I see our topic has been merged. As far as im aware, hosts that are using query cache are not affected, but then thats the same as reporting fake numbers. So far GT is the only site that reports this issue.

pedrotski wrote:
I see our topic has been merged. As far as im aware, hosts that are using query cache are not affected, but then thats the same as reporting fake numbers. So far GT is the only site that reports this issue.

I wonder how the extension fixes anything(if it does), as it only caches the answer to prevent a DoS attack by not calculating the answer every time a request comes, shouldn't even be needed for CS:GO as cs:go has some cvars to limit requests per ip and is on by default with a limit of 10 requests per ip. The answer looks ok tho without any extension, it shows the correct amount of players/bots, only gametracker displays the wrong amount (I don't know what I does and how it decides to take another value than the server answers).

same issue lately more than half of players show as bots and it seems to affect the ranking - https://www.gametracker.com/server_info/cs.oof.lv:27015/

The problem is with gametracker's implementation, not game developer's.

I have been tracking this problem for 4 years now, and everytime a real player is marked as BOT, there is at least 1 more player with the same "played time" also marked as a BOT.

A2S players query does not return any info about a player being a BOT or a real player with a Steam ID. It only returns a player name, a score and a played (online) time. Gametracker flags players with the same played (online) time as bots, because bots will always have the servers uptime amount of played (online) time reported. Since gametracker cannot know this uptime, it only has one way of checking for bots, which is totally not correct and gives A LOT OF false positives. This is the reason when you have only 1 BOT in your server, gametracker cannot identify it as a BOT, because no one else on the server has the same played time as it. On top of that, if more than 1 players have the same played time as each other, then they are flagged as BOTs.

This is happening since 2017 (and probably long before that, I only learned about this site and the problem in 2017), and no one tells you what really is happening, because then there would be nothing preventing people to add normal BOTs to servers and them not get flagged

There I said it.. (if you are going to delete this message, please remove that buggy bot detection "algorithm" so people stop whining about this to host providers. or else its really easy to modify the A2S players query response bytes so that no player has the same played time, just 1 seconds apart each other)

This is about to become a big problem as the most recent up CSGO update will force reconnect clients on a map change.

Out of the top 20 CSGO servers, this is happening to 8 servers. The only people it doesn't affect is those using A2S query caching (aka, delayed/incorrect/spoofed data). GT is rewarding those servers right now!

As KGNS said above, this is a Gametracker issue with player duration time, and it's only going to become worse because of the latest CSGO update.

Let me explain.

The reason it would happen previously on servers is that people were using a map crash fixer (https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=310542) to fix the crash that would happen between LDR and HDR maps.

Please fix this or at least disable the check for those who request it. We have already dropped from 6th to 7th because of this.

https://www.gametracker.com/server_info/51.79.162.166:27015/