So I've attached below a message from a player about our latest VASSAL troll.
This is just one example of lots of games he's ruining but this message
encapsulated almost every problem we see. We deal with one of these morons
about one a year and so if this seems like a case of deja vu, it is. :)
Last time I brought it up, there were some comments that 3.0 would address
some the various concerns. I just got 3.0 and started reviewing the feature
list and editing options and I'm not noticing anything off the top of my head
that would help so I'll just ask if there's been any progress in any of the
following...
1. Fixing the Undo button so only players can Undo. (I see no need for
Observers to have this function available as it's easy to ruin someone's game
just by hitting Undo 50 times.)
2. Increased MOD security so you can tell if your opponent's MOD does not
match yours (so dice exploits are not nearly as easy.) I've suggested a CRC
echo in the past.
3. Secure roller within the MOD rather than just via email.
4. visible IP so you can detect rudimentary name spoofing and anonymity
issues.
5. Unique UIDs so exact name spoofing isn't possible.
6. Improved room locking so it's not so easy to "barge in". Invites functions
to allow people into a locked room after the fact.
7. Kicking or ignore type functions to avoid chatlog spamming.
Anyway, VASSAL is awesome so this shouldn't be considered a condemnation, but
my yearly cry for help. :)
-Jason (Star Wars Minis MOD)
~~~ A Tale of Trolling ~~~
I was observing a game of SWM on Vassal tonight between two players named
empirejeff and newbie. Newbie made a few mistakes and was fighting an uphill
battle against Jeff, and after a particularily hard hit on one of newbie's main
characters, he told jeff that he conceeded. I stepped in and said I would
finish it. After I didn't recieve any complaints, me and jeff picked up the
match where they had left off.
And then the oddities began. Random units began spawning directly over our
battle area, every once and a while everything on the map would dissapear, and
HP and FP would randomly change. It was annoying. I asked for whoever it was to
stop, and newbie replied back that he would not. I told him that I was going to
ask the vassal admin to ipban him (mind you, this was the first game on vassal
that I started playing, up until then I had only observed, and even then, it
was my fourth time total being online) and all hell broke lose.
He begins private messaging me (mind you again that I didn't know I could save
all of these until after the fact) that he knows Rodney Kinney personally from
this site, and that he knows that both jeff and I were hacking the dice-bot
(although why he accused me of doing it before I even used them is beyond me),
so I rolled the dice about 10 times to try to prove to him that we wern't
cheating and to get him to leave us alone.
Naturally, that didn't quite work. After a few more minutes of trying to finish
the game against jeff, putting up with annoying messages from newbie and the
randomly appearing and dissapearing pieces on the game board, jeff and I moved
to a new room and reset the gameestate. Well, after a couple minutes of
un-interupted gameplay, newbie must have gotten bored and came over to ruin our
nights a little more.
We endured as much as we could before trying once again to change rooms, this
time locking the room. However, this newbie character at least had one thing
going for him: he was immune to locked channels. After re-joining the channel
once again, jeff gave up and logged off.
Now, all of this started at about 0300 this morning. It is now 0554, and newbie
is stil messaging me as I type this. This is a plea to anyone who holds any
sort of power over the Vassal system to stop abusive players like newbie from
ruining the game for others. Among his messages were threats to have the SWM
mod support pulled. I personally wouldn't care, since I don't have any
experience with it, but I know there are quite a few people who would be upset
if the mod's support did get pulled.
---------------------------------
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