Whats the stance on griefing ?

[CMH]

How about server settings, which can be changed by the server admin (which can be a player in game) disallowing changes to any buildings built by another player? If someone comes in to help and wants to rearrange stuff, you can disable it. Or enable it again if what they're doing doesn't suit you.

Together with autokick for friendly fire, there's one more way of griefing I can think of (which I won't share in case I'm just giving people ideas).

[Kewlhotrod]

what a joke, a game that advertised no DRM, am I entitled to a refund?

[Klonan]

what a joke, a game that advertised no DRM, am I entitled to a refund?

This isn't DRM, you can play the game without an account. If you'd like i can delete your account and forum account. However you are not eligible for a refund.

[CMH]

AFAIK with all games, online play is always "all bets are off".

Plus they haven't implemented anything.

It's just a friendly discussion on how to handle an issue that might possibly arise in the best way possible. And like Koub said, most people have been having a very responsible, constructive discussion. I hope that the developers have gained something from this thread and will proceed in a way that will best serve (the majority of) their audience.

[Kewlhotrod]

what a joke, a game that advertised no DRM, am I entitled to a refund?

This isn't DRM, you can play the game without an account. If you'd like i can delete your account and forum account. However you are not eligible for a refund.

well actually, it is DRM. using multiplayer as wall to protect your product is DRM, blizzard does the same thing. and also, non of that censoring does a damn thing, doesn't change the fact that this company [Moderated by Koub] lied to sell a product, nothing new.

AFAIK with all games, online play is always "all bets are off".

Plus they haven't implemented anything.

It's just a friendly discussion on how to handle an issue that might possibly arise in the best way possible. And like Koub said, most people have been having a very responsible, constructive discussion. I hope that the developers have gained something from this thread and will proceed in a way that will best serve (the majority of) their audience.

it doesn't matter [Moderated by Koub], this was advertised as the new dwarf fortress no drm with linux support, no a login requirement, this [Moderated by Koub] developer wants to ban people like you who misbehave against other players, boohoo. OP and admin advocating building a list of bad people or perm banning. idk how you people can just not be angry at that. oh on servers they don't even own*

sorry I had to mention that again because my pervious comments don't even make sense anymore because korb removed words like the sjw he is.

[Zeblote]

well actually, it is DRM. using multiplayer as wall to protect your product is DRM, blizzard does the same thing. and also, non of that censoring does a damn thing, doesn't change the fact that this company [Moderated by Koub] lied to sell a product, nothing new.

The game doesn't require you to login in order to play multiplayer. You can connect to servers with their ip just fine, and as a host you can also disable authentication if you want to.

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I've never seen a global blacklist working properly. You have no way of verifying reports and people will be blacklisted incorrectly.

That will cause more unnecessary drama than it solves, so just forget it... the real problem here is that there aren't any in-game systems to prevent abuse.

[MnHebi]

Well, what if instead of a blacklist type thing, you have a setup where every time a publicly listed server makes a ban, it reports it to a system. If a player gets a certain amount of bans, they get an anti-abuse system set upon them every time they join a server, where depending on how many bans they have, they get x minutes of anti-abuse where if they try to pick up structures, or destroy them by shooting they get instantly disconnected from the server. In this case, a player even if they have been abusive, can still join games, they can still play, they just cannot "accidentally" shoot up structures, or remove them then leave. Server admins could turn this system off if they want to, however, in two different ways. Either their server does not report bans it makes, or it does not listen for publicly listed bans. And a ban would only count once for a server, so no matter how many times a server unbans and bans a player, they can only report one ban. If a server is not found to be active for a certain amount of time, the reported ban is wiped from the system. Bans are also periodically wiped, but this period would be longer than the server activity period, like server activity is checked once a week, but ban wipe would be every 3 months for example.

Also, would be good if there was a system that punishes/stops join spamming a server. I see far too many clients trying to join a server, get dropped instantly on map load, try to join...one time a guy did that for one hour straight.

[Koub]

what a joke, a game that advertised no DRM, am I entitled to a refund?

If you commit some crime, you may finish in prison. And even, if you're (un)lucky to be in a country that's socially advanced enough to risk capital punishment, death sentance. Are you telling us you're also going to ask for a refund from life ?

it doesn't matter [Moderated by Koub], this was advertised as the new dwarf fortress no drm with linux support, no a login requirement, this [Moderated by Koub] developer wants to ban people like you who misbehave against other players, boohoo. OP and admin advocating building a list of bad people or perm banning. idk how you people can just not be angry at that. oh on servers they don't even own*

If such a list was implemented, it would prevent these potential griefers to play neither locally nor online. Server owners would have the opportunity to use it as a persona non grata list, or not if they prefer staying bent over, with their pants down on their knees.

Actually, as CMH said, this is an open discussion between people caring about the game, and not wanting it to be ruined by griefers on public servers. It's not a to-do list for next update.

korb removed words like the sjw he is.

You're Welcome. And it's Koub.

[CMH]

Definition of DRM?
Digital rights management (DRM) is a systematic approach to copyright protection for digital media. The purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized redistribution of digital media and restrict the ways consumers can copy content they've purchased.

So Factorio is still DRM-free. Even with this "theoretical-griefer-wall" put in, it still is fully within the above definition.

Or would someone with a password on their server also constitute a breach of the DRM-free promise?

[OdinYggd]

DRM would be what Minecraft does- if you don't have a valid username and password you cannot play at all even in single player. That is done as a countermeasure against illegal copying.

On the other hand, requiring multiplayer users to make an account that can then be used for some degree of auditing of their behavior in order to exclude bad behaving players is not DRM. You can still play single player without it, and of course it should be plenty possible to configure the server to ignore the blacklist if you wanted to run anarchy mode or make a honeypot so that people would come play on it for you to grief them.

There's a lot of ways to implement this, but anything relying on a central authentication solution is going to suffer eventually from capacity problems and be the target of hostile actions from people upset that they have been blacklisted.

Now I can think of a few ways to beat that too, basing it on a decentralized solution. But this has caveats of its own, some research and experimentation would be necessary before any sort of working solution can be implemented.

[Kewlhotrod]

The game doesn't require you to login in order to play multiplayer. You can connect to servers with their ip just fine, and as a host you can also disable authentication if you want to.

Servers and players are free to connect without using our authentication or matching server

so players which you have deemed bad will have a gimped, multiplayer experience using the old (current) code, or you'll just revoke there game entirely and make it so you have to logon even for singleplayer? (DRM) [Moderated by Koub].

In short, yes.

it will be irreverent because you'll only be able to connect to servers that only use 1.2/3 version and lower. server owner should be the one who decides who connects and who doesn't, my opinion is right opinion

If such a list was implemented, it would prevent these potential griefers to play neither locally nor online. Server owners would have the opportunity to use it as a persona non grata list, or not if they prefer staying bent over, with their pants down on their knees.

also, they are not "public" koub, they are not a public utility, when you join what you call a "public" server you're joining somebody elses server with there own different rules which you obey by.
lol and another thing, what accounts as griefing .. should we impose anti griefer rules for all servers?!

[Zeblote]

The game doesn't require you to login in order to play multiplayer. You can connect to servers with their ip just fine, and as a host you can also disable authentication if you want to.

Servers and players are free to connect without using our authentication or matching server

so players which you have deemed bad will have a gimped, multiplayer experience using the old (current) code, or you'll just revoke there game entirely and make it so you have to logon even for singleplayer? (DRM) [Moderated by Koub].

In short, yes.

it will be irreverent because you'll only be able to connect to servers that only use 1.2/3 version and lower. server owner should be the one who decides who connects and who doesn't, my opinion is right opinion

The server owner has full control over who can join and who can't. If you don't want to require authentication, you can disable it. If you don't like what they're doing with the server list, players can go around the whole thing and connect by ip.

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I don't think "in short, yes" was in response to the whole thing, that would not make any sense. More like you'd be unable to load the server list so finding servers to grief is a lot harder.

[Kewlhotrod]

The server owner has full control over who can join and who can't. If you don't want to require authentication, you can disable it. If you don't like what they're doing with the server list, players can go around the whole thing and connect by ip.

I don't think "in short, yes" was in response to "have to logon even for singleplayer", that would not make any sense. More like you'd be unable to load the server list so finding servers to grief is a lot harder.

and you don't see that as draconian?

[Zeblote]

The server owner has full control over who can join and who can't. If you don't want to require authentication, you can disable it. If you don't like what they're doing with the server list, players can go around the whole thing and connect by ip.

I don't think "in short, yes" was in response to "have to logon even for singleplayer", that would not make any sense. More like you'd be unable to load the server list so finding servers to grief is a lot harder.

and you don't see that as draconian?

I guess I've never seen a multiplayer game that doesn't have a (usually hidden) policy like this? If you had to manage this game, would you want obviously malicious players to keep roaming around?

I still can't see how the blacklist is supposed to work though. Any kind of "evidence" or whatever players can submit can be faked with ease.

[Kewlhotrod]

I guess I've never seen a multiplayer game that doesn't have a (usually hidden) policy like this? If you had to manage this game, would you want obviously malicious players to keep roaming around?

I still can't see how the blacklist is supposed to work though. Any kind of "evidence" or whatever players can submit can be faked with ease.

I would love to see an example of that dude, at this point I feel like the only sane human being on this forum, everyone advocating this sort of shit blows my fucking mind.

[Klonan]

it will be irreverent because you'll only be able to connect to servers that only use 1.2/3 version and lower. server owner should be the one who decides who connects and who doesn't, my opinion is right opinion

That is simply not true,
All current and future version of the game will have Direct connect without any required login or authentication, unless specified by the server owner.

[OdinYggd]

I guess I've never seen a multiplayer game that doesn't have a (usually hidden) policy like this? If you had to manage this game, would you want obviously malicious players to keep roaming around?

I still can't see how the blacklist is supposed to work though. Any kind of "evidence" or whatever players can submit can be faked with ease.

Which is exactly one of the difficulties of creating such a system. Because you don't have uniform standards for what policies a server should have, and the tolerance of enforcement varies wildly, you end up with a lot of false positives and even a whole new level of griefing by way of getting people wrongfully blacklisted. It very quickly spirals out of control into an administrative nightmare that will require round the clock staffing from many volunteers to moderate it.

The technical details of making it are almost trivial as long as it doesn't get DDoS'd. Its the ongoing administrative burden that is the biggest problem of all.

I feel like the only sane human being on this forum, everyone advocating this sort of shit blows my fucking mind.

No, I think you're the only one here who is unwilling to even attempt to maintain an enjoyable game experience for most players. I'd even go as far as say you are so opposed to griefing countermeasures because you intend to be a griefer yourself, and such measures would only serve to ruin your thrill by frustrating you.

The whole point of a shared blacklist between servers is so that people can inform each other of users known for bad behavior in an effort to keep them out of servers that don't want to tolerate such nonsense. In any sensibly designed system, individual server owners could ignore the blacklist on a per user or group basis to suit the needs of the server community they want to have.

This is where the DNS based solution I suggested works well. Not only does it make use of existing infrastructure to help keep costs down and reduce complexity, but it would be very much possible to do things like sort the blacklisted users into groups by type of offense. This would make it so that a family friendly server could keep anyone who was banned for nsfw postings from joining, while an adult community could unselect that blacklist group in order to allow such people to participate if they are not listed in any other ban groups.

There is a lot of flexibility possible if it is implemented with such capabilities in mind, and it does not at all have to be a totalitarian you must play it by our definition or we'll ban you from everyone else's server too sort of system.

[Kewlhotrod]

I feel like the only sane human being on this forum, everyone advocating this sort of shit blows my fucking mind.

No, I think you're the only one here who is unwilling to even attempt to maintain an enjoyable game experience for most players. I'd even go as far as say you are so opposed to griefing countermeasures because you intend to be a griefer yourself, and such measures would only serve to ruin your thrill by frustrating you.

The whole point of a shared blacklist between servers is so that people can inform each other of users known for bad behavior in an effort to keep them out of servers that don't want to tolerate such nonsense. In any sensibly designed system, individual server owners could ignore the blacklist on a per user or group basis to suit the needs of the server community they want to have.

This is where the DNS based solution I suggested works well. Not only does it make use of existing infrastructure to help keep costs down and reduce complexity, but it would be very much possible to do things like sort the blacklisted users into groups by type of offense. This would make it so that a family friendly server could keep anyone who was banned for nsfw postings from joining, while an adult community could unselect that blacklist group in order to allow such people to participate if they are not listed in any other ban groups.

There is a lot of flexibility possible if it is implemented with such capabilities in mind, and it does not at all have to be a totalitarian you must play it by our definition or we'll ban you from everyone else's server too sort of system.

thats twice now iv been accused of being a griefer when you don't even know my ingame name; I hope you see the irony of the subject.

[OdinYggd]

thats twice now iv been accused of being a griefer when you don't even know my ingame name; I hope you see the irony of the subject.

Evidence #1: You are opposed to anti-griefing measures of any sort, as would anyone who intends to be a griefer. It is logical to keep the option to grief open if possible when one intends to.

Evidence #2: Your most recent statement implies that you will not be using the same name in-game as you do on the forum, although a great many people try to use the same username wherever they happen to be visiting. While there are legitimate reasons not to use the same username, using a different username in-game is very commonplace among griefers in order to avoid people discovering their real world identities and facing potential backlash outside of the game for their actions. Griefers also often change usernames to avoid bans against them. A DRM-like mechanism to track the game install itself is necessary as part of the blacklisting scheme in order to block this method of bypassing bans.


Unfortunately for you, I've been a server administrator for many years. I've seen a few things that make it easy to spot suspects. Naturally since you haven't griefed anywhere that I monitor, I cannot say with certainty if you actually are or not. However, you certainly act suspicious, and if you came on a server I managed would find yourself followed by someone with moderator or better access.

[Xelephant]

I see two main benefits from the authentication. First there is no one impersonation someone else. Secondly every Player has one unique name so you can setup additional admins etc. easier.

To deal with malicious player i would like to see as an administrator more information. For example who started the deconstruction or who blew up all the labs. It would also be much easier to
administrate if the ban- and admin-list are separated from the save file. I would rather have better tools to deal with malicious players myself than a community blacklist.