Originally Posted by John Shoenick

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give a heads-up about some upcoming changes to the way server accounts work in TF.

In an future update, we are going to be introducing features that will only be available to game servers that have a registered game server SteamID, via the Game Server Login Token (GSLT) system. This system has existed for some time, but is currently only used in TF for persistent favouriting in the server browser. It has also gained some more restrictions recently that you should be aware of.

- Game server accounts are tied to an owning Steam user account
- This Steam account must not be currently community banned or locked.
- This Steam account must not be limited.
- This Steam account must have a qualifying registered phone.
- Game servers that violate the community guidelines for the game they are hosting may have their access suspended or revoked.
- Game server account suspensions or bans also apply to *all* other game servers tied to said Steam user

More info and management tools are here: https://steamcommunity.com/dev/managegameservers

For TF specifically, being free-to-play, access to some upcoming features may eventually depend on the qualifications the owning Steam user account. So, while creating dedicated individual user accounts to own individual game servers is possible, it may lead to an increased burden in the future. We recommend game server accounts be registered to the Steam account of the acting server owner -- GSPs should require clients to provide their own tokens.

This change will allow us to have a greater level of confidence in game servers, by making it easier to revoke access for bad actors and better tying game servers to their owners. The increased persistence gives us many more opportunities to assign trust to community servers, and to provide them access to features that would otherwise be too open for abuse. It also provides a much better mechanism for dealing with abuse than the current IP-ban system that is both less effective and more painful for server providers that share IPs between clients.

We will have more information once we are ready to begin rolling out these features, but I wanted to send this heads up such that current admins and server providers can look into integrating this support into their setups.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns and I will try to address them,
- Neph

Originally Posted by John Shoenick

While spoofing ownership of econ items remains against community rules, TF has a client-side system to mitigate this and it is not currently a widespread issue. We are not currently planning on adding any new restrictions on custom gamemodes etc..

Originally Posted by dedimark (Post 2418908)

it`s allowed Yes? or need to be enable "FollowCSGOServerGuidelines" "yes"

Originally Posted by AeroAcrobat (Post 2418888)

>This Steam account must have a qualifying registered phone.
This is new to me because I never bothered to give them my phone number
So, is this already a requirement or something upcoming?

Would be cool if there is simple way to check if I met all requirements.

status command gives me:
account : logged in

So I'm good?

Currently it says:


source: https://steamcommunity.com/dev/managegameservers[/LIST]

Originally Posted by psychonic (Post 2418911)

That has no effect on games other than CS:GO.

If you're not attaching visible econ items, attaching econ particles to items that can support them (ie, unusual particles to hats, community sparkle to weapons), or changing weapons skins and/or quality on stock weapons, then you're probably fine.

Strictly speaking, you're also not allowed to give a player any weapon that they don't own, but since those shown up invisible by default and with many custom modes relying on that behavior, I don't foresee them cracking down against it.

Originally Posted by Powerlord (Post 2419044)

John Schoenick / Jill has already said they wouldn't be cracking down on that.

Originally Posted by psychonic (Post 2418911)

That has no effect on games other than CS:GO.

If you're not attaching visible econ items, attaching econ particles to items that can support them (ie, unusual particles to hats, community sparkle to weapons), or changing weapons skins and/or quality on stock weapons, then you're probably fine.

Strictly speaking, you're also not allowed to give a player any weapon that they don't own, but since those shown up invisible by default and with many custom modes relying on that behavior, I don't foresee them cracking down against it.

I have confidence that this won't become a huge fiasco like it did with CS:GO. The current TF2 team seems much more understanding of the server op community.

Originally Posted by friagram (Post 2419136)

Do you have any idea how common it is to modify econ items and add particle/killstreak effects to weapons (freak fortress?), or edit weapon attributes to balance them.

Originally Posted by psychonic (Post 2419138)

Unlike what the sensationalist title of this thread implies, using a GSLT will not be mandatory. It was explicitly stated by the email that "some upcoming features may eventually [depend on a GSLT]". It's very possible that those features wouldn't even necessarily apply to heavily-modded servers like that anyway.

There's no need to freak out ahead of time based on speculation.

Originally Posted by John Shoenick

This change will allow us to have a greater level of confidence in game servers, by making it easier to revoke access for bad actors and better tying game servers to their owners. [...] It also provides a much better mechanism for dealing with abuse than the current IP-ban system that is both less effective and more painful for server providers that share IPs between clients.

Originally Posted by friagram (Post 2419136)

It would help if they released a list of exact things they do not want so we can remove any related stuff...

Originally Posted by John Shoenick

We will have more information once we are ready to begin rolling out these features, but I wanted to send this heads up such that current admins and server providers can look into integrating this support into their setups.