Posted 25 August 2013 - 04:44 PM
Sry to bring this again on the table, but I really hope to have some clarification about some things.
First thing is about that possibility to ban people who used cheat offline … is this even serious ? I mean, what’s the problem with the cheat ? Cheat causes problems not because some players use it as a weapon to be better than they really are, but because they have real opponent who get destroyed when they should not : that’s the problem. If a player had fun using a cheat against bots, there is nobody who suffers of this. Same if a moviemaker use a cheat for moviemaking. Same if a server admin use it to look at the demo (and, stop that bullshit, it’s of course more efficient to use a real cheat than that shownormals command, it’s just logic … in all FPS I know, when people look at a demo for cheat, they use themselves a cheat because that’s the closer they can go). If it’s not used against people, then there are no problem. Kinda same thing as a gun.
Well, my point is that, telling that a cheater can be permban without a warning is totally logic. Every player who use a cheat in a server with real people knows what he does, he knows what he risks. BUT a player who use a cheat offline for good/bad reasons has no reasons at all to think he does something bad, some of them does even do good thing with it. Banning the people from that list who use it offline would be a really bad move.
But if you want to forbid people to use cheat totally (meaning offline included), then at least mention it clearly in the first screen of the game, a message like “Every use of any type of cheats programs, even offline, will be considered as an infraction of the rules and provoke a permbanâ€. Something like that should be enough, but you can’t ban people just because you have a different vision of the cheat that they can’t absolutely guess.
And the second thing is about your AC method too. This time I’m referring to the way you list cheaters, and I think there is a real problem in there :
The actual method (that we can see) is the following :
- AC is included in the game, and spotted people using some specific cheats if they are auth.
- The auth are listed, published and can’t be used anymore because perm banned of the website.
And that’s all. So there are two main problems : we all see that you ban only the auth and not the person (we just have to see the banned players who created an other account freely without being banned). So, in fact, we have a list of banned players which is totally useless for the following reasons :
- As the bans details (meaning dates of cheat using) are not public, then there is no way to prove that cheats were used during competitive matchs, so no way to change competitive results even when cheaters played.
- As players details (IP especially) of banned people are not public either, they can freely create an other account and play without any kind of problem : competitions and servers owners can’t banned them by auth because they use an other, no more by IP because it’s not public : in fact they are not banned at all.
There are only two real solutions to make your AC effective :
First of them is to ban the players, not the auths. Meaning that once a player is banned for cheat, you have to look if he create an other account (and ban it too), make IP public, ect. The problem with that method is that it need lot of time and people dedicated for it, and you don’t have it. More than that, every organization who was hopping to do that way gave up at a point, because it’s too much work with too much complicated stuff.
The other method, which is the one I hardly suggest you, is the following : you don’t ban everybody from the game, you just list the auths with the IPs which get caught cheating, and you publish it. Only publish, not ban. You can eventually make this banlist the default one in a server. And, one more important point, it’s really important to communicate with competitions owners in a fast way. Because if a competitive player use a cheat, it’s important that competition know it in the following days, else that mean the whole season is getting no sense for many teams. There are much way good points of that method :
- You give responsibility to server owners. That was the same in 4.1, the good servers were the one who used popular banlist (PWB and UAA as exemples), but these banlist were not forced.
- You simplify competitions owners job. Because most of them use a temp ban system, we can hope for a redemption from the players who get caught. In the case of a perm ban, they’ll just create a new account and owners will have to find them.
- The AC bit is not public, meaning you can keep working the way you want, but as you keep in touch with competition owners (which trust you), then bans can still be applied, and we can hope a clean game in competition. I try myself to find sponsors for UrT competition, close to succeed it, but it really matters that FS work with us to have a clean game on that.
Hope for an answer for these two points :)