
to an arms race and ultimately been incomplete solutions. Operators have
worked around bans, for instance, as has been mentioned, and new code
and techniques have gotten around fakefull bans. But, behind-the-scenes
master list ordering and inclusion adjustments, which server operators
have no real control over, have been effective.
There are some talented engineers working at Valve. One of them could
easily see this as an interesting technical problem and tackle it with
automated tests that assign a server to a single more
geographically-limited region, combined with changing the master server
to leave off servers outside a client's designated region (something
they already broadly do for at least many US-EU queries). Or, they could
make it so that the servers determined to be returning faked pings (as
automatically tested from non-Valve IP space, as manually reported by
players, or as tested by employees who manually audit the most popular
servers occasionally) are silently removed from the list, with the
/entire CIDR prefix /banned for some period of time (such a ban could
happen very quickly, and having a minimum of that /24 blocked would be
both targeted and effective -- there would be no risk of collateral
damage and server owners couldn't easily dodge it as they can more
standard bans). These would be Valve-side changes that don't require
having a player connect to a server, unlike some server-behavior
concerns (such as fake tags not matching how a server really acts
in-game), and master server behavior adjustments don't require
client-side patches, either. Valve support could choose to ignore server
owners who complain.
Unless an engineer takes an interest in it, it may not be seen as worth
Valve's time until it is internally viewed as a widespread problem that
clients care about -- which is when it starts to potentially effect
profits, as Calvin said. I think that's the main potential stumbling block.
I'm interested to see what happens.
-John
On 5/11/2019 2:35 PM, Eric Flenner wrote:
There are many possible ways for Valve to solve this.
- Say this practice will not be allowed and rely on reports to have
the servers delisted.
- Ping the server from 2-3 different continents and see if they are
artifically low.
- Every minute while in-game, ping the current server with a2s_info
and see if its drastically different from the in-game latency.
- Use their new ping estimation API
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/api/ISteamNetworkingUtils and see
if there are any anomalies.
I am sure Valve is smart enough to think of other solutions if these
do not suffice. Yes it is going to take some effort to fix this but it
is not unsolvable. As for your suggestion:
1. People are not going to be happy seeing 200 ping servers lumped in
with 10 ping servers.
2. Valve already does something similar by only showing 5000 servers
around your location as determined by ip2location. So it doesn't work.
Chances are fairly good that there is "malice" behind this action from
GFL. Sure not having to switch IPs is useful, but Valve already
persists your server across IPs with tokens. What ddos are $5 vpses
with 1 shared cpu and 1 tb bw going to save you from? These are all
fake excuses to give them a cover for faking pings. They wrote a large
amount of code just to cache a2s_info packets, and are planning to
aggressively expand in games/modes they've failed to get into before.
But anyway, whether or not GFL is being malicious does not change the
fact that this is a bad practice that needs to stop before it spreads.
If this is not dealt with, the browser will be filled with fake pings
and any servers not using anycast will be dead.
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