What going free-to-play did to community servers

On 23 June 2011 Team Fortress 2 stopped costing money, and on 6 December 2018 CS:GO followed. Both switches removed a filter nobody had designed: the price of a copy. Community servers gained players, many of them new, and lost the thing that had made a ban expensive. Much of what they have built since is a way of putting some kind of price back.

The filter nobody designed

Before those dates, a new account meant a new copy of the game. A cheater with a VAC ban who wanted to keep cheating bought the game again, and a griefer banned from a community server could return only after paying for the privilege. Nobody at Valve or on any server had set this up as moderation. It was a side effect of selling boxes and keys, and admins leaned on it without thinking about it: a ban meant something because getting back in had a price attached.

The price shaped who turned up as well. Everyone on a server had at some point wanted this particular game enough to pay for it. Paying for a game has never made anyone pleasant company, though it did mean that a server's population arrived one purchase at a time, and every arrival had cost somebody something.

Who came in when the price went

Valve presented TF2's switch as the next step after four years and more than 200 updates, and the people who came through the door were mostly what community servers had always wanted: players who had never tried the game. Some stayed and became regulars, which is the reason to run a public server at all.

Valve never took the price away entirely. A free TF2 account came with limits from the first day, and the way to lift them was to buy something, anything, from the Mann Co. Store, which made the account premium. Community servers noticed within the week. By 29 June 2011 a plugin that kept free accounts off servers was being written up, and the only way past it was that same store purchase. Some owners wanted the newcomers. Others wanted their slots back from people they had no way to vet.

What a ban costs on a free game

On a free game, a ban costs the banned player the few minutes it takes to make another account. That was the change community servers felt most. A server ban stopped being a sanction and became a delay, and so did a VAC ban, which is tied to the account rather than to the person using it. The deterrent had to move from the ban to the door: how old an account is, how much it has played, what it owns, whether it has ever spent money.

Steam works on the same assumption. Its help page on limited accounts says malicious users tend to operate from dummy accounts that have never bought anything, so friend invites and trading, among other features, stay locked until an account has spent $5, and playing free-to-play games does not count towards it. That is a platform stating in writing that a purchase is a trust signal. Using the signal fairly is harder than it sounds, because a fresh account on a free game can be a cheater's fifth or a newcomer's first, and telling the two apart without false positives takes more than one check.

Valve priced its own queues

Both games later put a price back, and both times it stopped at the edge of Valve's own matchmaking. TF2's patch of 16 June 2020 barred certain new accounts from chat in official matchmaking modes, noting that work was continuing against the use of "new and free accounts for abusive purposes". CS:GO had folded its existing players into Prime on the day it went free, upgrading every one of their accounts and matching Prime players with each other. On 3 June 2021 Valve went further: non-Prime accounts stopped earning XP, ranks, drops and skill groups, because, Valve said, those rewards had become an incentive for bad actors.

The same post was careful to list what non-Prime players kept, and community servers were on it. That was fair to new players. It was also a decision about where the unfiltered accounts would go, because the restriction applied to Valve's queues while the community browser stayed open to any account, with whatever filter each owner chose to write.

Refuge and target at once

That left community servers doing two jobs. For a new player on a free account, muted in official matchmaking, TF2's community servers were somewhere to talk and be recognised, and a non-Prime CS:GO player had the same arrangement. For the accounts Valve's rules were aimed at, the same open door made community servers the obvious next stop. TF2 lived through years of the second kind, and the bot problem on its servers is the long version of that story.

CS2 later took over CS:GO's place on Steam and kept the free-to-play arrangement, while what remains of CS:GO's community servers runs on a legacy build that has to be installed on purpose. The question each owner faces has not changed with the engine.

Choosing what the door costs

Every filter a community server can apply is a price in some currency. Premium status and Prime are paid in money, account age and playtime in time, and a Steam level or an inventory in history. The retail price used to charge all of it at once, and nobody ever saw the decision being made. Free-to-play handed that decision to each admin separately.

The workable approach is to treat the door as adjustable. Keep it low while the server is healthy, because every gate also turns away somebody's first evening, and raise it for the length of a wave with an end date attached, as the guide to handling a sudden wave of cheaters suggests. Then take it down again when the wave has passed, and let the next newcomer in without asking what their account cost.