Ratings for servers.

[CortexReaver]

While player statistics might be controversial IMO, scaring away new players, I'd rather highly suggest to implement server ratings first, so not only players are "fighting for the best" on the battlefield, but admins will be forced into their own competition for larger player count too.

The idea of "official" game server is vague to me, too centralized (for an open source game) and uncanny: what if "official" game admins decided to ban me (for god knows what reasons, maybe over a political debate)? As I understood, "official" servers are on top, so they always get higher player counts, rendering me as a complete outsider for others: playing with less people from now stuck with my current win\lose ratio... if "player ratings" will eventually be implemented.

So,

1. If the lobby is empty, the highest servers that shows in lobby by default should be higher rated ones. I have nothing against filtering for only "official", but not by default.
2. If lobby have players, its being sorted by player count first, similar to how it is right now, and only AFTER those will be empty servers sorted by its rating.
3. The worse server gets, the lower it goes on the list. As an admin you should always have option for disabling statistic, but such servers will always be lower then rated ones.

Also players need to see server info somehow, maybe while hovering mouse cursor over or clicking on it. Maybe icons? thumbs up\thumbs down count, something similar.

And that was an easy part, next you need to calculate all that somehow. I propose 4 main anchor points, don't know how to connect all them in one formula yet:

1. Hardware and internet connection (latency). Most online games nowadays optimized for people with better rigs, so you get what are you paying for. You can not get more unbiased than this, most objective and solid criteria.
2. Players visiting\playing with correlation to people leaving. Also unique IP bans (by admins), but it always might be just one troll with VPN's.
3. Admin local victories to global win\lose ratio correlation. If he suddenly manages to won more matches on his own server then other's, so it'll count as well and server goes down in lobby list.
4. Something close to "like\dislike" functionality. This is the last one because it can be easily compromised by mentioned above trolls.

You can always get banned on "best" server, but there also will be another best servers - that's the whole point.
I know this is HUGE and gonna take a lot of time to make and test, so this is not for next coming release, not even for next after coming. Just something to consider in the future.