SK
6th October 2003, 21:49
So what is this place?
Well I started out as an admin for two large online gaming companies in the UK for the game Team Fortress Classic, a half-life modification. Like most admins I spent a great deal of free time watching demos and demos of cheaters/exploiters/team killers/racists etc etc. With half-life, players would have a unique CD-Key which when played online gave them a unique WONID to match their CD-Key. This unique WONID was a way of banning certain people from servers. Of course after nearly 5 years of half-life running like this you soon capture a fair few offenders WONID's. This was all great until the announcement of Steam (www.steapowered.com). Whilst I like the new interface and features it has brought to the game it has also made brought one devistating factor. WONID's are to be abolished and replaced with a new SteamID, sadly this meant that no WONID could be matched with the users new SteamID, so unfortunately all servers with 5 years of cheaters IDs banned are now lost.
You're talking too much, just tell me what this place it about?
For every person that is caught misbehaving on a server by an admin its one server less that, that person can now attack. Why cant we use that and make the ban spread to other servers too? With every ban documented and with enough satisfactory evidence we can create a new global list of known cheaters.
Isn't that just what 'Valve' Anti Cheat' does?
Yes and no. VAC when it has supposedly found a cheat, write to its own internal database of banned steamID's. These ID's are only banned on other VAC enabled servers. The server admin can't also see whos been banned from their server.
What would you say is enough to get someone on this list?
Not all offences would mean someone should be added to this list. A global list like this would need some rules setting up before anything is judged. A typical rule would be any use of any cheat software should be enough to be added to the list. General name calling happens all the time and can be a one off. In such cases the users information will be recorded and saved for future referance. Repeated offences would get them on the ban list. Racism is a not tolerated and will in most cases result in a ban on the first incident.
All demos require that the 'status' command is ran during some stage of the demo to prove its authenticity. Some might say that this is not enough as its possible to edit the ID's it displays. If this is at all possible then yeah your right, but then there has to be somewhere where your going to draw the line.
How would one go about getting their ID removed from this list?
The whole idea of banning cheats is to make sure they can't come back to your server. Once someone is on this list they are there to stay. In the possibility that there is enough evidence that this player didnt cheat or was wrongly accused then there is the possibility of being removed. The idea is to keep all demos and information for each ban to support the case. Sadly it has gone in the past where older demos cannot be ran from newer updates to the game engine. In this matter we simply cannot do anything.
What happens to the user when they have been added to the list?
The actual list of bans is useable by anyone. Of course this really is only server admins as these are the only people who can manage their banned.cfg file. Unlike VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) it doesn't ban on 'secure' servers. The process isn’t automatic thus giving the server administrator the option to use the list or remove people from the global list.
Isn't it a long process to be having to manually add users to the banned.cfg every time?
Like you say, it isn’t a hard thing to do, its just time consuming as the list is growing daily and therefore needing to be updated regularly. There are plans in the future to make this a lot more automated for submitting cheats and for server admins to add the banned cheater to their server.
Doesn’t sound a bad idea, but why are you only doing two half-life mods?
Well the project is really just an idea and needs testing. To understand what’s needed it would be best to work on just two games of which I play and fully understand. If proves successful with server admins, then new admins/moderators will be taken on to support other games.
Well I started out as an admin for two large online gaming companies in the UK for the game Team Fortress Classic, a half-life modification. Like most admins I spent a great deal of free time watching demos and demos of cheaters/exploiters/team killers/racists etc etc. With half-life, players would have a unique CD-Key which when played online gave them a unique WONID to match their CD-Key. This unique WONID was a way of banning certain people from servers. Of course after nearly 5 years of half-life running like this you soon capture a fair few offenders WONID's. This was all great until the announcement of Steam (www.steapowered.com). Whilst I like the new interface and features it has brought to the game it has also made brought one devistating factor. WONID's are to be abolished and replaced with a new SteamID, sadly this meant that no WONID could be matched with the users new SteamID, so unfortunately all servers with 5 years of cheaters IDs banned are now lost.
You're talking too much, just tell me what this place it about?
For every person that is caught misbehaving on a server by an admin its one server less that, that person can now attack. Why cant we use that and make the ban spread to other servers too? With every ban documented and with enough satisfactory evidence we can create a new global list of known cheaters.
Isn't that just what 'Valve' Anti Cheat' does?
Yes and no. VAC when it has supposedly found a cheat, write to its own internal database of banned steamID's. These ID's are only banned on other VAC enabled servers. The server admin can't also see whos been banned from their server.
What would you say is enough to get someone on this list?
Not all offences would mean someone should be added to this list. A global list like this would need some rules setting up before anything is judged. A typical rule would be any use of any cheat software should be enough to be added to the list. General name calling happens all the time and can be a one off. In such cases the users information will be recorded and saved for future referance. Repeated offences would get them on the ban list. Racism is a not tolerated and will in most cases result in a ban on the first incident.
All demos require that the 'status' command is ran during some stage of the demo to prove its authenticity. Some might say that this is not enough as its possible to edit the ID's it displays. If this is at all possible then yeah your right, but then there has to be somewhere where your going to draw the line.
How would one go about getting their ID removed from this list?
The whole idea of banning cheats is to make sure they can't come back to your server. Once someone is on this list they are there to stay. In the possibility that there is enough evidence that this player didnt cheat or was wrongly accused then there is the possibility of being removed. The idea is to keep all demos and information for each ban to support the case. Sadly it has gone in the past where older demos cannot be ran from newer updates to the game engine. In this matter we simply cannot do anything.
What happens to the user when they have been added to the list?
The actual list of bans is useable by anyone. Of course this really is only server admins as these are the only people who can manage their banned.cfg file. Unlike VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) it doesn't ban on 'secure' servers. The process isn’t automatic thus giving the server administrator the option to use the list or remove people from the global list.
Isn't it a long process to be having to manually add users to the banned.cfg every time?
Like you say, it isn’t a hard thing to do, its just time consuming as the list is growing daily and therefore needing to be updated regularly. There are plans in the future to make this a lot more automated for submitting cheats and for server admins to add the banned cheater to their server.
Doesn’t sound a bad idea, but why are you only doing two half-life mods?
Well the project is really just an idea and needs testing. To understand what’s needed it would be best to work on just two games of which I play and fully understand. If proves successful with server admins, then new admins/moderators will be taken on to support other games.