Are multiplayer servers moderated?

Multiplayer servers are hosted by other players, so your experience may vary between servers. If you've had a bad experience on someone's server, we recommend playing on a different server or hosting your own.

Servers are expected to follow our (fairly simple) server hosting rules. Otherwise, they may be hidden from the Internet server list.

Servers can be reported for breaking our rules by creating a Support ticket. Servers should only be reported if they break one of the rules currently listed on our rules page. If your server has been moderated, you may appeal via Support ticket.

Do you plan to introduce more moderation in the future?

In short: it's complicated.

We use the Steam Matchmaking API to find servers on the Internet. By default, Steam allows anyone to anonymously list an infinite number of servers. This openness is great for new hosts, but presents a challenge to block bad actors.

We originally had more extensive server hosting guidelines. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned challenge, the resources being dedicated to this were often of questionable benefit to players, and detracted from what could be spent on game development. More recently, we've been trying a new approach through Server Browser Curation:

Server Browser Curation

Anyone can create and share their own curation filters through the Steam Workshop or the web.

This feature decentralizes the process, putting moderation tools in the hands of players. Filters can hide servers you don't want to see (similar to ad-blocking), or add labels to visible servers. By creating a curated list, you could:

• Share servers that you recommend.
• Hide servers you don't recommend (e.g. pay-to-win, abusive admins, misusing Workshop content).
• Block imposters from impersonating/spoofing a real server network.
• Label servers based on their Workshop content (e.g. for popular mods).

If you’d like to create your own curated list, please check out this article. (Thank you for your interest in helping improve the quality of the server browsing experience!)

Behind-the-Scenes

To better understand our current approach, you may be interested in some more detail about the challenges our previous approaches faced:

1. Some server listings have become inaccessible outside of certain countries—even with a VPN. Unfortunately, this means that certain servers could only be moderated based solely on player anecdotes.
   
   
2. Repeatedly-blocked hosts have encouraged players to install software that blocks connections to our backend. This broke moderation (among other features), and this practice could present a security concern if players were installing questionable executables just to bypass blocks on (often, minor) rule-breaking servers. By decentralizing the backend it’s much harder for bad actors to detect and circumvent when they’ve been blocked.
   
   
3. Our previous tools haven't scaled well – and we can't scale them further at our own scale. Encouraging regional hosts to collaborate on "verified lists" to protect each other seems to have been quite successful so far.
   
   
4. Even while banning multiple accounts daily, and applying filters to block servers for re-uploading someone's Workshop content, bad actors can bypass such restrictions imposed by us with little effort. Steam remains in the best position to moderate misuses of the Steam Workshop, and most incidents regarding Workshop misuses (e.g., re-uploaded content) have been most adequately resolved by Steam.