Potential next project: trolling cheaters

[JackGriffin]

I love the ideas and it's great that there is still such a strong anti-cheater attitude among everyone. Don't forget though that for all this to work you are going to have to be able to do a positive ID on all players and that's not possible (even with ACE). As it is the ones that will need this the most are the ones who can bypass it the easiest.

[Fuzz_Ball]

Jack, must you be such a BUZZKILL?
I understand that there are some fiendishly brilliant malcontents out there who thrive on revenge but there are also those cheaters who know just enough to annoy. What I'm getting out of your point could be related to "don't lock your doors because most theives are locksmiths." Anyhoo, it's nice to see you up & in the UT world, still!

An idea I think would also hurt is to deduct several million points from their score. Some cheaters are proud of their overall stats and this would be a bigger insult that hits them in the ego.
i look forward to seeing how this works out.

[UT Sniper (SJA94)]

Jack, must you be such a BUZZKILL?

An idea I think would also hurt is to deduct several million points from their score. Some cheaters are proud of their overall stats and this would be a bigger insult that hits them in the ego.

^
i didn't think of that.

[MrLoathsome]

I wish you guys luck with this, but suspect Jack is correct and you might be paddling upstream.

Never had many problems with hard core cheaters on my servers, as I set them up to be less serious from the start.
Even when there were a lot more playing UT online, I never promoted them much, as the static IP DSL I got won't
support a huge number of players. And back in the day, there would be times when people were waiting to get on.
(That is no longer an issue.... )

There were a few minor problems with lamers/trolls/team killers over the years, but I have found the best possible thing to do is just
ignore them for a while, and they go away. Anything you say or do, just makes them do it more. That is what they feed on.

I am sure it is a much more annoying problem for those of you running more "serious" servers, but you might consider that as well.
They feed off your efforts to keep them out and anything you might say to them in game or elsewhere just makes them try harder.

In the last 12 years, I have only banned 1 player, and only have kicked a handful out because they were teamkilling or spamming console etc....

I almost kicked Jack off my DM/CTF server a few months back when he stopped by, but I was having too much fun shooting him, so I didn't.
(Pretty sure he wasn't cheating anyway..... )

Sorry for rambling on. Mr.Loathsome felt like typing. (And playing with smilies.)

My point is, the cheaters are vampires, and your efforts to stop them are blood.

[Wildcard]

Oh, I have so many mean and cruel ideas that would probaly be very unethical to implement!
For now I have my admin weapons arsenal mainly being the General Protection Fault Rifle
and the Seizure Rifle
Seizure Rifle makes your screen spin around obnoxiously and alt fire does the same thing for a longer duration of time with the addition of a HORRIBLE NOISE
Here's the horrible noise: http://wildcard.tigzone.com/WorstSoundEver/
Good fun when it comes to showing players the door you can make it a game! I love it when they run! makes the punishments so much more exciteing!
Stupid Ethics... If it wasn't too frowned upon I would be half way to a Blue Screen Of Death Rifle
Oh well I guess it's because I'm partialy only kind of a little evil ...maby
I'm a canabalistic troll kind of, I was trolling cheaters before it was even cool

How about a netspeed randomizer Ferail Dragon?
LAG!!!!

[Feralidragon]

I must note that the subject of this topic is "Potential next project", so it doesn't mean I will actually do something, it's mostly something to discuss.
Anyway, I gave this a better thought, what if something like that was implemented but without the cheater knowing he was detected? The max he can do is say "buggy server" or "laggy server" and leave.

iloveut99 has a point, this could influence the gameplay, so here what I think that could go (and taking a bit on everyone's ideas, specially a bit on Wildcard's):
- the player is detected to be a cheater;
- instead of downright public trolling and humiliation, we would just lag the hell out of him (it's easy to lag a client), and even write mambo jambo errors to his own client log, creating memory leaks, etc, without him realizing he has been caught. And perhaps give him a nice GPF when kicking him after a while.
- he/she may complain in the forums about the server, and in that case the admin himself can humiliate him in public with the ACE log if he wishes and if it proves to be real cheating.

The player doesn't get publicly announced as a cheater, mostly because of false positives. In case of a false positive, the max the player may have is a crash.

[EvilGrins]

Personally, I'd go you one better.

No matter what the gametype, if someone cheats you make something so unkillable SkaarjBerserkers spawn into the game, track him down, kill the cheater, and then fade away as soon as they get him.

After which, the cheater automatically gets kicked out of the game after the Berserkers killed him.

[JackGriffin]

Ferali, as always you find a tolerable middle ground that may actually work. I still think the potential for abuse is really high, especially on competitive servers. Once lag injection code is released it's going to cause problems because groups will attempt to use it to give themselves an advantage on their servers (something I'm quite sure happens already).

It's surprising to find what's buried in mods you take from servers already, and is actually a thread I've debated starting for quite some time: showcasing some popular mods in use right now and explaining what certain parts of the code are doing without your knowledge. Things like logging your user.ini or your passwords from your ut.ini are just the start. Most people have no idea the extent they are being monitored by uscript code.

Giving admins the ability to do such terrible things to players as have been proposed by people in this thread is a really bad idea and it's going to be abused.

[Feralidragon]

Well, anything can be abused, that's the history of any software and the community contributed work (guess why I don't use any user php contributed work in my stuff unless said user is already worldwide known and trusted?).
Even now, as you said, there may be some admins already loading up client mods for data mining, and whoever can retrieve user.ini passwords and settings, can even more easily crash or exploit the client with anything else, or even give a self-advantage. I think this wouldn't cool nor heat that in any way.