[HLL] Show A2S_INFO's playercount rather than inferring from A2S_PLAYER.
Since Hell Let Loose was released on other platforms than just Steam, any non-Steam players show up in the
A2S_PLAYER query with no name and an incorrect start time: BM ignores these and as a result might display inaccurate playercount on servers that do not have RCON enabled.
BM needs to either count these rows as an online player, or use the playercount field from the A2S_INFO query.32 Replies
(2/3rds of the current playerbase on PC is non-Steam, I've seen people report full 100 player servers only showing as having 20.)
Or, and this is a crazy idea: they can connect RCON to the server 😄
Unfortunately I don't know that there's a good way to handle this. A blank profile isn't something we really want to be creating since if the server doesn't have RCON we have 0 identifiers to tie to the profile.
I'm not suggesting you create blank profiles. Not creating profiles for those players is acceptable. But don't have that affect the displayed playercount, that is just plain misleading.
A 100-player server with 30 Steam players and 70 non-Steam players can still show up as 100/100 even if the playerlist only shows 30 profiles.
But right now it will show up as 30.
I don't think it matters if their blank or not as long as it's honest and showing the correct player count, the only people who care to see names/ID's of those individuals are those who use RCON from BM and that's all that matters so they can operate their server from the BM service.
Other services do acknowledge players in the player count even if they're not showing names or players who are Gamepass/Windows/Epic.
Please help BM! This is ridiculous
Other option is have the devs fix their game?
Who knows if they even can fix it. There's always a possibility its a steam policy that you're only allowed to show steam names in steam A2S queries, would be nice to have this confirmed by the devs though if it is the case
if that was the case, steam would restrict A2S To PC Based Games only.
A2S doesn't work with HLL console servers, only HLL PC servers. Are you aware of other crossplatform games where A2S does work and return the names of non-steam players?
'Crossplatform' for HLL PC doesn't mean between console and PC. It means between PC storefronts (steam-epic-gamepass) so its all still PC only
So a server that blocks epic games users and only allows steam players will show 100 players. A server that allows both will show ~70 players. We were in the top 20 rank before this happened, and now we're fighting to get into top 60. This renders battlemetrics stats wrong and makes the entire page useless to me. We strive to get our rank down, but if this is the case I will stop checking since the numbers are made up and tell people not to use BM as it's inaccurate.
What's this got to do with showing the true player count? There is two other sites that pull info that I know of via queries and they show that these servers are full, without even showing the player names, only people who need to see the full names are those who use RCON and they're the only ones who need to anyway. So what does it matter if a server is showing full and not showing those non steam users. Abu already said it but I'll reiterate his point. That is just plain misleading.
This is a pay to play situation right? People that pay you get better rank then ?
Or can we "connect" free with no feature access ?
I did type out a whole post regarding this, showing that two other services do show the data correctly, but the bot auto-deleted the whole post ( guess you aren’t allowed to compare BM on this site!) Censoring at its finest…
Also funny that if you post on here about other games ie Rust servers, using bots they get de-listed. How come this doesn’t happen to HLL servers on BM?
No it contained links to unknown places.
We have a strict bot for everyone's saftey.
Convenient.
Any chance of a reply to the second part too?
You're not helping Dave.
As for the bot delisting, that's some automatic process that cannot really be used for HLL.
Did you read? Was my question to you?
Thanks for you opinion, I will disregard it.
We're looking to see if we can create some kind of placeholder profile for all these blank EOS entries, but it's going to be a mess either way. If you don't have RCON with us you're not going to be able to look at the session history of those EOS profiles.
Honestly the HLL developers really should fix it so that a player name is reported in the A2S query response if they're going to bother including them in the player count
Doesn't appear to be automatic here https://discord.com/channels/202199157224636417/1319476255208378429, here https://discord.com/channels/202199157224636417/1330544358289702922 or here https://discord.com/channels/202199157224636417/1303885037455806495 or even the post below this one! https://discord.com/channels/202199157224636417/1332923245178912941
Does it have to utilize profiles? That sounds a lot more complicated than necessary when all that really matters is for the right number to be displayed.
I agree.
in my mind, it would mean coding in a different thing.
And also making it work with RCON servers.
Creating 1x for Query only, which use's the Query Player Numbers,
Then one system for RCON based servers using the Playerlist.
At current both use playerlist, RCON list Over Query. like most games.
Games that don't have playerlist support already use the Query Player Number only.
It's an either-or system. Either the game has player profiles or it doesn't. We have to have something to put in there
Also note that when we don't have a player list, the ability to detect botted servers is hampered
In general it's pretty shit when a game doesn't have one. It's even more shit when the game is inconsistent like HLL
Tell me about it.
This week you got NVIDIA ID 😛
I know there's some movement behind the scenes regarding RCON though
As in, fundamental protocol changes to make it more reliable and consistent
But I'll make an extra special note here that the only people who are affected by this are those that aren't using RCON. I'll see if we can do something about this in sensible way but in general I don't think it's a bad thing that servers who provide us verifiable player data are counted over those that don't.
@Hordicus
Kilo here had a smart idea.
Could create another level, where they could just connect RCON to get accurate/more reliable data for them.
Maybe this could be another level.
RCON connection only & Public Page Information (ORG page Access only, No Dashboard, No Triggers, No Scheduler, No Banlist.)
Maybe something to consider implementing as a cheap cost & just ignore rest of RCON logs & only track the Playerlist.
Maybe. RCON has a lot of overhead related to player profiles in general though. I'll discuss it and see
The data storage requirements on activity, player profiles, sessions, etc ends up being a lot. Idk if we turn that off for individual communities w/ out a lot of work
yeah understandable, it's why i said ignore the RCON logs 😛
I'd be totally cool with not being able to click through on these players, I'm more interested in getting our improper rank fixed.
Any update? Our server showing a measly 60 players on battle metrics and we're full. :angry:
You'll need to be patient. Feature changes take time
Otherwise connect RCON to your server
We connected our server but as soon as the trial ended, it's mis representing our numbers again. You can see the past 7 days were blaze orange showing true player counts. Today we're back to 70 players only. Can you just allow us to connect with limited (no) command access?
