Inaccurate Player numbers on servers

For a long time now a complaint has been that the number of players shown on the servers is not actual players but in most cases the minimum number of AI that have been set by the server admin.

It is not until joining the server that this is able to be confirmed. Not only have this complaint been around for a long time but official 397 servers are doing the same thing. Nothing like false advertising.

 

Yes! It would be much better if AI players were excluded from the player count. I'm not sure what the idea is in doing this, but I always felt it is counter productive.

 

I now avoid open servers with more than 5 people because 9 times out of 10 it is populated with AI. I have been around RF2 long enough that it does not piss me off too much anymore but I can imagine someone new to the game would be right pissed by this.

 

The program I wrote https://forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/rf2_servernotify.57559/#post-911227 has code that filters out names of known AI players. Last time I tried it the program wasn't working but I could modify it to list servers that probably have human drivers.

Edit: It is still working.

 

Isn’t it a steam thing as well ?

 

Update both S397 open servers no longer showing AI as players on the servers. Thank you 397

 

I added a new program rF2_serversWithHumans.exe that goes through all servers finding the ones with drivers whose names are not in the list of known AI drivers (drivers.txt).

 

Sweet and thanks , now how do I use this ?

 

Exe file so should just start itself , open and select servers ( at a guess )

 

Download rF2_serversWithHumans.exe and drivers.txt then run it. It collects a list of servers (that takes a couple of minutes the first time) then list the ones with human drivers. It’s not slick and it’s a little slow, if people like it I can add some kind of GUI front end for it and maybe find a faster API for collecting the list of servers. At least it's quicker and less frustrating than joining a server only to find it's full of AI.

It assumes that servers are fairly static, when you want to refresh the list delete servers.file.json and it will collect a fresh list of servers.

 

I picked up @Goanna's idea server info will also tell you if there are a shipload of bots...they'll all be online for the same period of time and added it to https://github.com/TonyWhitley/rF2_serverNotify/releases/tag/V0.8 rF2_serversWithHumans.exe
Players who have have been connected for "a time identical to the longest time of anyone playing" are now added to the list of AI players I scraped from the rF2 data files.