Hello,

after many of my fake player reports were ignored, I found out that Gametracker seems to allow a maximum of 3 fake players per server (source). My question is: Why is that?

My reports were aimed at UnrealTournament 99 servers; checking the serverlist shows that from the top 15 servers, 5 are using fake players. Three of them use the seemingly maximum amount of 3 players, the other 2 use more but have not be deranked either.

As you can see, the UT playerbase as shrunk in such a way that having 3 fake players on your server intantly boosts you into the top 15 servers. For the sake of the game and to help new players orientate, I would love to see these fake player servers deranked - maybe you can consider changing your 3 max fake player rule for games such as UT?

sp0ngeb0b wrote:
Hello,

after many of my fake player reports were ignored, I found out that Gametracker seems to allow a maximum of 3 fake players per server (source). My question is: Why is that?

My reports were aimed at UnrealTournament 99 servers; checking the serverlist shows that from the top 15 servers, 5 are using fake players. Three of them use the seemingly maximum amount of 3 players, the other 2 use more but have not be deranked either.

As you can see, the UT playerbase as shrunk in such a way that having 3 fake players on your server intantly boosts you into the top 15 servers. For the sake of the game and to help new players orientate, I would love to see these fake player servers deranked - maybe you can consider changing your 3 max fake player rule for games such as UT?


Bots are useful sometimes for some mods and games, i don't see a need for 3 bots since most people abuse that and use 3 fake players on the server to boost up (as you said), i believe that changing the rule to allow 3 bots (not fake players), that this bots shouldn't be allowed to trick the players into been a 'real' player.

AI bots are not counted towards rank, and some servers like to use many AI bots to make a game interesting when only one or two players are on.
Games such as Battlefield 1942 and its derivatives are pretty boring if you are by yourself or only have one or two bots as opponents.

A server with a few bots can allow a new player to learn basic skills without being constantly slaughtered by experienced players.

Bots that appear to be actual players (usually sitting in spectators) have been used for years to attract an initial player or two to a server.

Three is a fairly random number in all fairness; it makes little difference to rank in TeamSpeak3 where there might be as many as 700 people online, yet makes a large difference to rank on an Unreal Tournament server that normally has none.

Perhaps in a ideal world there would be a limit assigned on a game by game basis, but experience here has shown that the average server owner does not understand the difference between a Gametracker 'de-rank' and a ban, and many confuse AI bots with undetected bots, fake players and idle players.
So while 3 may be 'random', it is an easy number to understand, regardless.

I understand that gametracker accounts for a wide variety of games and that the fake player rule might make sense for some of them. However, I can only speak for Unreal Tournament and allowing these servers - as you said, chimaera - has a strong negative impact on the integrity of the rankings for the game.

As you are probably not familiar with UT, let me give you some quick information about the fake players there:

- The default game never publishes bots as players. People are running modified query uplinks that can basically report whatever the admin wants.

- Some admins use this modification to publish present bots in the server as players. This behaviour doesn't really make much sense, as players are usually interested in real clients being on a server, and not bots. Some admins have atleast the decency to tag the bots in the query response as bots; an example is this server. Therefore this modified query response can be filtered by the gametracker rankings.

- Other servers basically just report arbitrary nicknames as players, while there are no players or bots on the server. It happens that you can find your own nickname being reported by such a server as a player, while you are not playing there at all.

Regarding the top ranked UT servers, there are 4 of them which report fake players which are not bots on the server, but gave them a {BOT} tag. This tag is not recognized by gametracker and therefore their stats are heavily falsified.

https://www.gametracker.com/server_info/63.251.20.60:7777/
https://www.gametracker.com/server_info/192.223.31.70:7777/
https://www.gametracker.com/server_info/63.251.20.50:7777/
https://www.gametracker.com/server_info/192.223.31.18:7777/

In my opinion, these server either abuse the fact that gametracker does not recognize the fake players as bots or that 3 fake players are allowed. The admins are 100% aware of this. I would love to see gametracker reconsider their policies in these cases.

Any further reaction on this? The four linked servers are still happily ranked in the top 15 while using fake players tagged as "{BOT}"...

The rules are the rules.

No changes anticipated.


If you believe servers are not following the rules you are welcome to report their pages Reporting Fake Servers / Players

I've reported these servers a couple of times but they apparently are complying with the gametracker rules.

chimaera500 wrote:
The rules are the rules.

No changes anticipated.


Alright, I guess then the UT community has to live with falsified server rankings.