[All source games] BUG - Steam Ingame server browser reports wrong amount of players connected on Internet tab

[Zeitgesit]

Since a couple of days, there is a false reporting of player ingame server browser Internet tab. This does not appear to be game specific as the problem can be observed on most Source games.

The behaviour observed is that if there are more then 2 players in a server, the browser reports 1 player connected. The problem is not observed in Favourites and History tabs of the game browser.

In the attached, you can observe that the server has 6 players, whereas the browser reports 1. Needless to say that this is bad for servers as it will not bring in new players.

[brokenphilip]

Have you checked if these are non-Steam players by any chance? I vividly remember for GoldSrc (and probably Source) games that, for the Steam versions of the game and the Internet tab only, non-Steam players don't add to the player count (they do add up correctly in other tabs of the server browser, as well as in the server's game info dialog).

Usually, you are able to check for non-Steam players by running status in the console while connected to the server - check for unusually long or otherwise invalid-looking SteamIDs and testing them on a SteamID lookup site.

[Zeitgesit]

Thank you for your comment @brokenphilip that is great info!

Actually and interestingly enough, the problem went away about 15 hours after the mention.

My thinking (and hope) is that this may be work irl to servers faking player numbers. Perhaps they are trying to patch that. Here's to hoping! One thing to note is that busy servers player count was 2 and the servers whick fake their player count had a fat 0. Steam auth exploit/harvest by scammers