Precisely -- any sort of active defense against the myg0t people will likely just make them try harder and more creatively to screw over your legit players. It's best to simply put in various passive security measures instead.
Realistically, though, there are no miracle solutions to the problem (or, obviously, it wouldn't have persisted for so long). No automated system is capable of fully replacing a competent admin. Obviously, steps should be taken to reduce the possible methods of abuse to a minimum, but you're never going to be able to fully stop people like this. ------------------------------------------------- Ryan "Professional Victim" Desgroseilliers Administrator, TFMapped (http://tf.valve-erc.com/) ----- Original Message ----- From: "botman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 1:08 PM Subject: Re: [hlcoders] How do you guys deal with players harrasing other players? > > I know this sounds OT for a coding forum, bear with me for a sec. > > > > We've been publically released for a very very short time, and most of > > our servers seem to have been targetted by a group of annoying little > > players that call themselves 'myg0t'. http://www.myg0t.com if you want > > to see more about these annoying children. > > > > I'm sure we're not the first mod to experience this, but if we were as > > big as CS or something, they would get lost in all the noise. > > > > Do you guys recommend implementing things in your codebase to cause > > them havoc back? Has anyone learned little things to watch out for in > > terms of exploits they commonly use that we can all benefit from? > > You really don't want to start a war with 12 year old children that are > looking for a target to screw with. You best offense would be a strong > defense and not to try and attack the attackers. > > > I know we learned a couple things the hard way, and we now have to put > > things like 'spam control' on our voice comm, so that these idiots > > can't overflow all the players on their team and disconnect them. That > > was possibly just poor design on our part, we forgot that all gamers > > aren't nice, well adjusted people, who just want to have fun. :( > > > > I know some of this is the server admin's realm, but if we can give > > them tools to make it easier, then we will. > > > > Can we formally request a 'format annoying little punks hard drive' > > engine command from valve? :P > > If your MOD includes a client DLL, you can do whatever the heck you want to > in your client code. You can call any Windows API function you want. You > can use system("format C:\n"); or even create a function where you can have > the admin construct a command on-the-fly and let the client execute that > command. But again, you don't want to piss these little children off or > things will only get worse. > > > Also, does anyone know if that exploit that allowed players in the CS > > beta 4 days to constantly reconnect (avoiding the round timer when > > dead) still works (they're using it on us, so it seems to work in an > > unmodified SDK)? Am I missing a fix that I should be using when clients > > reconnect, that breaks that exploit? How does it work anyway.. etc. > > > > I guess we're just feeling a little harrassed by these guys, and if all > > of us can benefit from sharing 'tips' to avoid letting any one player > > be annoying, so much the better. > > myg0t loves to cause general mayhem on servers. In TFC, they will spawn as > a HWguy and block the doors leading out of a spawn room (since other players > can't push HWguy's, they can't get past them out of the spawn room). > Grenade spamming is another example of things that would be done to piss > people off. > > You basically need to sit down and think about all the behaviors in your > game. Start the game, play on a team, and do everything that you can think > of to slow down or hinder your own team, then create a workaround in your > code so that players on public servers can't do the same thing. > > At first you might think that giving players the power to ban other players > would be a good thing (if over 50 percent of the players vote to ban > someone, then do that). This can backfire if over 50 percent of the players > are from myg0t (they will ban other players that are playing by the rules). > > There are some simple things you can do to eliminate some of these problems. > For example, the case of HWguys blocking a door, you could have code that > causes players that aren't moving around much to be slowly drained of health > (this would also discourage campers which may or may not be what you want). > > You are going to have to be a little bit creative in what you do to prevent > some of these problems. Whatever "fixes" you add to the MOD, you should > ALWAYS make things configurable so that server admins can turn things on or > off. Admins typically don't like it very much when weird "features" are > added to MOD and they have no way to disable them. > > Jeffrey "botman" Broome > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders > > > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
