ValveSoftware
Fake communnity servers (servers browser list)
Hi, a lot of fake community servers have appeared in the server browser, which have different ip addresses, but copy the map, the number of players and their time on the server. This greatly affects the promotion of other community servers, please fix it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcdDcL9Dbj8
Mirrors community servers
Issue transferred from https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/2735. @deff-dev posted on 2021-05-12T06:07:25:
Hello, i’m a developer servers in csgo and now i more often notice fake servers with fake online in a csgo servers list (in brower servers). Therefore my servers and servers another creators have very low position in search as the search is clogged with 50-60 fake servers with the same hostname and IP.
Fake online — this method works only in servers brower (current data on the server) For example: Count players in server brower — 10 Count players really at the server — 2
Also i created theme on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/na5m54/mirror_community_servers/
One more video: https://youtu.be/5CUl2caoPGs At 0:49 we can see reconnected from fake server at really server
Well when they broke the fucking sourcemod I thought its going to fix the mirrors but... Um.. Not really:/
lololol
In addition to the obvious fake redirecting servers which should be the main priority to fix, there are also many servers that are queried from the Master Server, but not rendered within the server browser. I'm not sure if these are blacklisted servers (doubt it; Valve hasn't cared about blacklisting servers for years now I believe) or just servers that aren't responding to the A2S_INFO request.
There was a similar issue back in 2014 with Valve official servers specifically that I addressed to Valve and they fixed in this update. Basically, they were hiding Valve servers within the server browser's rendering, but still querying them from the Steam Master Server resulting in a lot less community servers being queried/shown depending on the client's geo-location (since Valve tries to pick servers closest to you first).
If you want to see this, you can perform a packet capture. On Linux, this is the tcpdump command I perform (0xFF 0XFF 0XFF 0XFF 0X54 are the first five bytes of an A2S_INFO request's payload).
tcpdump -i any udp[8] == 0xff and udp[9] == 0xff and udp[10] == 0xff and udp[11] == 0xff and udp[12] == 0x54 -XX -vv -nne
For me, within the first 30 seconds of refreshing the server browser, I had 51 servers display (which is HORRIBLE and even 90% of those servers were fake/redirect servers), but I queried around ~520 servers from the Master Server at that point overall according to tcpdump.
Anyways, with today's networking, loading 20K+ servers within seconds in the server browser shouldn't be a big deal to most client's networks, but obviously a client-side servers queried per second CVar should be released if they went down that road in the case somebody's networking equipment (e.g. router or NIC) cannot handle sending so many requests per second. It seems to me Valve has stopped caring though hence why somebody else is going to need to come along and make something better (that's what I'm personally trying to do).
It's no wonder communities have very little chances of populating servers in CS:GO nowadays. In 2014, after the server browser was fixed, my servers at the time saw a big increase in population. Valve just never maintained it afterwards.
Maybe one day Valve will revisit this and make something better. Let's hope, but I'm no longer holding my breath because it has been a struggle supporting them for over ten years now with how much they clearly don't support community servers and modding in their games.
You should really up your priority on this. It might not hurt your bottom line, but your long-term players that have been here for decades are really most affected.
The server list takes 10 minutes to load and 90% of it is spoofed russian servers
Because there is an actual usage for redirects that even Valve uses, its still fixable but a lot more work in that regard
here is the source code for this fake thing https://github.com/rcon420/fake-player-redirect, it's a bit outdated.
@kisak-valve Why does this take so long to fix? Can you at least give the Developer team the info that this should be fixed since this is urgent, community servers just dying because the developer simply don't care about it
@kisak-valve Why does this take so long to fix? Can you at least give the Developer team the info that this should be fixed since this is urgent, community servers just dying because the developer simply don't care about it
3 years+ in valve time is a couple of weeks, just keep waiting