-- [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ] The following is only our point of view, your mileage may vary.
It is becoming increasingly apparent to us that the majority of the cheats we see on our Counter-Strike:Source servers are coming from NetCafe Accounts. VAC for the most part seems to be working as a deterrent to the majority of normal users. I do not have access to VAC banning stats, but for all I know it maybe banning boatloads of players. The main problem here is, VAC's delayed banning system has no effect whatsoever on NetCafe Accounts, as it is a simple case for a NetCafe users to log out of the STEAM account they are using at the NetCafe and then log back in when they have been banned from a server by an admins and renter the server with a new STEAM_ID, and in any case, who cares about being VAC banned if you effectively have unlimited access to STEAM_ID's that aren't yours any how? Here is the thing though, most Netcafes are connected to the Internet via Static IP's. It is a rather trivial task to go through the logs with a program like HLStatsX and run a query that generates a list of STEAM_ID's on a per IP basis. Then you check to see which IP's have lots of STEAM_ID's attached to them, and then you add those IP addresses to your banned_ip.cfg file and run it at server start, instant mass reduction of cheats you will see on your server. If you want to be sure, just do a traceroute to the IP in question just to be sure you are not wiping a college or university out, but most often you will find that these are not going to have Netcafe accounts associated with them anyhow. But you can be almost certain that if you see more than 20 STEAM_ID's originating from the 1 IP address, you have found a NetCafe that is using your servers. Now the problem for Valve, is if lots of Game Server Providers start IP banning NetCafes from their servers, it instantly devalues Valves NetCafe program, since the NetCafe users will find it increasingly difficult to find servers to play on the Internet. In fact it is my understanding that if you IP ban, then your servers will no longer even come up on that IP's server browser, they will either not show up at all, or they show up as not responding, in either case the result is the same. I do not have a simple answer to this, but whilst delayed banning exists, there is no other way to stop cheats on servers who have effectively unlimited access to STEAM Accounts, other than to IP ban them. Thoughts? -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
