Global banlist is a BAD idea. You get one jerk ass banning people for no reason and then a large number of people who did nothing are all banned. Krenzo hardcode banning people has nothing to do with global banlist seeing as Krenzo, a responsible person, banned them and not some random admin. What this mod needs more than anything is a larger player base; and giving people, who have no interest in the mod, the ability to prevent people from playing is completely retarded.
You seem to think server admins would be able to add people to the global banlist. that is incorrect. Only people that are deemed cheaters/dicks by the entire community on the emp forums would be able to be globally banned. Server admins would not have the ability to just ban people. It would still be a thorough process to ban people.
I'm going to go against Evan on this - even if I started to formulate the idea along while ago - and had it in mind that the "admins" banning people would be under strict rules and regs to avoid stupid bans. Why am I against it now? THere's a select few of you too dumb to understand the idea, and only have the mental capacity to think, "OMG THEY WANT TO BAN BSID". The general public liked the idea afaik, but a select few of you simply seem to have a mission against it. Now, if we would code some system into empires itself allowing us to ban people without hard code bans (say, reading a file in from empiresmod.com with a list of steam IDs to ban, and having the server check said file once a day...or even every round change) I would be in favor of that - as it would be replacing hard code bans, and allowing empiresmod devs to react faster to known problem players.
RA - that is in essence what I'm suggesting. Is it not? Reading a remote file to replace hardcoded bans
I'd appreciate it if this select few that you believe think that way, would step up and come clean about it. Surely the only people that believe this are the ones fearing to be banned, which aren't a lot of people AFAIK. This has nothing to do with BSID, why would you bring that up? Because 3 people in BSID were the first to post? Lets not bring things like this up, Headshot acted on his own, Opie acted on his own, I acted on my own, I doubt any of the above would care if lets say Avair got banned, I also highly doubt that would happen as I do trust that none of you will start banning willy nilly, I'm not that dumb. Bans should be left to admins, they are well up for the job, why even bother doing this, I don't see it's importance, I don't, it has zero importance from my point of view. The other way I see it is because people deserve a second chance, I'm sure we could start a whole discussion on this. (do murderers deserve a second chance?) Other reasons why I do not like a global ban list, which are all IMHO: - Admins using these global banlist without caring who is on that list. - Drama of people coming onto these forums, or those of the league, saying they were banned and want to get unbanned, completely unnecessary. - Time wasted dealing with banned people, or dealing with ban reports. - empiresmod is not even big enough to have this, the few griefers can easily be identified and banned, complete waste of time. Is this needed? No it's not needed. There has never been an admin that came to this forum saying he had a hard time banning all the damn griefers, they can do their job. There is a list in the ban hammer, Km has a list, let them use those, don't try and make something like it mainstream for all admins to adopt without even looking into them. (point 1) A ban is the result of a serious offense, and a very delicate subject, nobody likes being on some kind of list for that one time they went berserk, or by bad judgement. The worst kind of griefers do it for the lulz, they're not part of the community, they grief or they don't play, so this is not going to solve anything, if it would even solve things like "ohnoes there is a global banlist, better not piss people off." If that comes across the mind of any griefer, it's probably not someone that should be put in such a list in the first place as he probably won't ever come close to chopper. But if this is what you 2 want to spend your time on, sure go ahead.
I concur that we dont need a global banlist plugin, at the moment most serious griefers get picked up pretty quick by most admins on the more popultaed servers and are denied there fun. WE admins have a responsibility not to abuse our priviliges and for the sake of the community only ban those who are out to destroy Empires games on a regular basis. lets focus our skills on making Empires better and leave banning to the server admins................
I'm not speaking against BSID - I'm speaking against people like Simon who were the first to respond to the initial suggestion of a ban list 1-2 months ago with something to extent of "You just want to ban us" - as if I'd be so willing to spend hours of my time to ban them. I wasn't attacking HSM either - I agree with him. I simply think that some easier method to allow developers to rid the game of people - other than waiting for a hard code ban to make it into a server patch - might be useful.
I agree that a global banlist would be useful, there already is one in a way, the KM banlist. I think server admins who don't want to spend a lot of time playing can just update their server with that banlist and be content that for the most part their servers are fine. To me the Global part means that lots of servers can use this service and have input to that list. What I don't understand is why it's being discussed here. The banlist doesn't have much to do with Empires development. If server operators want to organize in such a fashion then great for them, but it doesn't need to be discussed here. Systems like Sourcebans are widely used in other games, but they're not made by Valve and they don't need to be.
We we're trying to get this into empires as a feature or at least an option for servers.. Seeing as the current developer/people thingies don't want to we will just make a plug-in just for empires..
I don't understand why the debate is still going on. Let me recap... Evan and some other folks (who do not have any direct responsibilities to the Empiresmod) want to make it easier for devs to permaban griefers via an external tool that would be equivalent to hard-coding steamid's. They also want to make a plugin that would allow server operators to sync up their own ban list to the "global" one. Dizzy and others are against this because they think it's not important and not necessary, but mostly because they think this would discourage server admins from doing their jobs, and make it too easy to ban people. I fail to understand how this would be any different than it currently is, other than externalizing the hard-coded bans. Whoever would be in charge of the mod after Krenzo's departure would still be the final voice behind these types of bans, except they wouldn't have to recompile the source code every time a [CHOPPER] guy phishes a new Steam ID. In terms of wasted time and effort - hey, it's their own time to waste. As long as this project does not interfere with the ongoing development of the mod, why not have them do it?
It will interfere, these people that will update and maintain this ban list are all part of empiresmod, right now it might seem as some have time to waste, but it's better to plan ahead and be sure when theres things to do, there isn't something unnecessary competing for their time. Reef is a coder right now, he is also working on a balancer for the KM server, he can not do both, which is a perfect example of how things go. If they prefer to make a global ban list, they can do it, but they'll do it on their own. Apart from that, I and others with me would like the league to become a part of empiresmod, more than it is now, which make the global ban list an optional, but still official project.
I'll add you to my list of people who think it is someone out with an agenda. As I originally proposed it, it would have been an impartial system. I agree with Chahk on this one, it has its benefits, and if people want to do it on their own time - fine. But also having an easier setup for devs to do ban work would be good. Much like the relationship of AON bans to Evenbalance doing MacID bans.
