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Thank you for bumping this thread up.

Here are the people I don't want to see them on AAO25! And in RL too!





Etc., etc., ... You can find tons of it on YT. Wake up people.

LOL.

WOW. Nice movie. AA in RL.

Or them banning people for bugs in the game

Please.

You don't get banned because bugs exist, but because you exploit them (in your case it's the roof/escbld bug in hosp).

[...] We don't want to do anything about it, at least not right now. We want to fix the issue, but there
aren't any obvious solutions to go about doing it. [...]

And such statement is perfectly acceptable for me, unlike the Teddy's ("there is nothing we can do").

For example, forcing rules onto server admins wouldn't work because, as someone else pointed out, what would be the punishment for not enforcing said rules? We can't ban someone for not enforcing a 30 sec no spam rule, that's ridiculous.

Of cours it's ridiculous, let's discuss only the reasonable ideas.

Also, the manual labor in making sure servers don't ban players permanently would be ridiculous.

Here we disagree, the effort doesn't have to be large, just pay _ANY_ attention, FFS. (sorry for the explenative, but it's frustrating how many times do I have to repeat this one single fact).

We'd also run the risk of punishing a clan leader and their whole clan abandoning AA, which we obvious wouldn't want.

Here you are being inconsistent with your actions (as assist admin(s)). Normally, when you are trying to persue some ideas that you consider "right", you accept the fact that some people may leave. Take for example the screenshotting thing, the training thing, etc, etc. So far you acted like admins that dictate the rules and it was all right.

Now, you claim to be afraid that "some" players may get annoyed and leave.

I say you are being inconsistent with yourself.

This entire discussion has one huge problem though. Most of these server issues tend to be a he said she said situation with different stories from both sides. We can't believe one player over another so most of these abuses would go unpunished or undocumented due to lack of proof.

You are being inconsistent again. You banned players just because of some screenshots illustrating they have TK-ed. Why can't you use the same approach for server owners???

I'm not saying I don't want to put in the time here, I do, I want to help as much as I can. What I'm saying is, since the admin team is voluntary, the best case would be not to have too much work for them, because believe it or not, the majority of people don't want to put their time in for anything voluntarily.

Of course solutions that involve tedious manual work are bad.

But hey, this shouldn't be something new to you guys. All this management of "1 account only" rule is already tons of manual work now. Just look at "can someone active my account, please" messages in shoutbox - they are appearing every day.

As for abusive admins, as of now there's little we can do, but who knows what the future might hold.

If you would admit that "we don't want to do nothing about it", I would be ok (from a logic point of view).

But you have written "there's little we can do". That's an obviously false statement. I'm dissapointed to hear that from a person that is involved in math.

Not a bad idea, but the problem I see arising is how exactly will we know how long a server admin has banned a player for?

Yes, currently this information is not available at the auth server. But I believe that with moderate effort, it could be.

Anyway, I just wanted to touch on the idea, not the technical details.

so we'd have to trust server admins to follow the rules

YES, and this is the essence of the general scheme I was talking about. Remeber my mumbling about how linux kernel development is organised (BTW, Linus just got the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award)? Whatever you do, the server admins have to be in a trust-relationship with the assist admins.

In a huge community like in mainstream games, you don't need it. Server admins are free to abuse, as players have choice and can just go elsewhere. But in today's AA, it's different.

Certain things sure will make more players leave and as well the Server owners, so be careful.
Less servers = More private bans, less place to play, less players.

Of course, that's why admitted that good solution is not trivial.

I actually agree with this. [...]

The dummiest of assist admins finally understood. Now it will be downhill. ;-D

That's a bad idea. What about kicks and bans for violating certain rules that are not universal on all servers? Like Hospital 203 spam? A global ban would be a bit ridiculous.
Bad server admins may be a problem, but taking all of the power away from them and giving it to us is not a good solution.

You are correct, the solution is not easy, and the radical path is definitely not the good one (I already explained that full centralization is _not_ the way to go).

On the other hand: there aren't that many map-specific rules out there, are they? I'm hosp expert (although I started on Sandstorm, the best map eva :-P), so I dunno.

Here is a recent shoutbox entry:

"-wA'tNc.troy- 1D [ASSIST]
look i want play on ua, i cant... and its the only one server with ppls online :/ i wont play bridge or hospital !"

It is a _PERFECT_ example of what I was talking about. Assuming this dude hasn't made something gross, he just has been practically eliminated from AA, by a single server admin.

How can you not recognize that this is a serious issue nowadays? Let me repeat: LOCAL ban works like GLOBAL ban, in an AA we have today (handful of active servers, and most of players used to 1 maps).

As for Pit [...] You really don't have any clue about the damage you caused, do you? Doing one thing right don't compensate the shit you pulled to make it.

Unlike you, I know exactly what I did. If you have any concrete examples, please post it. I will just note, that the playerbase did not drop at all during my "damage time"...