Factorio Forums

I know other game developers will perma ban disruptive players. Just wondered what your stance on the whole thing is due to the other night this happened

First time he had joined (later we found out he had also quietly been removing random pipes from the oil refineries) Don't know the chap, he just seemed interested in screwing up random games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNMwcNiZqlo


Will there be an official report to report griefers? once you get 10 unrelated reports about one player you can block their account ? report it on to steam (if they are a steam user)

please keep this civil chaps, but I would recommend insta banning this guy if you see him on your server.

The video you posted, is private…

If we see a lot of disruptive or abusive behavior we may revoke a game membership without refund, but this has never been needed before.

gheift wrote:The video you posted, is private…

DOH !!!! *fixed

Klonan wrote:If we see a lot of disruptive or abusive behavior we may revoke a game membership without refund, but this has never been needed before.

I have to say I am amazed by the community, I love not having a password on the server and the people I have met and when randoms come on they just jump in and ask "how can i Help" It truly is the best example of humanity I have ever seen in gaming.
I was genuinely surprised and saddened when this happened, Is there an official place to report this or due to the very low number just pop a post here if it happens again ?

You only need a few assholes to give a feeling of insecurity and make people think grieving is common.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that legally forbids grieving. The Terms of Service only tell your acocunt can be cancelled if privacy policy is violated.

A solution could be some kind of blacklist where server owners may report grievers, and an option on servers "do not allow reported grievers". The list would be hosted by Wube, and it would, I think, solve quickly most problems. Grievers would quickly be limited to playing solo or with other grievers, and that's all.

Koub wrote:You only need a few assholes to give a feeling of insecurity and make people think grieving is common.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that legally forbids grieving. The Terms of Service only tell your acocunt can be cancelled if privacy policy is violated.

A solution could be some kind of blacklist where server owners may report grievers, and an option on servers "do not allow reported grievers". The list would be hosted by Wube, and it would, I think, solve quickly most problems. Grievers would quickly be limited to playing solo or with other grievers, and that's all.

The terms of service is scheduled for an update very soon, with additions for the mod portal and matching server.

A community curated list of trolls/griefers is a possibility, but for now we havent seen much issue.

(also you can just ban them, and reload from a recent autosave)

Klonan wrote: A community curated list of trolls/griefers is a possibility, but for now we havent seen much issue.

(also you can just ban them, and reload from a recent autosave)

I quite like that idea regarding the list - easy to implement and easy to work with.

This finally got me off my arse to finally re-enable Admin-only commands and finally look up how to ban players. also increased the amount of saves to 80 incase im not there !!

I'm sure, we will have mods, that implement some rules against such players.

Klonan wrote:

Koub wrote:(also you can just ban them, and reload from a recent autosave)

Well you have to make sure that the player you want to ban has connected to the server at the point of the autosave or you won't be able to ban him.

While i agree that griefing is annoying, i don't see a benefit of a community driven black list. I never seen one work or used as intended in other games.

I have been wrongly put on a community-curated ban list before, and I would be interested to see what sort of measures you would put in place to make sure it will not be misused.

In my case it was because some kid decided that my username was too close to his, and called me out for attempting to impersonate him (even though I had the older account by 2 years).

But it could be as simple as building layouts that doesn't agree with others (solar:accumulator ratio?) or a perceived reaction towards biters (as in not attacking them together)? Or just a noob that accidentally built and aggro-ed a huge biter base.

In any of those cases a group might lodge a report against this individual and get them on a ban-list. There wouldn't be any way to get out of it, and even if there was it would be a huge hassle.

But yes, a way to deal with grievers will be nice, but has to be properly curated.

Sadly, there has yet to be found an equilibrium between turning into a "special snowflake safespace" and complete griefer chaos. I think that any sort of enforcement from the side of the dev-team can damage the community, but private black/whitelists should be a reasonable expectation, as long as there is not some holy crusade going on with those.

To black- and whitelists

In my live as programmer I saw several blacklist concepts in different software projects and when digging down to the ground I always found, that it was introduced to repair/fix/cover for a bad/ugly concept at a completely different place in that (or another) software.

A blacklist is in short form a concept, which avoids continuous misuse. But the griefing has to happen at least once. Bad luck for those, who are the first.

It doesn't guarantee nothing. If there is no process, that runs AFTER the griefing, that add it to the blacklist, the griefing continues. So the concept of blacklisting works only, if the blacklist is always up-to-date. Which is never the case, cause otherwise you wouldn't need a blacklist.

The advantage of blacklist is, that they can be handled global. The idea is here: You cannot trust somebody, which has failed once. But that is - already mentioned - also a steady case of misuse: Players are added, that didn't do anything wrong.


Concepts that work in that case much better are for example the other way around (whitelists), which allows misuse only, if you know "him" (here the player). It implicitly adds some kind of "getting more trust process" BEFORE the user is added to a whitelist. This order of process guarantees also, that the process will always working (otherwise even the owner cannot use it).

A whitelist is not global, but local (in most cases). The range of trust limited. Misuse cannot happen.

Possible ways to introduce whitelisting into Factorio:
- simplest form of whitelist: Login without passwords. Only known users can login, but need no password.
- More advanced: once a player had been successfully invited/joined/logged-in into a server/game he doesn't need to do this process again. One-time passwords and other kinds of tokens work very well.
- A user is in a global group of trusted users (global whitelist)
- there are surely more...

CMH wrote:I have been wrongly put on a community-curated ban list before, and I would be interested to see what sort of measures you would put in place to make sure it will not be misused.

In my case it was because some kid decided that my username was too close to his, and called me out for attempting to impersonate him (even though I had the older account by 2 years).

But it could be as simple as building layouts that doesn't agree with others (solar:accumulator ratio?) or a perceived reaction towards biters (as in not attacking them together)? Or just a noob that accidentally built and aggro-ed a huge biter base.

In any of those cases a group might lodge a report against this individual and get them on a ban-list. There wouldn't be any way to get out of it, and even if there was it would be a huge hassle.

But yes, a way to deal with grievers will be nice, but has to be properly curated.

Always there is a possibility of mistaken blacklisting, this can easily be avoided by keeping the results open and the decision making process transparent, although heavily moderated as in these scenarios it can get heated. I do hope it was a one off in regards to this player, but to say nothing than I am helping no one. I would prefer not to have a community ran blacklist, I think that is something that should stay in the hands of the developers, as it can easily get very political and biased.


Regarding the whitelist / blacklist scenario, I have met some great people the past few weeks just running a random server, this is the first person to cause an issue, I like to think of it as a one off and hopefully a complete exception to the rule. Whitelists would limit the amount of awesome people you can meet

I'm not a fan of using moderation tools as a way of restricting in game actions. There should be tools and mechanics to limit the kind of damage a griefer can do.

For example let's look at this griefing tactic: Instead of saying "oh wow dick move you can't play anymore", have the player drop a corpse/bag containing their inventory.

For another example A player doing extreme damage to a factory can be easily solved by turning the factory against him. Light up those turrets and eliminate the threat. Or a "friendly fire" mode can remove that option entirely, so a player can't gun down another player's factory.

Stuff like that.

I like the friendly fire thing activating something.... an auto-kick would be nice.

But the damage has to be moderately severe: an accidental hold on the "c" key with auto-shotty shouldn't activate it.

Maybe allow a certain amount of damage to be done, then a full minute of their weapons being disabled, and if it happens again within a certain time (1 hour?) then a kick/ban on that player.

As for removing vital parts of a factory... I'm out of ideas.

I wanna bring another aspect: Wouldn't it be not the best kind of "test", how griefing-robust your factory is?
I mean I hear some always crying "Oh, the biters^D^D^D, sorry, Nauvisians are too weak, not intelligent enough..."
Wouldn't that be not the ultimate game to play against a real griefer, that tries to destroy as much as possible?
Seeing his steps in a replay and how long will he survive against your traps and defence?

ssilk wrote:I wanna bring another aspect: Wouldn't it be not the best kind of "test", how griefing-robust your factory is?
I mean I hear some always crying "Oh, the biters^D^D^D, sorry, Nauvisians are too weak, not intelligent enough..."
Wouldn't that be not the ultimate game to play against a real griefer, that tries to destroy as much as possible?
Seeing his steps in a replay and how long will he survive against your traps and defence?

No, because we don't actually have any weapons to fight intelligent enemies. Only turrets designed to eat mindless hordes running at them.

ssilk wrote:I wanna bring another aspect: Wouldn't it be not the best kind of "test", how griefing-robust your factory is?
I mean I hear some always crying "Oh, the biters^D^D^D, sorry, Nauvisians are too weak, not intelligent enough..."
Wouldn't that be not the ultimate game to play against a real griefer, that tries to destroy as much as possible?
Seeing his steps in a replay and how long will he survive against your traps and defence?

If we wanted that wouldn't we just play PvP?

white list and black list is very primitive which is compensating for something that should be in your server which is a faction mod so anybody who isn't within your faction cannot touch or do anything to your factory, also "stance on griefing" its your own fault for letting him in the first place,[Moderated by Koub] make regular backups server side periodically.

Klonan wrote:If we see a lot of disruptive or abusive behavior we may revoke a game membership without refund, but this has never been needed before.

also if you actually go though with that and the developers act as law rather than the server owners acting as law and revoking there right to play because you deem them anti-social etc i'll personally stop supporting this game, [Moderated by Koub] that you'll even consider that when its your job to provide the platform and the community job to grow it, you don't even own the servers they are playing on, so you have no right. I could understand prehaps if you where leagueoflegends where the game devs actually own and manage the servers of course but caving into OP request and outright revoking there game access is INSANE.

second edit, jesus christ.

Klonan wrote: A community curated list of trolls/griefers is a possibility, but for now we havent seen much issue.

[Moderated by Koub] cannot clearly possibility be exploited and abused.

Kewlhotrod wrote:

Klonan wrote:If we see a lot of disruptive or abusive behavior we may revoke a game membership without refund, but this has never been needed before.

also if you actually go though with that and the developers act as law rather than the server owners acting as law and revoking there right to play because you deem them anti-social etc i'll personally stop supporting this game, [Moderated by Koub] that you'll even consider that when its your job to provide the platform and the community job to grow it, you don't even own the servers they are playing on, so you have no right. I could understand prehaps if you where leagueoflegends where the game devs actually own and manage the servers of course but caving into OP request and outright revoking there game access is INSANE.

I am not saying this going to happen, but if someone is using our service, namely the matching server, to troll and harass our players, to bully people, or to demean them or any other abusive or illegal acts, then it is our duty to the players to protect them from such players. While we do not own and operate any of the servers, we are acting as a way for players to connect and interact with each other, and for any service this comes with this responsibility.

The last thing i want to do is to revoke matching server access to players, and there will be fair warning if anybody comes close to this, but it will be an option for us if we have to do it.