

Cheaters in Garry's Mod - sebastianmck
http://garry.tv/post/21903800166/cheaters-in-gmod

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chrisacky
About 3 years ago I used to host about 140 GMod servers. At the time, I
_believed_ that I was the single largest hoster of GMod servers since there
were only about 400-470~ servers up at anyone point. No idea what is happening
now since I've gotten out of game hosting entirely... anyway...

My perspective on why this is fantastic from being a game hosting company is
that GMod servers were a _bitch_ to maintain. They definitely took up 80% of
my time in maintaince despite only being a small portion of all the games I
hosted. The reason was to do with all of the cheaters who would nuke the
server by spawning a ridiculous amount of resources and overwhelming the
server with assets which the physics environment just could not handle.

The owners of the server would be angry at the cheaters and would also be
angry at my company due to the quality of service. Often, these hackers would
play on empty servers as well, which you might think is a victimless crime...
but it could actually have a knock on effect to other servers on the same box.

Banning hackers in Gmod is a fantastic means to maintaining the quality and
enjoyment of the game for other people. I would have loved to have seen this 3
years ago.

(Also if someone knows, how many active GMod servers are there currently
running? Professional curiosity).

~~~
lifeformed
A quick check for me shows 1119 servers. I'm in Japan at the moment, so it
might not be a complete list.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Reminds me of Garry's way to stop piracy. If you used a pirated copy, it would
bring up an error message _where the error code was your Steam ID_. That way,
he could ban people who did it when they posted the error on the forums.

If I remember correctly, the error was "Unable to shade polygon normals".

EDIT: Corrected error message.

~~~
Argorak
It was clever. Except that it yielded false positives, which are a hassle to
sort out, because people would be shamed on forums for asking about that error
message.

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AndyNemmity
I appreciate the comments from cheaters at the end. I run an online game, and
the last one sounds like the majority of emails I get when I ban someone,
although the people I ban are less articulate.

Banning paying players is the worst. I wish there was a nice happy solution to
the problem of cheaters, but I don't know of one.

~~~
simonsarris
> I wish there was a nice happy solution to the problem of cheaters, but I
> don't know of one.

In DOTA2 and Starcraft 2 cheaters (and in DOTA, griefers/feeders[1]) are put
into their own secret matchmaking queue to be matched up only with other
cheaters.

I thought that was a rather clever solution.

[1] someone who, possibly out of frustration, intentionally dies to the enemy
team, giving them gold

~~~
viraptor
That would work well... if you can guarantee no misclassification at all. Once
it starts to rely on opinions, it's completely flawed. How do you judge if
someone dies intentionally or not? There's always going to be a grey area.

Now imagine you have a false positive and start matching someone who paid for
their online gaming with cheaters all the time.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Not sure about DOTA, but in League of Legends, players can be reported, and a
team reviews the complaints for any given player, including watching the
games.

Sometimes it's hard to tell - I've had bad days where I'm just dying all the
time because I just levelled up and am playing against harder people AND
having a bad day, so I keep dying - but usually, it's really, really blatant.

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Tim-Boss
The line "You cant just ban them because...It is also a violation of the human
privacy rights." has particularly brightened up my afternoon!

~~~
skore
Kind of reminds me of the Asimov Quote:

> _“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through
> our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy
> means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”_

How dare you take away my ability to make everybody else's life miserable!

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kabdib
Definitely check out the "best of" Xbox Live bannings: whywasibanned.com

Policing online services is hard.

~~~
DrJokepu
I don't know, I'm not really into gaming so I'm not familiar with the context,
but most of the "mod" answers seem to be unnecessarily arrogant and
condescending, not exactly professional. Are they Microsoft employees or
community moderators? If the former, this is no way to treat customers (even
if they're cheaters), if the latter, maybe they should enforce higher
standards for moderator communications.

~~~
scott_w
I'm not sure what you're referring to.

In three pages I only saw one reply which could be construed as
"unprofessional", where the moderator said "this is my favourite..."

They all seem quite straight, to the point, and courteous. Well, as courteous
as one can be when telling somebody they're not welcome in your community.

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DannoHung
Wait, he doesn't give server runners a way of disabling the cheat ban? That's
a little weird.

Also, are these guys being banned from using GMod in any capacity, on creative
servers, or on servers with specific game modes?

~~~
cobrausn
He does.

 _Once you’re detected and you’re on the list then you’re banned from all
servers (unless they remove the cheaters.cfg - which is up to them)._

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Fizzadar
Hooray! A few years ago I ran a small (5 server) gMod community. Up until now
the only way to prevent cheaters has been to write your own Lua-based anti-
hack, glad to see Garry has come up with a solution.

