ValveSoftware
[TF2] Fake re-directing servers
I haven't seen this reported but it is very annoying. Servers in TF2 can fake their ping.
For example, I am in Australia, so only Sydney servers should show 5 ping, but I get USA and EU servers that show 5 ping, but when I join its 300+. A lot of servers do this (UGC, Skial, etc):
(Above screenie you can see multiple servers faking their ping, to point one out, Skial EU shows 5 ping, but then a server like PAYLOAD from fragmasters UK, which would also be a european server, shows 253 ping which would be the real ping)
I also had a seperate issue that some servers aren't even servers at all, I remember looking for a powerhouse server, I would join that community server and it would then redirect to a server with a different name, location, map and everything, it was a "fake" server that redirected to another one and there was about 4 of them that redirected to this one main server.
For the second issue, there looks to be a popular post about it here: https://x.com/Yahiamice/status/1511767637340172295
Fake ping posts: https://forums.backpack.tf/topic/72137-tf2-servers-faking-ping-in-server-browser/ https://www.skial.com/threads/what-to-do-about-ping-faking-in-the-server-browser.102792/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/gchh4n/skial_pingmasking_servers/
Skials post: https://www.skial.com/threads/announcing-the-skial-anycast-network.83763/
Looks like (at least in Skial's explanation) they are ping masking in an effort to stop DDOSing it seems? But it is super annoying.
Looks like it also was first mentioned by #4484
Hello @JayBoom, in general, multi-issue issue reports are bad for any issue tracker. The first half of your issue report is a duplicate of #4484 and for tracking purposes, let's use this issue report to focus on the second half.
Unfortunately I don't think anything can be done about the redirecting servers without removing the ability to make a player connect to another server (which tbh would probably be a good thing) since there's no real way to check
The most chunk of tf2's fake server right now are from fastpath, you can block them using this one https://gamebanana.com/mods/289337
Just copy the ip's from that to tf2's server_blacklist.txt in cfg folder, enjoy a fastpath free browsing.
