Choose which Valve data centres your matches are allowed to use. Per game, with live ping.
You need: Windows 10 or 11 · one of the supported games · administrator rights the first time you block something. Nothing else. No account, no driver, no background service.
Supports Deadlock, Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. Interface in English, German, Spanish and Russian.
These games never expose the IPs of their servers. Everything is tunnelled through the Steam Datagram Relay: Valve runs points of presence around the world, each with a handful of relay IPs, and the ones you can reach decide which region you end up in.
server2pick lists every location for the game you pick, measures its latency continuously, and blocks the ones you do not want with outbound Windows Firewall rules. Blocked location, skipped region.
flowchart LR
pc["Your PC<br/>deadlock.exe"]
fw["server2pick<br/>firewall rules"]
okpops["Open locations<br/>Sterling · Chicago"]
nopops["Blocked locations<br/>Frankfurt · Stockholm"]
mm["Valve<br/>matchmaking"]
srv["Game server<br/>in a data centre"]
pc --> fw
fw -->|"1 · pings"| okpops
fw -.->|"dropped"| nopops
okpops -->|"2 · latencies"| mm
mm -->|"3 · places it"| srv
okpops ==>|"4 · route in"| srv
- Your game pings every location. The firewall rules drop the ones you closed.
- So only the open ones come back with a number, and that is all your client can report.
- Valve picks a data centre that suits all ten players in the lobby.
- You reach the server through an open relay — the thick line is the match itself.
Two decisions, not one: where the match is hosted, and where you enter the network. Only the second is yours. That is the whole mechanism — it works by starving the matchmaker of data, not by forbidding anything.
Which is why it is not absolute. With enough European players in the lobby, Frankfurt can still win, and you would then reach that server through whatever relay you left open. The Steam overlay names both lines separately, so "Game server in Stockholm, relayed via Frankfurt" is a normal thing to read.
The relay pool is shared: Deadlock's 141 relay IPs are a subset of CS2's 210 and Dota 2's 165. Block those IPs machine-wide and you hit every Steam game at once.
server2pick binds each rule to that game's executable instead — so Deadlock can sit on Europe while CS2 keeps North America open, both active at the same time.
- Pick a game on first launch. It reopens the last one afterwards; the switcher is top left.
- Turn locations off with the switches or by clicking the map. Changes you have not applied yet get an amber ring.
- Apply changes. Windows asks for administrator rights once — the Restart as admin button sits in the sidebar.
- Save combinations you use often as profiles.
Applying while the game is already open does not reach it: Windows leaves existing connections alone, so the running session keeps the relay it started on. The status card says which of the two you are looking at — Rules in effect reads yes only once the game has been started under them.
Rules survive reboots. Unblock clears the open game; the link in the status card clears every game at once.
Do not block too much. The relay network routes around blocked locations, and match confirmation starts running into timeouts — the app warns you once fewer than three are left.
Share produces a code like S2P2-S0lNTMnJT86uK65M…. Anyone who pastes it
gets the same server selection and the same profiles, for every game at once.
Codes written by older versions (S2P1-…) still import.
Install paths, language and ping interval stay local: a code never overwrites where your games live, and it never touches the firewall on its own — the recipient still presses Apply changes.
Take the installer from Releases. It is not code signed, so Windows shows “Unknown publisher” — More info → Run anyway.
Ping measurement works without administrator rights. Only the firewall part needs them, and the app asks when you first block something.
On start the app asks GitHub whether a newer release exists. If there is one, a card appears above the status panel; installing is one click and the app restarts itself. A failed check stays silent — no network, no complaint.
- It blocks relays, not game servers — those are not public. In edge cases the relay network still routes you into a blocked region.
- IPv4 only; Valve lists no IPv6 relays for these games.
- Team Fortress 2 uses the relay network for Valve matchmaking only, not for community servers.
- Windows only.
server2pick is MIT licensed — see LICENSE. Use it, change it, ship it, sell it; keep the copyright notice with it and expect no warranty.
That covers this project's own code. The libraries it is built on stay under their own licenses, all of them permissive; every component, its version and its notice is listed in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md.
Unofficial. Not affiliated with Valve.