One of the things that customers have been consistently requesting from us a better method of finding game servers with the specific settings that they like. Some players want servers with friendly-fire on, or TF2 birthday mode, or 24/7 Dustbowl, and so on. Other players specifically want none of these, asking us how they can find servers with no changes. At the same time, we’ve watched as server operators have increasingly filled out their server names with descriptions of their custom settings.
We’ve been working on a solution to these problems that we hope will make sense, solving the player’s desire to search for specific settings, and the server operator’s desire to have better descriptive tools for their server. The concept is similar to web page metatags, where server operators can specify descriptive tags in any manner, and clients can search for servers by specifying the tags they’re interested in. Some tags are automatically filled in, based on server convars. For example, in TF2 we’ve removed the restrictions on a variety of server options (like friendly fire & respawn wave times), and now the tag system will automatically add a tag when they’re changed, so that customers who want to play on these servers can easily find them.
As you can see, we’ve put a new tab onto it called “Custom”. Servers with tags will appear in this list, where the player can specify a list of tags they’re interested in. The “Add Common Tags” button will give them a list of the top 20 tags in use across all the servers, so they’re able to easily choose the popular tags. Untagged servers will show up in the old Internet games list.