10 Jun 12, 11:52PM
Every once in a while someone says this happens. A "new" crop of cheaters appears.
Every time it happens I try to get online a few times to see it for myself. And every time I do I never see one obvious cheater.
I'm really starting to believe people are just playing on junk servers. Which raises a small issue:
1. Central blacklists are reserved mostly for particularly potent and destructive cheats. Therefore only a handful of cheaters will ever make it there and even if they do it's nothing a proxy can't fix. The CBL is nothing the average cheat needs to concern himself about.
2. Servers will likely never be required to run a blacklist as that is functionally a central blacklist.
3. Servers are damn easy to set up and run.
As a consequence of the above three, I believe there is a large quantity of servers with an outdated blacklist(Or none). These servers are then overrun with "new" cheaters.
Then there are adequately administrated servers with some form of blacklist, admins, and few cheaters.
As any frequent visitor to these forums knows, we can't always expect a new user to take it upon himself to read the documentation, get educated, and do it the right way. AC's style of pick-it-up-and-play applies to the server as well. It may even be discouraging users from running quality servers.
So we have a flood of servers that are always empty, some quality servers that are frequently occupied to some extent because players know they are good, and garbage servers with no administration because somebody picked up the software and ran it without a thought.
I wonder if we should be doing something to encourage higher quality servers. I wonder if there is an objective method for measuring the quality of a server aside from measuring latency/packet loss as these are not the issue. And I wonder if we should be employing these methods to determine who is doing it right, who is doing it wrong, and addressing the issue on a case-by-case basis.
Every time it happens I try to get online a few times to see it for myself. And every time I do I never see one obvious cheater.
I'm really starting to believe people are just playing on junk servers. Which raises a small issue:
1. Central blacklists are reserved mostly for particularly potent and destructive cheats. Therefore only a handful of cheaters will ever make it there and even if they do it's nothing a proxy can't fix. The CBL is nothing the average cheat needs to concern himself about.
2. Servers will likely never be required to run a blacklist as that is functionally a central blacklist.
3. Servers are damn easy to set up and run.
As a consequence of the above three, I believe there is a large quantity of servers with an outdated blacklist(Or none). These servers are then overrun with "new" cheaters.
Then there are adequately administrated servers with some form of blacklist, admins, and few cheaters.
As any frequent visitor to these forums knows, we can't always expect a new user to take it upon himself to read the documentation, get educated, and do it the right way. AC's style of pick-it-up-and-play applies to the server as well. It may even be discouraging users from running quality servers.
So we have a flood of servers that are always empty, some quality servers that are frequently occupied to some extent because players know they are good, and garbage servers with no administration because somebody picked up the software and ran it without a thought.
I wonder if we should be doing something to encourage higher quality servers. I wonder if there is an objective method for measuring the quality of a server aside from measuring latency/packet loss as these are not the issue. And I wonder if we should be employing these methods to determine who is doing it right, who is doing it wrong, and addressing the issue on a case-by-case basis.