clantag abuse

General Stuff about Armagetron, That doesn't belong anywhere else...
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Word
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Post by Word »

Jerry wrote:
wrtlprnft, a word which is an assortment of consonants and not a name, wrote: Nicknames are supposed to be just that, names, and are not designed to contain additional information like the player's age, their hobbies, their website, the name of their dog, the music they listen to, or who they like to play with. Hence the limit of 15 characters.
So we should be named Roger and Jerry?
lol ^^
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Post by epsy »

Word wrote:But I can't do anything when I see players there who were our tag except saying: "Don't do that or I'll inform an admin and you get banned forever here!"
You can. Just say
No, you aren't in this clan.
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Post by Word »

Paladin wrote:Isn't this whole problem solved by the kickpoll system? Just kick the people that steal your clan 'tags' if it bothers you so much.
Not everyone cares about kickpolls and many players vote always "no" just because they can "I vote always "No" and nobody can change my mind" ....
Paladin wrote:Word: What if I wanted to be Prune Face? If you are having problems with clan tag abusers on servers that do not support auth go and talk to the owners of that server. It's possibly they might just have enough pity/care enough about it to take a look.
I do that already, but I don't think it helps much. As you said, it depends on the admins goodwill.
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Post by Word »

epsy wrote:
Word wrote:But I can't do anything when I see players there who were our tag except saying: "Don't do that or I'll inform an admin and you get banned forever here!"
You can. Just say
No, you aren't in this clan.
Does that change anything? some players who know that I am one of the pru-founders will understand that he isn't, others won't.
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Post by epsy »

Then who ******* cares?
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Post by wrtlprnft »

Word wrote:But I can't do anything when I see players there who were our tag except saying: "Don't do that or I'll inform an admin and you get banned forever here!" :)
And what an empty threat that would be on many servers!

I don't think I'm the only one whose opinion of your clan would be worsened more by that threat than whatever the imposter could possibly do.
Again, nobody is forced if it is done automatically
Then poor pruno and poor prudentialist are forced to have even sillier names than they did before and we have another kind of trademark system in the world, one that's even dumber than the existing one even.

Oh, and it's a *nick*name. Call yourself whatever you like, but don't try to claim any sort of rights to that nick or parts of it. There's probably more clans out there than there are three-letter names, and any of them might open an armagetronad division without even knowing that name already exists.
Does that change anything? some players who know that I am one of the pru-founders will understand that he isn't, others won't.
And most won't care.
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Post by Word »

I know, I suggested it because the only thing one can do is empty threads. I don't like to use any threads. That's why I suggested it. I talked to many members and leaders of other clans (the great ones) in some servers today about the idea, and they all liked it.

pruno and prudentialist aren't forced, but pru|dentalist or <-=pru>no..i said that already in my second post, we'll add strange symbols, so it won't be hard to make a difference between those who abuse it and those who just have a normal nick (or i will just ask them to join us ;) ).

I don't claim rights. But clantags are something which can be abused and involve players who have no fault in bad debate battles. There are clans who have more tag-faker than members.
Last edited by Word on Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Word »

epsy wrote:Then who ****ing cares?
calm down :wink:
I never saw someone wearing the |x| tag who I didn't know as member of your clan. But in Ww, ID, pru, R, DS or even dbd, that happens almost every day. And it is really annoying if you don't know who you are talking to. Nicks is not someone's true identity, but in the game it is enough to recognize someone. If you plan a clanwar and you have only some time left, you meet some players who pretend to be in clan xy and ask them "are you ready for the clanwar tomorrow?" and they answer you with a "fu", and if you have that situation very often, you would know how stupid it is.
Why is it so hard to understand this? :P
Last edited by Word on Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by wrtlprnft »

Ok, let's go back to your argument about there not being enough auth-enabled servers. Auth has been implemented for quite some time now. It's an unobstrusive feature that doesn't restrict players in any way by default, as auth'ing is completely optional. Still there are too few servers that use it.

Let's assume we implemented your clan tag forcing today. This kind of feature wouldn't make it in a 0.2.8 release anymore, but let's assume it was going to be in 0.2.8.3. Being more obstrusive than auth it would be even less likely to be enabled by default than auth, so a server admin would have to deliberately decide to disable auth and enable your stuff, for which I can see no logical reason, so you'd still end up with at most as many clan-tag forcing servers as auth servers.

Auth is really enough to establish someone's clan membership. It even goes beyond that because it doesn't just have a list of valid nicks for a given nick but actually verifies if it's really the right guy. Anyone who cares can simply say /players (and you can tell them to if you see an imposter) and they'll see who's lying and who's not. Anyone who doesn't care … doesn't care. No harm done.

So, who exactly needs clan-tag forcing?
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Post by Word »

It doesn't force anyone to wear a tag, it prevents confusion. If it runs automatically, it doesn't require auth and a password and the registration process, so it is uncomplicated. If you have ever seen one of these "YOU CAN'T KICK ME I HAVE MULTILPLE IPs"-people you would know that the /players command doesn't help much if the guy says the truth.

I don't think it is useful just to prove membership but to prevent misunderstandings and a bad atmosphere.

To say you "force" some admin to enable it is as if I would say you force players to have rubber and speed and a lightcycle. If it is an essential part of the game, nobody would complain.
Last edited by Word on Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Lucifer »

I don't think anybody's misunderstanding you, they (we) are just not seeing a reasonable cost/benefit ratio in your proposal.

Let's assume we setup a completely centralized system like you've asked. What next? Do we force server admins to use it? Or do we not force them to use it?

You guys can only make rules on your own servers, haven't we discussed that one to death? As wrtlprnft pointed out, most server admins won't opt in. In fact, I predict that only clan server admins will opt in, and you already have the ability to deal with the problem with clan servers, because those are the only people who really care about it. That guy that has the independent non-clan-affiliated server can't see why he should care, and probably has a completely different view of your (and all) clans than you want him to have.

Now, with all that said, I've actually thought a little bit about the problem, and think there *may* be a solution. It still has the limitations wrtlprnft so eloquently described, however. And it sure in the hell won't be in 0.2.8.3, probably no 0.2.8 release, and probably won't appear in any release anyway, but here goes:

We allow a group name for players. Simple enough, right? Similar to team name, but different enough conceptually that we can't just abuse team name for it. The group name would be transmitted as an extra field, not prepended to the nick name. The client would have to display the group name according to the player's configuration (i.e. we could have options to prepend it in chat, show it over the cycle, etc). We might even be able to support an icon for the group, which introduces the idea of supporting an icon for the player as well.

So, when a player authenticates (here comes wrtlprnft's limitations), the auth server sends the player's group information to the game server, which in turn relays it to connected clients.

This idea has an additional limitation the luke-jr pointed out. Someone who wants to spoof a group can just setup their own auth server and have it serve up the same stuff the clan's official auth server serves. While that's true, it does raise the bar in terms of what a person needs to do to spoof a clan, and I predict it would knock out 99% of the smegheads doing it.

And calling it a "group name" rather than a "clan name" gives it enough credibility for people not in clans to use it for other reasons. A player could conceivably be on 3-4 different fortress teams, each with their own auth server. When he wants to play in a tournament for the team, he authenticates with that team's server rather than his normal server. Ok, that's the only non-clan use case I've got.
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Post by Word »

Lucifer wrote:That guy that has the independent non-clan-affiliated server can't see why he should care, and probably has a completely different view of your (and all) clans than you want him to have.
if it was automatically controlled by the master server or something (i am not a programmer), the guy doesn't even need to care, and all are happy, but not if the guy is completely against that system because of whatsoever.

I thought of something similar, like color codes:

§pru§<---here comes a clantag, but only the pru can be seen in game.
is someone is named pruno and not §pru§no, he won't be renamed
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Post by -=VcL.Rajinn »

wrtlprnft wrote:
Word wrote:why?
In a way they are. Nicknames are supposed to be just that, names, and are not designed to contain additional information like the player's age, their hobbies, their website, the name of their dog, the music they listen to, or who they like to play with. Hence the limit of 15 characters.
Sure, clan tags aren't really hurting anyone, so noone complains about them, but running around trying to force server administrators and/or developers to follow the latest hot arguments between clans and their members is just silly.

As it's been said before, if you want your clan members to unambigously prove their identity and clan membership, set up an armathority that only clan members have accounts on and tell them to only play on servers that support armathentication.

I agree with that. Even though I am a leader of a clan, my members all know eachother, we know who isn't in the clan and what not. It will just cause more conflicts than this game really needs.
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Post by Lucifer »

Word wrote:
Lucifer wrote:That guy that has the independent non-clan-affiliated server can't see why he should care, and probably has a completely different view of your (and all) clans than you want him to have.
if it was automatically controlled by the master server or something (i am not a programmer), the guy doesn't even need to care, and all are happy, but not if the guy is completely against that system because of whatsoever.
Ah, controlling from the master server or something like that would be antithetical to everything we do here. Just look at the auth system to see that. There's no chance in hell we're going to write something that forces server admins to run their server in a particular way, especially if that "something" is only written to serve a special interest group.
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Post by Word »

It doesn't cause conflicts. If you don't want to take part, it is your own choice.

@Lucifer: ok i understand that. didn't know it means to force admins to enable it. I thought it means just to integrate it into the game, like an automatical update-thing of a virus-application. :?
Last edited by Word on Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:45 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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