Anti Griefing measures

Hadn't had the time to read though everything but never the less here are my ideas antigrief better:

* Reward good players instead of just punishing bad ones:
Instead of just punishing people for grieving maybe awarding people for contributing would be nice too.

* Make the player feel bad for grieving:
Show a smiley or some small KAG player who looks sad if you grief to make the player feel bad for griefing and motivate him to make this small player happy.

* Required reputation to join a server:
Afaik the game Americas Army has something like that. There you can't join server when you don't have enough good reputation.

* Noob server with no required reputation:
This would limit griever to a few noob servers.
You would need to have accounts for that.

* Supporter accounts with donations:
Another way would be to create supporter accounts for people who donate money. Griefers will most likely not donate and if they do the will loose their supporter account.

* Avoid vote grieving by hiding supporter account status from non supporters:
To avoid issues with voters (grievers could join the game and vote supporter account players) you could hide that a player is a support account user (except for other support account owners).

* Allow recording grievers to show it with votes:
You could add a demo feature which allows people to see if a player was really grieving (maybe the admins and server mods only).

* Join delay to allow voting grievers before damage happens:
Add a join delay to give people time to vote the player if he's a well known griever.

* Fake map for grieving detection:
If a player gets kicked/banned often he will join a fake server (with bots) instead of a real one. The server map will look like a normal one but it will be used to detect if the player is a griever or not (destroys a lot of own buildings or creates more ones or just fights the enemy)

Best would be to pick stuff thats not too difficult to implement and try it out.

 

My replies in bold

 

The accounts will not be magic. People can keep registering new ones, and an account still needs to be flagged as malicious in the first place.
Requiring an account to play will deter new players.

 

Faster than you can bring down a 1 block thick building? :).

I'm happy to hear this.

 

I think there should be some waiting time when you register your new account before you can play (12 - 24 hours) so a griefer once he has been banned has to go, make another email adress, register and wait such time. That would discourage many of the, quite simply, retarded teenagers.

And as to not discourage too much new players, there should be a server option to not require accounts, and at least one server like this at all time (¿maybe dev run?) where anyone can just hop in and play.

 

Today I played 3 games. 1st was fine. 2nd - the other team got weakened by a griefer and lost.

3rd game :
- 2-3 griefers who kept changing the face of the battle (got only one name but forgot it.. - thus my 1st suggestion),
- A supposedly god-mode-enabled guy, who just devastated our whole team without loosing a heart. I myself have broken his shield block and stabbed him about 5 times, he couldn't move, blood was spraying, no corpse under him, I didn't loose any heart - he neither. His name is DrillingWillie. I know no-one's gonna ban him on my word, but maybe I'll encourage others to report him too.
- A guy who was constantly spawning at our team's secured outpost. Maybe it was a bug actually, cause he seemed a bit confused himself at first.. but then managed to destroy some of our defenses.

Seems the account system is not really working so good.. KAG is just too tempting for griefers I think. We all know that it happens almost every game. So my suggestion is to:

Record every game

I know a demo system was already suggested (that would be perfect), but for now we can do it ourselves. KAG ain't too hard on today's computer's resources, so running a recording app in the background with low quality settings shouldn't be a problem, maybe even with on-the-fly compression to reduce the recorded files' sizes. If just a few players actually do it and then make reports, the community will be MUCH cleaner in just a few days I'm sure. Mass banning shall commence.


Another thing I thought of is:

Better use of votekick reasons

I.e. - when someone gets votekicked with a reason 'griefing', he gets (perma?)banned and the last x minutes of the changes he made to blocks get reversed. I know it's another controversial solution, castles popping out of the blue.. but since griefers are either spotted fast or 'work' outside of action, maybe it ain't that stupid. It can be tweaked so that it doesn't respawn the blocks when there is an opposing player nearby. Also when a wall gets spawned 'on' a player, he could get teleported outside of it. Seems much better than the current struggles we're having.

 

I was thinking of the same thing, but the problem is the potential for abuse with that system. Like if an enemy is about to collapse a castle/fortress, a person can beat them to it and destroy the building themselves, get kicked, and then the castle is back up again.

 

I'd rather not record every game simply because I get lag if I run anything too intensive (fraps reduces my framerate by a whole 30fps, so only when I really want to record new stuff). I just think that everyone saying "accounts are coming, accounts are coming" doesn't do a damn thing. Cause, now they're here, they're still not working well enough. There needs to be a better way to BAN griefers from the moment they start collapsing castles. Anyone who has been wrongly accused has 2 hours to wait before they can play again. In the meantime the ban request should then cause the game to record the last 1 minutes of what was going on from your perspective and anyone who pressed f12. League of legends has this tribunal service where if you read the logs of a game and judge whether or not the person was worth reporting or not they get free IP (which is the games free currency) however they did it badly because you get hardly any IP. Being involved in griefing tribunals would have to be rewarded with some sort of game credit to buy stuff that doesn't affect balance but does improve your overall experience. Maybe this can be bundled in the p2p update that will come where if you involve yourself in enough tribunals (A LOT) you can get the p2p version of the game for your hard work and contribution to the community.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and after the tribunal service if the majority of players who watched the recording vote "Punish" then admins will be passed the video to confirm they should be punished and to read any possible appeal from the user involved. They then make their own decision to punish or not punish (punishment being perma-ban IMO).

This would be separate from server ban which could be set up to happen very quickly in game. Server owners can just permaban with a command in their server. Any appeals then need to be directed at the server owner on the forums. Otherwise that user is then perma banned from that particular server. Of course if he goes to another server and starts griefing, gets kicked and banned, that just produces a second 1 minute collaboration of the griefings antics and he then has double the chance to get his account perma-banned.

 

Why not Furai? You could only possibly get perma-banned from the game by the game admins and moderators IMO, which seems fair as they should know what is griefing and what is not griefing from the one minute video. Plus innocent users will be informed that they are being judged for perma-ban and will have a chance to appeal. It would take a lot to get through to get perma-banned:

A. Have the users voteban you in the server.
B. Then majority "punish" vote is required in the tribunals
C. Even then the final decision comes from the moderators who have only been shown the ban request because it got through A and B.

 

This. I didn't even realize they weren't verified. If they aren't, accounts are useless. It's harder to create a new account for griefers when they gotta register a new email address first (but make sure you disallow instant addresses like from www.mailinator.com)

 

The issue is some people weren't receiving emails.

If anyone has any idea of a way to make people only able to have one account let me know.

 

Ban players based on I.P as well as account. Any other accounts registered on the same I.P get banned too.

In which case: A: griefers can still switch pcs when creating a new one.

B: Anyone with a younger sibling who shares their pc with him can get punished: The younger sibling can grief and get banned thereby getting an innocent older sibling banned for no reason.

This is the method that gets closest to making a person have only one account. Even then it has flaws.

 

Someone can't just change their i.p address without having a static one to begin with or switching pcs. And I was suggesting it as a case in point rather than an actual sugggestion. The point being that there will always be ways to make two accounts. I.P bans just deal with the issue the closest to completely as possible. If it was implemented you'd include it with email validation as well.

 

They can use a proxxy.

There is almost always certainly a way to make two accounts. If we put in measures to make it more difficult but not impossible, people with the drive to do it will still do it, and it will become a nuisance for new players who don't want to be griefers.

Once again the reason I'm not gun ho about email verification is someone can just make a hotmail in a few seconds, and it doesn't always send.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, there's a chance that in the future if there's an in game tutorial. It will be required to activate your account. So if it takes ten or so minutes, griefers would probably just give up.

 

Precisely poe, even you can point out flaws in it, but if you're asking for a solution that is the tightest possible way to cut down on account cloning, then I.P locking would be the way to do it IMO.

 

Ban players based on the MAC-address then. They can't easily fake that, right?. They gotta use a different network card/computer.