Considering shutting down master server...

by eihrul on 09/18/2006 02:59, 114 messages, last message: 10/21/2006 04:37, 104613 views, last view: 10/31/2024 22:14

Well, today I've seen the biggest display of immaturity I've ever seen. People running around, connecting to servers as soon as they saw someone else connect, crashing other clients, banning them, etc.

If this is what it has come to, we'll just shut down the master server. People only seem to want to abuse the service we're graciously providing for free, and fuck it up for everyone else.

If that's the case, if that's what some of you guys really want, fine, we'll just shut down the service since it's basically unusable to anyone as is.

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#8: Re: ..

by Passa on 09/18/2006 10:41, refers to #7

I'm sick of it, I had a look at my server logs again since my last post and it looks very suspicious..

I want to play normal Sauerbraten online, I want the master server service, thats why I vote for Sauerbraten to go closed source. Its been abused for too long (the copyright stuff) and now just rampant cheating.. close the source and let people have a good time. Yes, it means alot of the cool people in this community cant make cool mods.. but what can you do? Is there another solution?

Maybe closed source mentality might be good for this community for a change..

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#9: Re: ..

by StillPeter on 09/18/2006 10:42, refers to #8

I hope there's another solution, is there anything I can do?

All I can think of now is getting an strace for if I get crashed? Would that be useful?

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#10: anti cheat

by MeatROme on 09/18/2006 11:04

Sadness.
Whatever makes them do it?
I just don't get it; maybe it's just a sick craving for power over others.
They'd have made good Nazis!

And I was ready to upload a new ServerMonitorClient today :(
But in the light of the current reality this is probably a really bad idea.

A thought I've had before was :
Link authentication to this forum - requiring any would-be-player to hit a "know my IP" button before the masterserver will ever answer him.
Again - this isn't foolproof - but if each server also had a way to verify that a connecting IP was indeed registered here it would make it easy for us to SPAM the perpetrators with links to suicide-HOWTOs - maybe they'd take a hint?

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#11: Re: anti cheat

by Passa on 09/18/2006 12:42, refers to #10

I want to crawl into a hole and emerge when this is all fixed; I feel really hurt by this, Sauerbraten is one of the only non-retarded online games that I can play..

Dont make me lower my IQ even more by playing CS! I wont even get started on that, other than the fact that it rots your brain.

Yeah so FU cheaters/hackers/script kiddies/socially deprived nerds/paedophiles/complete morons/the sort of people who call the up-late-game-show to answer questions (rofl..)

I'm considering taking my server off the masterserver, and simple meeting up with people in #sauerbratem until this is over..

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#12: ..

by Max of S2D [Fr] on 09/18/2006 13:08

Damned. I prefer got a Closed-source Sauer than a Sauer without MasterServer...

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#13: dang cheaters

by mitaman@work_cave on 09/18/2006 13:18

All the fun of going online to play Sauer has been spoiled the last few days by cheaters. To bad they don\'t use their \"talent\" to contribute to the game instead of ruining it for others.
May you cheaters all burn in Doggie Hell.

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#14: Aww damn

by shadow,516 on 09/18/2006 13:33

What has this place turned into?

This was never a problem before, and Im rather pissed that it's emerging now. I dont like the idea of closed source OR no master server, but really what choice do we have?

This quite frankly sucks...

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#15: ..

by Cyk on 09/18/2006 14:08

Ok, for one thing, a better implementation of anti-cheating devices would help. If you have played Counterstrike or other Source-based games, you may have seen things like "votekick" that would possibly work here- maybe not with small games, but with larger ones.

You could simply make a closed-source version that adds a long identifier string, but I don't know how secure that is with hex editors and such.

Meh.

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#16: ..

by SanHolo on 09/18/2006 15:25

I really don't like the masterserver to go down. Some reasons got already provided by others, another is to never give in to "terrorists", in our case cheaters.

I am no game-developer, but how about this:

Every major release has the checksum of the three official builds hardcoded, and only clients with the correct checksum can connect? I don't know if that spoils the fun for anyone (besides cheaters), but cheating was way harder like that, now wasn't it?

We shouldn't give in to those idiots.

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#17: ..

by YG2F on 09/18/2006 15:46

player authentification ?
player account registration ?

a server which allows registered players only ?


I've just discovered Sauerbraten about 2 weeks ago ... that would be sad if i can't play it anymore ... :-/


Yoann

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#18: Re: ..

by rancor on 09/18/2006 16:50, refers to #17

An idea that has been circulated on the Urban Terror forums in connection with their distribution of a Quake 3 binary compiled from the source release is the idea of a keyserver. Basically, the thought would be that you'd register your email address and pay someone some small amount of money, and you'd get a cdkey.

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#19: ..

by Max of S2D [Fr] on 09/18/2006 17:16

Well... i wanna understand why there are no game protocol. If it's impossible to do a game protocol against the cheaters... don't publish the source.

But the problem of the "kickers/banners" stay complete... and "votekick" command would be usefull !

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#20: ..

by StillPeter on 09/18/2006 17:20

I know the checksums and whatnot solutions won't actually work for anyone with any perseverance, but I'm starting to think that at least some hurdles should be put it to make it slightly difficult.

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#21: Re: protocol/votekick (was : no subject set)

by MeatROme on 09/18/2006 17:24, refers to #19

Huh? Please take more time to write your posts, they are very hard to understand, since english is found to be so un-french by the French ... I actually got by better on german than on english when I went driving through your country once.

If you're suggesting for Sauerbraten to go closed-source because of this recent wave of vandalism that would put me in dire straits indeed ... I'm learning so much and having tremendous fun into the bargain. And the "terrorist" argument also holds true - let's not give in to a few vandals trying to wreck our community.

I'm not sure what the difference between votekick and the existing kick command is supposed to be - if it is simply that kicking is decided by majority vote then you can already simply inform the current master of your opinion via in-game chat ... no need for voting on it IMO.

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#22: Re: checksum idea (was : no subject set)

by MeatROme on 09/18/2006 17:27, refers to #20

Indeed, this is to easy to spoof.

As I understand it eihrul has some aesthetic issues with reusing the trick they used for Cube to make self-compiled binaries incompatible with the release-versions ... also there is an increasing number of players running on architecture where no official build exists (64-bit for example) ... so I don't know if that approach would go down to well with those guys & gals ...

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#23: Re: checksum idea (was : no subject set)

by StillPeter on 09/18/2006 17:33, refers to #22

Damn, I didn't think about that.

There's got to be a better way than closing the masterserver.

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#24: ..

by makkE on 09/18/2006 17:39

Something must be done for sure. I think the solution cube had was pretty good, though releases might be too fast still atm to do it. Maybe once it´s somewhat final?

Btw, max´s english is pretty good for a french his age imho ;)

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#25: Re: ..

by StillPeter on 09/18/2006 17:57, refers to #24

I didn't like the cube solution purely because it is technically against sourceforge standards.

Maybe throw a few hurdles to make cheating less easy and if someone has a build that won't connect because its an AMD64 then they can email the md5sum, CRC, whatever to someone in charge so they can enable that to connect to the masterserver so it can be updated to accept that md5 whatever?

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#26: Re: picking on language

by MeatROme on 09/18/2006 18:17, refers to #24

sorry, Max_of_S2D[Fr] -
I guess it came out more critical than I wanted it to ...
please, no offence was intended ...
what I actually wanted to say was :
"Hope I understood you correctly ..."

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#27: ..

by apflstrudl on 09/18/2006 18:25

i like votekick idea everyone can do a votekick and only the master of the server can kick someone directly. But for that you have to set a password and only the master who got servermaster with the password set with "-p" can kick.

Would that be possible?

I don't have friends who play sauerbraten. And you need a fast connection tu run a server with about 8 people. I know there are some, but i don't think that someone copies the IPs to connect directly if the master server is down and then kicks the others. And i don't think that everyone can get a server, or can i get some fro free???

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