Urban Terror Forums: [4.2] Update 4.2.012 - Urban Terror Forums

Frankie V, on 24 April 2013 - 04:21 PM, said:

Can you give me some examples, without using auth as one of them, of how you would track an aliased administrator? Maybe *I'm* missing something.

I don't get this strong defend of incognito spectacor

"I don't want to be recognized when:
-sometimes plaing very bad (my pr0 tag is in danger!)
-crap talking
-I dont want chat with anyone
-I only play as fake and rename only when im #1
-warm up
-trolling
-etc"
some less naive reasons than "specing cheaters" (you can catch only noobs who dont care if someone spec or not)
Be honest with yourself, choose one or write your own.

Frankie V, on 24 April 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

This hits on a whole different area than what we're implying. If you already personally knew the player in 4.1, I can see what you're getting at. But we're more hitting on a quiet, private administrator. Some servers I've admind, it was against the rules to let the players know who the admins were.

In fact, going in the direction you brought up, auth is just making information on players 100x easier to obtain. What we're asking is to minimize it without completely disregarding the auth system. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea behind the auth system, I just have a problem with how it's publicly executed.

"Cyber Stalking", in its current definition, is something a lot of people are actually guilty of in some way or another but you can't pursue repercussions in every case, especially when it just comes down to being annoying in a FPS.

Bug report:
Can't change monitor refresh rate. It is always at 60hz no matter what, and it is very annoying if you have CRT monitor.

well guess what, i am this QA rebel that agrees that auth names on the scoreboard should be optional, because it does not encourage people to use auth at all. if you can't be incognito if you wish so, and have to log out and still being able to join almost every server, then why bother using auth at all. there are absolutely no benefits.

what is the point of looking for cheaters on jump servers? can anyone see the point?
on public servers? for admins there is absolutely no difference if they get a cheater report with the player name of auth name, you'd have only alias a little bit deeper in the logs.

as an admin- i do respect players privacy and their right to anonymity. with all the risks involved, i just don't like the idea of making my server a police state.

PS. imagine a cheater using auth and get caught. that would be just hilarious.

This post has been edited by n1n: 24 April 2013 - 06:26 PM

Frankie V, on 24 April 2013 - 04:21 PM, said:

You should get out more. Anyone that's ever administered a highly popular server will tell you that cheaters essentially fall into two main categories:

• Drive by one-offs that almost never come back after being banned
  
• Persistent stealthy ones that make an effort to seem legit

The first option is what you're talking about and they do annoy the crap out of people, but they typically move on to a new server after being banned.

But the second category are much more of a pain and certainly are MUCH more likely to try to evade a ban and come back for more. The particular hacks they use might be super tough to catch and may require stupid amounts of time to catch. But one thing is for sure -- those in this group are most likely to have a toggle button to turn it off if they think they might be under watch. And it is precisely why being able to spec them with a random name and no way for them to know you are an admin that is helpful. Server-side demos are another step to help with this.

Apart from hacking, you also have griefers that will do things like smoke spawn and whatever. They too might be likely to stop their behavior if they know an admin jumps to spec to see who's doing it.

Frankie V, on 24 April 2013 - 04:21 PM, said:

That is one kind of cheating, where they put on a poorly configured aimbot which snaps 90 degrees onto people as soon as they are visible. However during the few months that I was admin on public servers I witnessed a lot of more subtle activity. I saw someone with an aimbot only on their primary, who used their deagle almost the whole time in 10 minutes of watching them. A former admin also comes to mind, who would wear tacs and sit underwater on Eagle all the time. People had their suspicions about him for a long time, eventually he was caught through a submitted demo. It would have been much harder or even impossible to catch this kind of cheating without the ability to alias. In my experience most people who are cheating will alter their behaviour if they know an admin is spectating, either from knowing the alias or seeing a clan tag. For an admin the ability to connect to a server incognito is a very valuable tool and one of the few ways you can ensure people are staying honest. An incognito connection for spectating may be an option here, where you can join as a spectator and be unannounced and invisible to players (hopefully with a different password than rcon, as most people using a system like B3 won't want the rcon password handed out).

Divinity, on 24 April 2013 - 06:34 PM, said:

In 4.1 I remember an rcon ability that did a fake quit and then moved you to hidden spec. Pretty sure this was a customization Rambetter wrote for his old servers.

Would be cool to have this in 4.2. It sure was useful for catching those cheaters who toggled their cheat once someone jumped to spectator.