Something to think about.

General Stuff about Armagetron, That doesn't belong anywhere else...
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Light
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Light »

Ratchet wrote:Ironically, that's why this thread was started. According to OP, the direct result of removing someone we didn't like.
Well, I wouldn't say it was a direct result of him, but he was a part of it. I don't know if I can say it was a mistake or not to remove him, but I would say it surely hasn't helped us to push one of the more active players away. I had (maybe still have ...) a strong dislike for him, so I would probably vote to do it again, but if I don't make it personal, it would make more sense to keep him here as far as activity goes.

It's more enjoyable without him here, and that may be the case for you if others were removed as well. Those of us wanting a larger number of users playing would suffer, but the others who may not dislike a smaller, probably closer group of people will benefit. This game is kind of outdated as far as the gameplay goes, and it's difficult to imagine getting many more users without money being involved, so it's likely that the small group of players is what this game will be for some time to come (which I would say it already is).

So, I think it all depends on which side of things you're on. I'm obviously for a more active, larger community, and the others here seem to be more for a smaller, but better quality community. Maybe there's a balance somewhere?

Not sure which side you're on, if either, but pointing that out was so true it hurt. lol
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Z-Man
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Z-Man »

Heh, everyone has their own theory why user counts aren't what they were two or three years back. To me, the most significant one boils down to "There are better games out there, a lot of them free."

I wanted to say a thing or two about bans and punishment, still. The way I see it, the majority of users, say 70% to 90%, don't need moderation at all and would do just fine without. Of the rest, again, a large majority would mostly be nice, but can be provoked into lashing out into undue attacks. Be it by trolls or just heated arguments or rivalries carried over from the game. For them, bans would feel like punishment and they can be largely deterred from acting up simply by their possibility, But then there is the very tiny portion of users who don't see their accounts here as representations of themselves, as tools to forge relations with other people; they see their account as puppets. Banning one of their accounts is just about as effective as locking up a puppet, they won't care and just try to come back with another account (harder now, but still possible). Rookie is definitely one of those. Liz, probably too. Swag, maybe. I think the LittleSteps account means a little more to him, though.

I definitely won't ban a forum account for unverifiable acts in the game. I'd need solid evidence in the form of server logs from generally respected server admins that there is a link between the toxic ingame behaviour and the forum account. Ideally, a stupid login, but IPs may suffice as well. Thing is, I bet others, especially Rookie, take on the Swag name in the game from time to time, and if you punish the wrong guy with a ban, the effect is doubly bad: the wrongfully banned guy now is rightfully bitter and will get worse, and the guy who got away unpunished is going to cackle about it and is also likely to get worse. What you really have to do is ban them from the game, and we all know how difficult that has become to do reliably thanks to IP hiding VPNs getting less and less laggy over the last couple of years.
Monkey wrote:You even said yourself that his behaviour warranted a permaban had it been aimed at anyone other than you. Well, it shouldn't be that way. If someone stabbed you to death, you would expect them to get full punishment for murder, not some reduced punishment because it's only you they've killed.
Heh, well, in a sensible justice system, the judge is never identical to the victim, not only when he's dead :) Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury here, he attacked the entire devteam and all active moderators are developers.
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ConVicT
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by ConVicT »

All this Swag, rookie (whoever else) talk is just useless.
I feel like I've said it before. In fort, when we're all having a nice game and Swag comes along and ruins it... Why are we still playing servers where none of us has any control? Ban him as soon's he trolls, it's really that simple.
You can argue that he'll use a proxy and come back and troll again, but, he'll run out at some point, AND maybe if he's banned as soon as he does it, he'll stop it. If he doesn't stop it, he gets banned right away, what can he do?

I'm going to add my own Fort soon, I hope you'll all join me when I do so; I guarantee there'll be none of this shit!

This was started about Durf, and has more to do with who wasn't banned. I do agree with mokey though; Swag and even his Littlesteps account should be banned.

@Z-Man: You think he's asking questions so he can fix broken stuff for himself in the game? He's not, he's asking about building from code so he can attempt to break it entirely. He's already gave me (not knowing who I was) the link to his sourceforge to-do-list and it's all game-breaking bullshit. Most of which was requested by Zulu.
E.G. "server spy" There's a period when you're syncing with a server but you've not actually entered the server. He plans/planned to exploit, keeping it in that state so he can read what everyone is saying when they dunno he's there. On top of that, I'm sure someone mentioned somewhere, he made his bot available to certain people, and apparently it can even play sumo well?


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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Monkey »

Z-Man wrote:he attacked the entire devteam and all active moderators are developers
He said that *you* are a sh*t tier developer and that *you* should kill yourself. Those comments were not aimed at the entire dev team.

As far as moderation goes, I believe we would benefit from much stricter moderation; a zero tolerance approach to unacceptable behaviour, with clear warnings displayed after entering servers or after logging in on these forums. I've just read Convict's post above and I agree with him totally.
Z-Man wrote:There are better games out there, a lot of them free.
I've been playing computer/video games for over thirty years and I haven't played a game this good, ever. I must have played thousands, if not thousands upon thousands, of games, yet this one tops them all. Hardware I've played on includes NES, SNES, Gamecube, N64, Wii, PSP, Playstations 1/2/3, PCs 286/386/486/Pentiums/etc, Gameboy, Megadrive, Mastersystem, Dreamcast, Amigas 500/600/1200, C64, Spectrums 48k/128k, Electron, BBC Micro, Apple II Europlus, Atari ST, Xbox original/360...these are just off the top of my head. Armagetron Advanced is, in my opinion, fundamentally, the best game ever made. However, it and its community are wanting in several areas and have some issues. This game has phenomenal potential, you and the other devs need to realise that you are creating (note my use of the present tense) something special and stop putting it down.
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ConVicT
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by ConVicT »

Ready whenever you guys are!
ms.PNG
Monkey, you're already a mod. We need your type.

Edit: I thought I had it ready but I had a ladle cfg.
It'll be up when I have time to find one. Or if anyone has the one I need; it'd be much appreciated!
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vov
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by vov »

This should (almost) be what you need: http://resource.armagetronad.net/resour ... 014_v2.cfg
It's basically a ladle config without the whole tournament access level fluff.

The things I'd change for a public fort server would be:

Code: Select all

team_max_imbalance 1  # evenly sized teams
auto_team 1  # 0: new players join as spectators, 1: new players join teams instantly
On another somewhat related note, I uploaded some standalone configs from my old Game Collection project (tl;dr: instant <insert game type here> with one rinclude; forgot to upload em a while ago - d'oh!)
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Lucifer
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Lucifer »

Monkey wrote:
Z-Man wrote:he attacked the entire devteam and all active moderators are developers
He said that *you* are a sh*t tier developer and that *you* should kill yourself. Those comments were not aimed at the entire dev team.
In that case, I'm the one who dropped the ball, because I saw Z-man's response and figured I could make the call to permaban the guy, but didn't.
As far as moderation goes, I believe we would benefit from much stricter moderation; a zero tolerance approach to unacceptable behaviour, with clear warnings displayed after entering servers or after logging in on these forums. I've just read Convict's post above and I agree with him totally.
I'm ok with zero tolerance if the unacceptable behavior is clearly stated. In cases of ambiguity, I prefer to err on the part of keeping the person around rather than banning, so temporary bans are appropriate in those cases (which is the vast majority of cases).

As to better moderation in-game, I started a physically demanding job after 9 months of unemployment (taking care of my kid, if you recall). After getting conditioned up to do the job, I started walking to work (for exercise, mostly), and am now having to recover from that and get conditioned. As a result, I'm spending a lot of my downtime just relaxing.

If you'd like to work on the Global Moderation System (or whatever we named it), I'm happy to post my outline on how I want it to work. Someone more familiar with the config system can put the actual configs together, and ultimately I will host a mirror of the configs on my webserver (which has excellent uptime and is a VPS, so it doesn't even depend on my home internet). Keep in mind that the effectiveness of such a system is reliant on two things: how flexible the system is for what moderators can do and how good the moderators themselves are (a side point is that if there aren't enough moderators to properly police servers that join the system, anarchy will continue to rule, so players need to know how to find moderators when they need them).
Armagetron Advanced is, in my opinion, fundamentally, the best game ever made.
I have previously posted my agreement with this statement. :)

Therefore:
This game has phenomenal potential, you and the other devs need to realise that you are creating (note my use of the present tense) something special and stop putting it down.
Please don't lump me in with those guys. :)
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ConVicT
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by ConVicT »

vov wrote:This should (almost) be what you need: http://resource.armagetronad.net/resour ... 014_v2.cfg
It's basically a ladle config without the whole tournament access level fluff.

The things I'd change for a public fort server would be:

Code: Select all

team_max_imbalance 1  # evenly sized teams
auto_team 1  # 0: new players join as spectators, 1: new players join teams instantly
That's it all added, cheers!
I've added you to the moderator list too as vov@forums. If you have a preferred login, just let me know.
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Z-Man
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Z-Man »

ConVicT wrote:He plans/planned to exploit, keeping it in that state so he can read what everyone is saying when they dunno he's there.
Oh, that's just the old style spectator mode. Yeah, I can see several ways this could be problematic for unsuspecting players and hard to deal with for server moderators if some other technique is used. I think I may have seen it used, but it may just have been coincidence.

Oh, he's really open sourcing his stuff and even associates his branch to the project so it's easy to find. That's... unusual.

Lucifer: If you feel you can be sufficiently impartial on this, sure, go ahead and think about it. It's not too late, I won't stop you. But just for reference, my emotional reaction was an eyerolling "really?", nothing more.
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Lucifer »

Z-Man wrote:Lucifer: If you feel you can be sufficiently impartial on this, sure, go ahead and think about it. It's not too late, I won't stop you. But just for reference, my emotional reaction was an eyerolling "really?", nothing more.
It's not protecting your emotions that will motivate me, this time. :) It's that I think that anybody who says anything to the effect of "Go and kill yourself" should be shot through the shoulder socket and left to bleed out. Ok, that's a metaphor, been watching NCIS and they actually had that happen in a scene and it was quite tense. :)

I didn't jump on it at the time because you were the moderator on it, and I don't overrule other moderators without first talking to them, and I didn't think we needed to talk about it. So, glad we got that settled, and I'll think about it some more. More time has elapsed since then with very little trouble from the guy, and that has to factor into a decision as well.
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Monkey »

Lucifer wrote:I'm ok with zero tolerance if the unacceptable behavior is clearly stated. In cases of ambiguity, I prefer to err on the part of keeping the person around rather than banning, so temporary bans are appropriate in those cases (which is the vast majority of cases).
I totally agree with that entire statement and I'd expect every other moderator to do so too. To be honest, I like to give warnings for first offences. The problem we have in this game though is regular offences by repeat offenders.
Lucifer wrote:I started a physically demanding job...I'm spending a lot of my downtime just relaxing
I know that you devs are busy guys and I am (and I'm sure most of the rest of us are) grateful for all that you guys do. :)
If you'd like to work on the Global Moderation System...I'm happy to post my outline on how I want it to work. Someone more familiar with the config system can put the actual configs together...
I'd be happy to contribute where possible and I'm sure there are others here that would too, some of whom are more familiar with the config system (sinewav, vov, convict...). Post how you want it to work (in a new thread though, I think we've exhausted this one).

@Convict
I think we need a clear code of conduct for this new server, preferably in its MOTD (message of the day). Nice job for the work so far btw. :)
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Lucifer
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Lucifer »

Monkey: I don't know if I'm right out and said this before, but I'm actually on board with the global moderation thing, completely and unconditionally. You and other players like you have managed to convince me. So, see, I'm not *that* stubborn. :)

I'm organizing my thoughts right now, and I will be posting them soon (definitely tonight). I also have to do a little research on what tools the game provides, because it provides many more now than it did when I last hosted a server.
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Light
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Light »

Lucifer wrote:Monkey: I don't know if I'm right out and said this before, but I'm actually on board with the global moderation thing, completely and unconditionally. You and other players like you have managed to convince me. So, see, I'm not *that* stubborn. :)

I'm organizing my thoughts right now, and I will be posting them soon (definitely tonight). I also have to do a little research on what tools the game provides, because it provides many more now than it did when I last hosted a server.
A global mod system would be extremely easy to make. I could set up a script for it pretty easily, along with server-side (database server) permissions to allow certain people to add to it. The only problem is that if people are currently using a script, they would have to add it to their loop or replace their script with it.

The problem then comes when you pick the people who have abilities to add to the ban list, as well as making sure their accounts cannot be accessed by someone else. We can't really use IP validation either because dynamic IPs changing too often would be annoying to keep updated.

Basically what I see is a user logs in, their IP is checked against the ban database, and they're automatically banned if they are on the list. Of course, proxies and whatnot will still be an issue, but we can't use username bans or anything that broad. The only other useful function I see is a command to add or remove, then the server could handle permissions with that. Although, maybe to avoid any potential problems, adding to the ban list would probably need to be done on a webpage, but that isn't the end of the world.

Then my final concern would be that people are going to have different tolerances. If people are scared to joke around and have fun for a fear of being banned from a bunch of servers, it's gonna be a pretty boring time.

Last comment is that I would not use configs that need constantly updated. Pulling from a database is the best idea I really have as your script would never need updated unless new features were added to it. The script could also provide some message or warning if that's a concern.

If you guys want it, I'd be happy to set it up. Would be a simple one.
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Lucifer »

Light wrote: Then my final concern would be that people are going to have different tolerances. If people are scared to joke around and have fun for a fear of being banned from a bunch of servers, it's gonna be a pretty boring time.
That's where we'll need specific guidelines/policies to be followed and enforced, and pick the right people to do the enforcement.

Maybe I should start that thread, too, heh. Or maybe this is the right thread for it and we should rename it.
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Light
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Light »

Lucifer wrote:That's where we'll need specific guidelines/policies to be followed and enforced, and pick the right people to do the enforcement.

Maybe I should start that thread, too, heh. Or maybe this is the right thread for it and we should rename it.
The only problem is that the people I would quickly trust are usually not active as far as I know, which tends to include the mods here? I would say depending on how the conversation goes from where it's at in the other thread, that maybe we use that if we happen to quickly bypass the whole idea for how to set it up. If you don't like my idea, then I guess it'll need to be used for what you intended. :P All I can do is try.
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