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Just keep the game playable and reliable. With anti cheat, competition, and community.

Quite interesting to read. The Auth Server is the site Battletracker.com (=bt), isn't it? It's based on a wbb-board, so the passwords for sure are stored crypted (there's the possibility since version 2, if I remember right). Homey made you an API to check, if the submitted login data is correct and to send you some stats and the bt-number back.

Battletracker is just a place where accounts are stored. We have a VPS server that runs everything else (controls authentication, server querying, server list, banlist, and more).

But what about the delivery of my personal data to assist? That is not crypted. When I login in Assist with my bt-name and bt-password are send in "clear text" to assist-server. Nice to see only " ******** " in passwordfield, but the data finally send is plane text.

It's not sent in clear text. There is a special hashing method inside Assist that hashes the passwords with salt before they're sent to Assist/Battletracker.

I think outside of your "staff team", there are a lot of players who have coding abilitys. In my case, I offered my help not ony once or twice. I got rejected several times and than I finally lost the interest on trying it again.

While you "re-setup" this page, there was a short massage like: "Can anyone host the site?" I perhaps could do so but didn't have a way to contact you. I wrote a pn to Johnny on bt, because it was the only name and person I clearly could identify. Perhaps he forwarded it to the rest of the team...

I have heard of you offering help in the past but not this last time. In any event, some things are kind of disorganized on our end. One of which is the offers of help we receive. Some are discussed briefly and then ignored or are outright ignored in the first place. This is not good. I've created a new thread in the admin area with a list of people who have offered to help, what they're good with and a way to contact them. This list will be used any time we need anything. Any offers of help from here on out will not be in vain.

For the future I'd like to have more transparency about what is going on and less restrictions. In my eyes it's a stupid thing, that modded servers are not tracked, only one account per person is allowed and many more... For sure, if there is a server-mod running, which gives 1.000.000 points per kill or something like that, it shouldn'n be tracked. But there are a lot of people who like to play with sf-weapons on standard maps (which was / is allowed from the game by forceclassing), so why you don't let them play that way? Also "low gravity" aka. "high jump" is settable by admin, so let them have some fun with it.

For the transparency, we will have a TOS that outlines what Assist is and what it does on your computer. As for mods, I don't think we'll track them again. We didn't remove them from the game, people are welcome to play. From this standpoint, we've accepted them MORE than the AA devs have. SF weapons can still be done by forceclassing as long as it's not abused/done every round. It's been explained many times that this disrupts classic gameplay. This project is about keeping the core gameplay alive, true to what the original developers wanted.

Don't ban those players globally if there is no evidence.

It's been a long time since we've banned without evidence. There's plenty of players reported but honestly, everybody that's been banned has been banned with proof.

Pit had nothing to do with it.  I Host the site.  My hand was forced to suspend the site until the issue was resolved. 

In taking down the auth server, and removing the AC Protection methods used from distribution they met my requirements to restore the site.

There we're never any hard feelings, just business.

The website is back, and I'm working with the developers to get a playable version out ASAP.

Enough about what happened, Lets move on.   What would you the players like to see in the near future?

wtf regarding doing business. your business should ve been done sometime around 2006. when the game was in its peak. and how da fak have you been forced to suspend everything..please, do explain!
if that is truth then something should be decentralized..i bet there are companies out there that can provide better service then yours "lowpingservers".somebody really faked up that johnnyM dude since he left for good.that someone should be labeled by the community and expelled forever.

If you do not agree with the Terms of Service, please remove Assist and all related software from your computer.

Already done.

IMHO the only possible way to bring back AA is without third party software.

Already done.

IMHO the only possible way to bring back AA is without third party software.

See, it would take a LOT more work to modify the AA code and setup a server similar to the devs did for the Personal Jacket. Getting that right would be next to impossible. Not to mention, AA would have to be modified and recompiled which we don't have the tools/knowledge/files to do so. Assist is much easier. If you don't trust it, that's fine. There's others that will.

Will low ping servers continue to deal with 2.# after this? They removed the game from their options...think they will bring it back? What other hosting options are there

LPS is hosting AAO25.com right now. We're talking about where to host the Auth server, that's undecided.

If someone is smart enough to snoop network traffic of someone, replicate it and play it back to Assist, they should probably be spending time going after something worthwhile, not a free America's Army account that only gives you access to play the game...

Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate the advice and hopefully ELiZ or someone more knowledgeable than I can figure out how to make it work. I blab here a lot but I'm just a map guy. The other guys do far more work than me when it comes to Assist.

Let's move on shall we?

YEEESSSSSSSSSSS. better today than tomorrow. go on please, i am standby to play this wonderful game again:)
and thanks for doing this again.