I moved your post to the General Gaming section.
This happened on one of the 64 player 1000 Tickets servers correct? It is unfortunate that a rant was needed to report this to the admins but I will address it nonetheless.
Those servers are very popular, filling up and staying full almost every day. iGame admins are usually around to report and take care of hackers/troublemakers 9 out of 10 times. Unfortunately there are times that admins are not online and some cannot be reached, we are not sleepless cyborgs after all. I myself was already asleep by the time this post was made, as my schedule dictates an early rise so I can do maintenance and checks on ALL servers when no user is connecting to them. Most of our bans involve direct input from users, they report it and we investigate it. Then steps are taken to remove the problem from our servers. Without co-operation from the community our job becomes very difficult, we cannot smell when there are issues, although I did request this feature in my operating system upgrades many times. Saying that NOTHING is done about it is a bit harsh as we do try our best to catch as many hackers/troublemakers as we can, but we cannot be everywhere at once. I make a point of reading a few logs of some servers every few weeks, searching for key problems we might have missed, but how will I know what to search for at specific times or is it even possible to search for EVERYTHING that could have happened? As I was typing this a player was found on one of our COD4 servers swearing and then disappearing, and no one reported him.
Most of the admins can be contacted via X-fire or even e-mail. We only require an e-mail or a message with some proof. One of your screenshots would have been enough to peak my admin interest and this could have been handled much quicker.
The sad fact is that Punkbuster cannot catch everyone and there are significant disadvantages when using alternative means to protect a server.
Most of those add another layer to an already busy server.
GGC was shut down more than 6 months ago due to a lack of support from the punkbuster devs and other reasons, the message was a little bit vague.
Goodbye message can be viewed here:
http://ggc.tpc-clan.de/
And what about the debacle PBBans had regarding the unjustified violation #50710 ban of a large group of players due to a glitch in PB misreading software.
There are many other reason I could mention why streaming is flawed and the problems it can bring to a server far outweighs the good it can do in some cases. They have caught many hackers and we are glad for that, but not as many as you would think. I prefer to have a more hands on approach to sorting out problems on our servers. The automation is bypassed and the window for mistakes become a lot smaller. The process is simple as mentioned above and most of the time, if I am not on the loo or sleeping, problems are solved almost immediately or within a few hours of it happening.
Now to the plugins system you asked about, admin tools like Procon etc are a double edged sword. They do give admins great flexibility when they need to maintain or customize their servers. But these plugins work 80% of the time, if it is that much, the plugins and the tools themselves are not officially supported by the developers of Battlefield 3. The RSPS were warned more than a few times in the past that Procon and its plugins should be disabled because they might cause unwanted lag or crashes, use at own risk came up a few times. These problems I saw for myself at times when we were testing plugins and combinations of plugins to tweak our servers. Even the teambalancer had issues. Even now if you report issues or crashes or problems with lag to the developers they always ask if you were running plugins etc. The storm of information the tools send to servers can cause severe lag that could be mistaken for server lag. Remember the early days of BF3, the SGS Metro server with all its glorious lag? The problem was not the hardware but the extreme plugins used there. Welcoming players that joined, voting, kick voting, team balancing and kicks for using certain weapons (ALSO something not supported by the developers), and the list goes on. Oh and country kickers and ping limiters are outlawed and are not supported at all. We do actively block 99% of international traffic to our servers, but some IPs still squeeze through.
I could go on but you get the idea why we use humans to ban and investigate players instead of leaving it in the hands of some system we cannot fully trust or putting a voting system in the hands of users who might just decide to go haywire and vote kick you or others without cause. And then more chaos to sort out.
The tools and plugins, even the streaming,they are like a house of cards waiting to fall over and they can cause major headaches.
As always we appreciate the support from the community in reporting hackers/troublemakers to us.
The player you mentioned in your post has been banned
. Even though only 1 user reported it out of 50+ players. The future of stopping hackers and their kind is in your hands as well, not just the admins, but EVERYONE working together. I suspect that is one of the reasons why GGC closed down, the lack of support.
PS. I forgot to mention this. You say every now and again a hacker appears, I sit on procon a few hours a day every second day or so and watch the servers, watching walls of text pass by and waiting for issues. But alas issues like this one can slip through the cracks when I am not looking or busy elsewhere on another server. Also I had to decrease the times spent watching due to the issues with the tools.
Most bans you will never see or even know about, we keep all of it private. No one is notified about a ban, not even the person who reported it. Just because you cannot see us does not mean we are not there.
I hope this long winded post cleared up some of your questions. To assist in eliminating the possibility of cases such as these we will also be supplementing the number of current admins with newly recruited admins. The recruitment thread will be live by mid-week.
Battlefield 3 servers poorly administered
Originally Posted by Spartan
