The subtle problem of Abuse - Official Servers

Unturned II U4 Discussion
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So after giving one warning regarding the paywall,
a second one regarding pay-to-win,
now a third one regarding staff abuse on Official Servers. third times a charm

Some assumptions
Now theres not much to say here. This is evidently going to be a problem, yet I haven’t seen any discussion regarding it. Official servers will need Official staff members to check for hackers, assuming the Anti-Cheat is not perfect and some players are willing to pay money to get on Official servers and cheat. and honestly, if you think people wont do it, go look at CS:GO before the F2P update, or really any game that is paid for that has cheaters

So there will be hired staff, searching for hackers. Humans make errors and sometimes do things wrong. This can be called unintentional abuse. Some humans are greedy or dickheads, and they do intentional abuse.

Assuming that the current forum mods will not be game-mods (because that would take lots of their time to moderate both in-game and on forum) there will have to be a new fleet of staff hand-picked by Nelson, or worse, Nelson has to make some staff application thing and all the kids flock to it and fill it up.

Abuse
whatever. Who is staff doesn’t particular matter, the point is staff will inevitably abuse whether intentionally or unintentionally, and that will make the game look really bad. Sure, people today can point to 3.0 server-list and say its fully of shitty abusive servers, but its obvious that they’re ran by the “community” and is out of Nelsons jurisdiction to do anything.

However, when abuse is done on Official servers, by Official staff members, it makes the game as a whole look bad. Imagine people writing negative reviews about the game because a staff member did xyz to this one players. Theres hundreds of ways a staff member could abuse and thousands of ways to make the game appear worse by writing related reviews (or, even worse, creating YT videos about) the abuse.

Furthermore, for a moment we can just assume the almighty god-tier staff are perfect, their decisions are perfect, never make mistakes and are of entire moral character. EVEN then players can still think they may have abused and have convincing evidence that they ‘abused’ and spread it around. I’ve had this done tons of times on my servers where I objective did not abuse, while players still made it out to be that way. I’ve seen this hundreds of times on other servers, too.

Consider the following
We’re not even considering things like staff being rude, mean, discriminative against gender, race, profile picture, online identity, etc. NOR are we even considering the hundreds of people who are bound to try and impersonate staff to trick other gullible, less fortunate players. Nor are we considering other aspects of the Official/Endorsed Unturned community that suffer from great abuse already most notably but not only the Official Unturned Discord

Quick counter-arguments
Sure, you could exclaim the anti-cheat will be flawless and there will be no need for human staff -
which is unlikely.

Sure, you could try your best to not hire shitty people or prevent unintentional abuse -
but it will always happen.

Sure, you could say abuse and/or abuse allegations are inevitable -
or you could just not have Official servers and chance ruining the games reputation more than it has to be.

Sure you could say worrying about staff abuse is “stupid” -
But some people care about their experience and dont like authoritarian admins up their ass.

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Prevention is a good tactic. We could prevent the problem entirely by having no servers.

Prevention and Anti-Cheat
We could also prevent hackers with an Anti-Cheat. Of course they will get through, but it is a constant battle between devs and cheaters. So long as we pressure Nelson to patch cheats, and caught cheaters get automatically banned, we can have a cycle of automated, non-human staffed ‘moderation’ where the only ‘authority’ is a robot that can not make mistakes and can not be fundamentally wrong.

Yes, I said AC’s are not perfect. But I’d much rather play a server with no staff than a server with abusive staff. The problem in Unturned 3.0 is that the foundations of the game are terrible and have many exploits for hackers to use, which Nelson simply can not repair. This means unmoderated 3.0 servers that get popular simply get cut down to shreds by scummy hackers.

With 4.0, every-time a new hack comes out, there will always be some sort of method or patch that Nelson can do that will either passively counter or detect the hacks. This way there can be a constant battle between dev and hack creators.

And even better, is if Battleye comes to Unturned 4 it will actually be able to do its job efficiently without the broken foundations in its way. Not only will Nelson be pressured by community servers to patch cheats, now he will be pressured to patch them by Official server players, a slightly higher caliber bullet right there.

Democratic Alternative
Alternatively, instead of hand-picked hierarchical authoritarian staff, we could have something very much Rocketmod Observatory where we use sortition to pick users to review someones game-play and come to a united and unanimous decision. The system could also be very much like CS:GO over-watch, in the light that you have no name, no profile picture, or any indication of who you’re watching is, to prevent bias and discrimination.

Many players could attend each trial, and trials could be re-done if the defendant believes they’re innocent. Ontop of this, trials should be based on objective facts, not subjective things like quick aim, or things that may have been caused by lag. Reviewers could add notes, timestamps, and thoughts on the replay to share with the others, or for future reviewers.

Better yet, if we’re doing replay-like footage, there could be advanced techniques used to make the replay un-usable as information to give players an advantage about bases or players in the server. A crazier suggestion, players who do not own the server pass could do the reviewing. lol

This would take power out of the hands of few and give it publicly to the hands of all players to carry the duty. This method would also ensure that there are no active staff on the server, vanishing, using godmode, teleporting around and harassing players. The only injustice that could be done to players subjected to review would be the anonimized replay, and, on rare occasions a false ban that can be appealed.

Maybe, very much like CS:GO’s system, only experienced players take the cases. Or, better yet, there is a sort of priority queue, where the experienced players take priority over reviewing appeals, then cases. Small incentives like cosmetics, steam items (in general) or perhaps a permanent gift pass that reviewers can give to their less wealthy friends, so they may come enjoy the Official Servers.

Thats my mini-take on it. Afterall, this is not including the other two major problems with Official Servers and I still sorta dont wanna see them.

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presumably there will be a steam group, discord server, or a Forum section for official servers that hackers/abusers can be reported.

When the game has just come out, there will be a whole lot of glitches that people can exploit, like the item duplication glitch in 3.0. so the whole place will be a bit of a mess until things are patched and figured out.

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Great. Now I can report my enemies and have the staff harass them.

Bugs, exploits, glitches I’m fine with. They do not alter the game code, and rather than punishing individual players, more players should use the exploits to gather awareness and put pressure on Nelson to fix them. Hacks are a completely different subject, and will (atleast should) be around well after the game launch.

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I think I partly see where you’re going with this. You’ve seen how other companies have failed with avoiding abusive staff and false bans and you don’t want to see the same happen with Nelson and Unturned II. If we want to avoid any sort of unfair treatment from staff why not try forcing them to be entirely democratic with their situations. Make it so we have an odd number of staff members and the majority has to agree on what to do if a certain person is “proven” to be cheating. People are never going to be perfect but we can take steps to keep what we want and try to prevent those few incidents of abuse. Why not suggest a few actual alternatives that would involve keeping official servers?

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it sounds like you don’t want this idea and you don’t have an actual good point against it

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It’s the trolley problem all over again. Do you:

  1. Let one player ruin the whole experience for everyone else on the server and no staff to step in if they were to bypass the anticheat (TF2 is a good example. VAC always gets hackers in the end but I’ve seen accounts blatantly cheat and get reported many times but it was still undetected by VAC at that moment.)

or

  1. Give players staff roles and open up the possibility of them abusing powers

Both choices suck, it just matters which is going to have the most impact in the long run, and it’s impossible to tell since there’s so many variables. I’d prefer Nelson to do as he pleases, and so far that seems to be to implement official servers. Even without staff, harassment is still going to happen, would I love to eliminate that? Of course, but acting like server staff are the only ones doing this is crazy.

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I’m glad we have staff in the forum to set things in order, and those staff can negotiate problems when it occurs like civilized human being.

Likewise, I believe there’s nothing wrong with official server staff. I don’t get the paranoia of reputation damage this topic is all about.

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Tbh, I think nelson will choose the mods, yarr and Molt. And here’s why I think. They are never biased. Even when users here want them to be on their side because of something the suspect did that is shown and proven with facts, those 2 are never biased. They just wait for an action that goes against the rules here. Those suspect’s accounts are never deleted unless they commit something bad here. Too confusing: yarr and Molt are never biased, and take action if something goes against the rules here.

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A lot of the world is ‘democratic’ yet climate change is still a big problem. Does that mean its the peoples fault?

The short answer is no. Indirect democracy and such are flawed. Even if you made the system ‘democratic’ these moderators would function as de-facto representatives. Sure, you could “vote” someone in, and “vote” someone out, but the entire situation does not revolve around their character, rather the entire idea being fundamentally flawed.

This is ridiculous. Theres not going to be 7 staff members on all the time on the same server, and if someone is truly hacking they need to be punished on the spot, no time for some vote.

You’re explaining a system very much like Rocketmod Observatory where individual servers would ban someone, send evidence to Observatory proving they’re an hacker, then let Observatory players vote if they’re guilty or innocent. This process is too slow and is on a very individual server level, while there might be way more than one Official server.

Sure, you can present it like a trolley problem, but thats a False Dilemma logical fallacy. You present only two options like they are the only ones. There are plenty of other options, including but not limited to simply having no official servers.

cool

I think you didn’t even read the post.

lol

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Brah the problem you talk about is so stupid, sure admins abuse a little. But it happens on all servers. Also racists and whatever probably won’t be admins. And if they are how can you tell race through a video game.
I don’t care if the admin spawns in vehicles and loot. It’s more for me to take.

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Firing up the time machine as we speak.

and that is all anyone can say against this post.

In all seriousness though, the moderation tools and moderator’s logs should provide enough evidence that when someone (whether they have admin privileges or not) does something wrong it can be addressed, and so any defamatory claims can be destroyed with facts and logic disproven.

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Assuming the logs are just as much as UT3, then we can assume logs are not solid evidence to prove someone is abusing, but they could be abusing. Theres tons of things that are not logged that could be abusive. Have you ever seen a server log?

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No, atleast not from Unturned II.

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bro just have mods for mods to make sure the mods aren’t breaking rules

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You’ve become the very thing you swore to destroy

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we should get a mod to supervise Nelson :sunglasses:

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In my opinion, you could have just cut the entire topic down to a single paragraph.

The topic revolves around official server mods having a correlation to Unturned II’s review/rating by players. Everything else are every type of game server’s potential problems, which I assume everyone is familiar with.

To be honest there’s not much to tackle here. This feels more of a reminder with unnecessary fillers all over.

Not saying the thread is bad, and I’m not saying it is good either. But you could have cut it down to a single paragraph.

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Staff won’t harass anyone falsely reported.

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No need to jump the gun. Theres plenty of other implications that I thought were so obvious that I didnt need to say them, including but not limited to

  • Players distrusting staff - thus “disrespecting” them, going against them, or not reporting things against the rules to them. Have you ever seen real life? In some parts of the world, people in the streets cheer as the detained literally run away from being nearly handcuffed
  • Players not buying the official pass due to rumors or legitimate abuse You understand people go on the Steam forum almost weekly to ask if the “Unturned Gold Upgrade” is worth it? Imagine that, except more frequently, except the replies are negative and about abuse.
  • Entire groups, clans and factions leaving official servers due to interpreted abuse, or just anyone in general
  • Overall less sales, players may not buy cosmetics or whatever is planned Surely there will be more than the ‘Official Server Pass’ to buy, because the pass itself is used to pay off the server rent costs. The server pass does not generate direct revenue for Nelson, its just a closed-loop system.

Well thats why I called it a “sublte problem” since nobody seemingly talks about it, or they know but dont care. :man_shrugging:

Better a more explained and thought out post with a good foundation rather than a crappy one. If I did the opposite, you would’ve just called me out for the exact opposite. I guess I can’t win, huh?

Staff will harass no matter what. And they will harass whoever is supposedly cheating whether you believe or not. Their process of checking if someone is hacking is in itself harassment.

For an example, thats like saying the TSA (whom if you dont know are the agents who search people at American airports) don’t harass people unless they find something suspicious. Every single check is harassment and coercion.

Ontop of this your claim in itself is flawed with the belief that the staff, with their god-like powers, will know if a report is false. Staff will not know if a report is real, false, or in-between. If there is staff, they should treat all reports equally.

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And the topic revolves around official server staff and the game’s review/ratings. Your implications were already implied when you said
“Imagine people writing negative reviews about the game because a staff member did xyz to this one players. Theres hundreds of ways a staff member could abuse and thousands of ways to make the game appear worse by writing related reviews (or, even worse, creating YT videos about) the abuse.”

Subtle problem doesn’t imply or is a synonym to reminder for me. But that works, I guess? Your vocabulary.

No lol. I’ve already said it is just filler, I don’t think I’m letting anyone win or lose - again, the thread feels like a reminder, not a debate. The entire point of the thread revolves around official server staff and the game’s review rating. The filler doesn’t improve the thread at all in my opinion.
Keyword is filler if you haven’t caught it yet.

That’s a bold assumption coming from a server owner, but you do you. You’re the one with server experience here.

Agreed.

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