Can we have a packet that is sent by bots to inform the server that the client is a bot and not a regular JJ2 client?

One use of this is to exclude bots from player count in server list to know actual players count in a server.

You see servers with player count of 4/32, 2/32, etc all the time while they are actually empty of players.

https://i.imgur.com/01rs1gN.png

This is a good idea, though it will not be trivial to implement (but also not impossible)

There is an option in the sgip config to hide certain player names from the list. I was experimenting with it a week ago, but decided to revert it back.

Filtering by player name is probably a safe alternative. If servers ignored players whose names start with "Bot," and ignored spectators, those two changes should give us accurate player counts.

Originally Posted by Violet CLM

Filtering by player name is probably a safe alternative. If servers ignored players whose names start with "Bot," and ignored spectators, those two changes should give us accurate player counts.

This would do the job too if server owners collaborated, even though what I suggested is more convenient and more accurate IMO as it would only require us bot creators (Cranky and me) to modify our bots and remove setup complications for server owners.

About ignoring spectators, I'm personally not for that. If there's some ODT tornament with 20 participants, server will show 2/14 insead of 20/32 on the menu?

Actually your idea to ignore spectators gave me an idea, why don't we have 2 swappable player counts on the menu? For example let's say we have a server with 20 players, and only 2 players are playing, while the other 18 are spectating the match, we can have the server list menu showing [20/32] ny default, and if you hold down tab key, the player count of that server will show as [2/14], and if you release the tab key, it will go back to [20/32]. Maybe we can accomplish this by adding both player counts somewhere to the query response packet (0x06), like putting it before the data Stijn added on v5.5.

These are just my personal opinons, the name alternative would do the job even though there are better approaches.