ISP's here do not give a damn about online gaming. On a meeting with one of the biggest ISP's here, the head manager clearly stated that he didn't believed on the business, and soon enough he had to start billing the real usage of network and cut the support. This sound stupid, but the story on Portugal GSP's is incredible...
The pioneers came, but when the real competition appeared, the pioneers started on public forums accusing other people of ripping off his software (namelly a MOHAA remote admin package), he even changed the licence wich originally was bound with it...
Things got more complicated when this so called pioner broke a gentlemen's agreement a couple of days before signing the final contract with KPN Qwest Portugal. KPN got insane and started sponsoring the second big GSP's, full bandwidth for free (but they ommited the fact that were being bought by another ISP wich the main capital comes from France Telecom).
So all the ISP's started sponsoring their GSP clientes and price war started, with the price per slot dropping to 1€ and 1.8€. Many small GSP's have been wipped out. That's when a community was founded and supported by a small local ISP, and rackplayer.com was started, from players, to players... But the support ended after sometime, due to a change in the major ISP wich dropped their ADSL prices to a very low price, making lots of people changing to them. Unluckly that was the only ISP that rackplayer hadn't direct connect or peering due to Portugal Telecom's abusive peering prices. People fled and started to rent servers by 1€/slot.
The market became cartelized by 3 GSP's wich work together and rip off people. There is no competition. With rackplayer's disappearing, they took it all.
ISP's do not care about it, you can report whatever you want, they ignore it... unless you're a nazi, then they will act. Governament and ISP's only act on political or racial causes. Online gaming doesn't bellong to either of those two, so... u will be ignored....
Besides, Cable and xDSL do not have static IP's and you can force your DHCP client to request a new IP from the IP pool on the DHCP Server, or you can even force one if you have the network details like gateways and so on and configure your PC as static (might have some IP collisions though), but you can test it with pings...
That's a pretty hard battle to win... Beasides, taking UK out, most countries will rule that a product that you BUY is yours and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, overriding the EULA's. That's not new in Italy, Germany, Spain for instance... Even big ass companies like Sony and Microsoft can't stop 'mod chips' on their consoles, wich is a much wider market, and mod chips (comercialization and usage) is legal is most european countries. As far as I know only UK's Higher Courts are in favor of software houses or ludic equipments regarding modchips and hacking products. All the rest who have gone to court have been ruled in favor of the end user.
It's a loss battle.
Bruce "Bahamut" Andrews wrote:
Pretty useless, it just makes you appear to be spinning around in circles to anyone that's spectating, not entirely sure what the actual player sees, but yeah. Pretty obvious.
Incase you guys haven't been monitoring the normal HLDS mailing list, here's the NonSteam info to bring you up to speed on those annoying hackers that have a seemingly unlimited supply of keys:
I've had success testing out the "hack" of steam called "non-steam". It's basically a version of steam that originally allowed you to play Counter-Strike 1.6 and other mods offline. Recently though, an extra patch has evolved it so that it allows you to play online -without a cd key-.
That's right, it exploits the SteamID System and allows you to play online without registering a key to an account. You still need to change accounts to change ID's though.
Website for it is currently down (the primary one, at least) as it got owned by it's webhost, but there are still a number of sources that allow you to download it from.
Non-Steam can be used to connect to any half life or half life mod server without a cd key. When combined with the afformentioned VAC Disabler v2 and a multi-hook, this becomes "[myg0t]"'s playtoy.
So to anyone who is having issues with hackers that have an endless supply of ID's, do yourselves a favour and ban their IP addresses. It's harder to change those (which isn't saying much for steam at the moment).
The discussion on the HLDS mailing list has been going on for a while, check the archives if you're interested in specific details and test results, but the end result is: The SteamID system has been completely compromised and anyone can play Half-Life or it's mods for free.
So the only way to get rid of persistent hackers is to report them to their ISP, and hope to hell their policies cover this kind of abuse (if you're in australia you can also [if you're really bored] take the cheater to court and possibly get them jailed under cybercrime's Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) s 478.1(1) - http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/comact/11/6458/0/CM000070.htm )
Not posting this information on STEAM forums, generally people that run servers are mature enough to not go and abuse it, but the more people who complain the higher the chance of something being done about it.
Heh, who knows, maybe we can get Vivendi to get on VALVe's arse with this, since they are essentially allowing free distribution of their game by not solving the issue =)
- Bruce "Bahamut" Andrews
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ronny Schedel Sent: Friday, 1 October 2004 11:16 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hlds_linux] Awesome news for vac team
What is a spinhack?
http://www.darkcheats.net/php/dbcheats/?game_id=15
SPECIAL QUOTE: 25-09-2004 Vac Disabler V2 <http://www.darkcheats.net/php/dbcheats/?cheat_id=366> Enables you
to
use any not vac proof cheat on VAC servers! Simple to intall and very effective:) Indetectable
Some extra homework for VAC team ;)
plus 17 more working cheats.
nmarques
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