Rivecoder
Registered just to make one post
Posts: 1
Registered: 07-08 |
First off, pardon my late reply - I never got around to registering here, though I've already read this topic (and pretty much every one before it), so I've heard all the arguments so far.
It's great that the atmosphere here has gotten more... civil. I don't know how the two camps were reduced to closing their eyes and shouting at each other, but it's not getting anywhere, so the calmer atmosphere is much, much more pleasant. Closed source obviously isn't perfect (and we know that), but neither is open source, and if we want to prevent exploits and cheating we need to discuss things civilly. You guys obviously know a lot more about open source (and its implementations) than we do, and we know a lot more about Skulltag (and its community) than you do. So, we should plan this together.
And yes, I've said it - I'm not fully convinced by AlexMax's viewpoint that the community can deal with cheaters automatically. I'd like to believe it (I'm an idealist), but there are a lot of thing about our community that could go against this. First, our servers are mostly decentralized. If you get kickbanned off of one server (ie, one dedicated server), you can go to another one. It's easy to change your name, and even easier (for some people) to change your IP. Thus, if Bob wants to have fun by joining games of Skulltag and then cheating to screw up the scores, there's no real penalty for him to do this. As always, it's more work to ban and keep up with this guy than it is for him to wreak his havoc. If people want to cheat for fun, they'll be able to without much consequence.
What about reputation? This should be a bit easier, since the better you are, the more eyes there are on you. The thing is, though, Skulltag has a much less serious environment than, say, ZDaemon, and we really don't have rankings or tournaments. Clan v Clan action is probably the closest thing you can get to that. It's in a clan's interests to protect their reputation, but in an average player...not so much. After all, throwaway aliases are just as reputable on the scoreboard as longtime accounts, and there's no protection from name faking. People also alias to avoid drama and just to... play. There's not an implied standard that, when you join a server, you just want to play, and not to chat with everyone who sends you a message. Ideally, we wouldn't have all this aliasing. It reduces players' credibility. Is that really Rivecoder? You don't know, do you? Drama!
What does that have to do with open source? Easy - if there's no credibility behind the players in a server, the fact that they could be using any build they choose - one, say, that doesn't draw any walls - will only worsen this drama. AlexMax refers to a smooth, responsible, self-policing community, but I'm not sure we have that yet.
We've thought about things like an account system, though many people prefer the current state of 'democracy'. But an account system is centralized, though, and that doesn't grind well with the idea of open source. Maybe we could work a system like openID, where you have independent servers (or people?) vouching for you? However, this is all just conjecture.
What's your opinion on this? How do the notable open source games do it? How do you see Skulltag handling it?
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06-29-08 10:04 
