The subtle problem of Abuse - Official Servers

Ah. So your mind is set on not having any Official servers at all.

And if it will be implemented, you worry and assume that potential mistakes made by the server moderators will directly affect Unturned II’s review/rating. Mistakes that every other community server makes seldomly.

edit:
Technically yarrrr is correct that is hasn’t happened yet. lol
UII hasn’t publicly released as of this post.

I also worry about

2 Likes

So due to that you don’t think we should have official servers with staff at all?

And can I ask you this, How exactly would the staff abuse the game in a way that would ruin the game for other players? Sinc I don’t think they will be allowed to spawn in items and stuff like that.

And if you are telling me that official staff wont be any different from 12 year old kids abusing on their own servers then think again.

1 Like

Well boys.
We’ve concluded the thread.

Thread is a reminder, no debating. :sunglasses:

2 Likes

i think that this thread raises some good points, and i think the part about false abuse claims justifying bad reviews cannot be overstated. In forums and reviews, abundant threads and posts can be found relating to false bans through VAC and Battleye already. I mean how many threads contain the general direction of “Battleye banned me but i never hack game sucks”. Giving U-II a ‘human error’ justification for bad reviews only increases the leverage that these reviews have, especially with the whole idea that these are official servers with official staff. And even these consequences are assuming the best, that is assuming perfect staffing that is not actually affected by human error.

In saying this, i’m not sure what the correct course of action would be to take. This is something that must require careful thought by Nelson, as if done incorrectly could lead to disastrous results. I am not against the idea of staff or official servers, i’m pretty on the fence. But either way i think that Nelson should put serious thought into this, the servers cannot just be something thrown together last minute.

2 Likes

The conclusion that Rain is trying to draw is:

There’s other points he’s making, but that’s the conclusion it seems he wants people to reach after looking at his points in the various threads.

3 Likes

Here we go again, slightly different topic but Molt seems to be right on the money with this statement:

I want to re-iterate something I posted in another comment quite a few weeks ago. Your opinion on official servers is biased, and your points are unsubstantiated.

So if I understand your argument correctly after reading through this, IF official servers are implemented, they MUST have staff. Staff will then be abusive. Which will harm the gameplay and the games reputation.

But none of that is certain. Why MUST we have staff? Perhaps like CS:GO anti-cheat will be strong enough to have minimal hackers, and any hackers that slip through will be banned with time. Or maybe we implement a super advanced system like Overwatch reviewing system from CS:GO.

Perhaps we MUST have staff, sure. Why is it assumed that the staff will be abusive? Many organizations run on honest and intelligent volunteers without issue, and this forum is at least some evidence that Nelson has the capability to select staff that have good judgement and critical thinking skills. We have staff here, staff that isn’t abusive and seem to keep each other grounded and supported. So I don’t see why staff is assumed to be abusive.

Then maybe we should implement a better system, with checks and balances. Every ban has to be reviewed by 3 staff members, or 5 or 20. You have created a fictional system ripe for abuse in your head, then argue against it. Correct me if I’m wrong but I haven’t seen any news that staff would even be hired, let alone Nelson outlining the system for them.

At that point the staff would remove those moderators, should be simple as that. Nelson could fire anyone at anytime presumably, and staff would have their own methods of removal as well. Exactly like any organization with employees or volunteers.

So in conclusion, you have made another post without evidence filled with hyperbole which proves nothing. Save this post for when Nelson says he is going to hire staff that can ban people with impunity. Then this post will have merit. Until then, we are stuck arguing about a staff administration system which hasn’t been implemented, documented, or agreed upon.

11 Likes

So basically, Official servers are bad because of the possibility of abusive admins?

Look, admins aren’t dictators. They can be replaced rather easily the second they get out of line. Abusive admins are a product of bad staff and I think that Nelson is mature and professional enough not to hire idiots to moderate his official servers (that he pays for). Nelson has good incentive not to let badmins ruin UII for everyone.

I know that you just hate the idea of Official server because “Hierarchy bad” or some other delusional reason.

3 Likes

There wont be staff members on official servers.

Coupled with the other two posts, then it seems like the ultimate solution.

Do you… know how moderating a server works? Have you ever moderated 3.0 servers?

For those that are not familiar, usually you would /vanish /god and tp to players to check their activity. If they’re in a glitch base, ban. If they’re flying around in a hatchback, ban. If they’re snapping onto players and its really obvious aimbot, ban.

You realize anyone can just claim from here that the staff TP’d to them and revealed their base location to their buddies? Among hundreds of other things they could say, such as stealing stuff from crates, supporting staff teammates, really anything you could think of. Sure, they might not be able to spawn things in if they remove such permissions, but theres hundreds of ways you could abuse these powers

Another example is two ex-staff I’ve had on my own servers. They used /god /vanish to go around looting military locations and deadzones without being caught or taking damage. This doesn’t directly impact another one player, but its still of course abuse, and the gathered items are an unfair advantage.

Oh, and btw, I forgot to include we’re not even considering the hundreds of thousands of hours wasted by the admins and Nelson trying to prove and verify staff are not abusing. For every action they do we should question it and they should justify themselves. If they cant justify their hierarchy, it should not exist.

I don’t think you were reading when I said

Someone decent that can understand the other side.

yep. Worst case scenario Nelson is loosing money, Unturned’s reputation takes a big hit, and player start to distrust SDG.

Best case scenario theres official servers dominated by elite groups with no freelancers or etc.

Again attacking my ideas by calling them biased. Biased people refuse to see both sides and do not have an open-mind. I am very open-minded and have self-evaluated both sides. I never said it in the last thread, but an attack on my evidence, which was myself and my experience throughout 6,000 hours and hosting various servers is an attack on my authority, and almost an ad hominem.

You even went so far as to attack my agenda or reason behind being against Official Servers by saying crap like it would be better for my Server Franchise which again is in no way related and again, I wouldn’t be hosting my servers if there were quality servers to play on, especially ones that dont suffer from a pay-to-play whitelist

I am not being biased. I evaluated both options pros and cons and reached a conclusion. Just because I share my results and how I got there doesn’t mean anything is biased. Just because I dont talk about the pros Which I dont do because I’m lazy and its sorta obvious doesn’t mean I’m biased.

Now seeing as you’ve attacked my posts before with the simple regard as denoting my authority and experience on the subject, I can assume thats what the rest of your post is. Just questioning my authority on the subject.

My authority to others is subjective and if people dont want to believe I’m objectively an experienced server-hoster that is in their own faults, and I can not do anything about that.

BUT after reviewing the rest of your post, it seems like all your questions are pretty self-explanatory. I’m not sure why you even bothered. Not sure why anyone liked it. Lets nitpick a little

Staff will be inherently abusive. You did not read the post and or the other comments.

Now this is a decent idea, coupled with my other idea about replays, you could sorta review someones gameplay to check for cheating. But again, you cant just sit around and wait for over a day for all the staff to review it before banning him as he will cause too much destruction. Cant ban him on the spot because that would violate your little ‘checks and balances’.

Sure, you could develop a system where you ban them, then review them, and either keep them banned or unban them when you find them innocent. However, this super coercive, super long, super beurocratic, and can easily be used as a tool for harassing other players - like I said earlier. And then this process could start all over again to the same player or group.

I said above and earlier in this post why this is not going to work. You did not read the post and or the other comments.

In your eyes there may be no issue. But I may see objective issues.

Here? On this forum? Not abusive? Tough call mate. I’d say its pretty abusive and I have said so before.

Again with jumping the gun, putting words in my mouth/head. I did not go out and find the worst scenario and go with it. I evaluated many different ideas. You dont know how I think or my thought process. I’m not an idiot, I run servers, and it would be manipulative to put the worst ‘fiction system’ into the heads of people who do not run servers and have little knowledge on the subject.

If anything, you’re the one being manipulative by creating and reinforcing ideas like this one.

You know, you think they’d do that. But evidently they dont. Just look at the Official Unturned Discord. Do I really have to say anything more? Surely you’re smart enough to guess for yourself that the staff there get away with dumb shit without any real consequences, especially ones who have done exactly what I mentioned.

So in conclusion, I made a third post with my authority as evidence, filled with straight up facts, which proves my point.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

You know, if anything it seems like you are perhaps a little tiny biased towards me. You know, jumping the gun and writing an aggressive stance against my ideas without even reading through them all thoroughly.

lol

ad hominem, irrelevant

You did not read the post and or the other comments.

You know, lil guy, I honestly would prefer this lmao. Maybe when they get flooded with hackers it will give Nelson an “incentive”

aka pressure to counter those cheats.

2 Likes

You know “little guy”, most if not all games dont have staff on official servers, nelson would have to keep managing them and could get in real trouble for their actions.

You can report hackers with proof on websites and forums. Depending on how its set up. You dont need “admins”.

1 Like

How about exaggerating a little with comparisons? In a way, you can compare server staff to law enforcement. Why does law enforcement exist? Those cops can carry around weapons in public and if they decide to for whatever reason, they can just start firing on some random person in the streets. Server staff may have the potential to abuse but without them, who enforces the rules? What is there to make the game fair for everyone? If hacking is such a big thing with other people, why do you want to let them get away with it because nobody has the power to do anything?

You could, but as I’ve said multiple times before in the post, you cant have slow systems like the one you’ve just suggested. Takes too long, and what evidence? Player recordings?

And whats worse is I imagine a hack that lets you make others look like they’re hacking, then you’d record them. This kind of stuff already exists on Minecraft and if it came to Unturned then it would make any player-based recordings unacceptable and unverifiable.

To serve capitalists. :man_shrugging:. Lets not go into no mans land. aka politics

Which many people are opposed to. no mans land

Good question. no mans land warning

You can learn all about Anarchist politics online. I suggest NonCompete who has a good educational series. I may also suggest Thought Slime’s debunking of classic Anarchist myths

I never said we should ‘let’ them ‘get away’ with it. I’m almost certain I never said anything remotely like that. Quote me if I did, because I didn’t mean to.

inb4 baker says the same exact stuff he said the first time

2 Likes

I know we went over this last time, but basing the truth of a claim based on the source of the information is a logical fallacy.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

Thats right I still believe that. All three of these last posts have had different subject lines, but your conclusion you draw from these ideas is that Official servers should not be implemented. Which at LEAST in part is due to your activities/ past. Everyone has bias.

Showing/ Discussing only the side of an issue that you agree with is bias…
When a News channel only broadcasts news that the CEO agrees with, you would call that biased news…

I don’t think ANYONE is denying that you have many hours in the game and have hosted servers/ communities. However any anecdotal experience you have, needs to be supported with evidence before you convince other people. Particularly people who think critically.

The questions was WHY is that assumed? Which you didn’t answer. I did read the post and the comments.

Why not? Its not ideal, but maybe the best system. You don’t want abuse, but you don’t like slow systems. No system will make you happy.

I did read everything. Slow systems with checks will destroy abuse. Quick systems allow for abuse. There are trade-offs. Pros and Cons to any system. So it could work.

Did they delete your criticism? The fact that you aren’t banned after criticizing the staff is very good. Reflects well on the staff.

I have no knowledge of that discord, however if they truely are abusive, why doesn’t Nelson remove them? Is it community ran? Honestly haven’t heard anything about that.

You have done none of this. Your authority mean NOTHING when it comes to proving a point. You think Harvard just releases a statement saying “The Next Ice Age Will Happen In 7 Days” and expects people to believe them, simply based on the fact that they are Harvard? NO of course not, they release massive documents filled with REAL evidence and findings. Not hyperbole, assumptions, and logical reason.

Your point has not been proven. Not even close. You haven’t even presented an alternative other than scraping Official servers. Surely there is SOME system that is good enough to make it worth it. I mean many games do it successfully.

9 Likes

is god an abusive admin? I think so because he took away my great grandma before I could say goodbye

3 Likes

Alright, since you say we shouldn’t let hackers get away with what they are doing, what is your proposal to counter them without moderation?

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.

1 Like

That isnt a slow process, its a faster process than having people do it in game. Minecraft is completely different from UE4 and cheats work differently there too. You cant make that sort of stuff here and if you could people would be well aware of it. Not to mention if there isnt enough evidence the suspect wouldnt be banned. And people wouldnt be banned directly from recordings. If you had “staff” on a server all of their bans would be mostly useless, because people could easily appeal them, since staff can give wrong verdics, anti cheat cannot. Every ban made by anti cheat is set in stone. Staff bans arent.

Anti-cheat isn’t perfect so you shouldn’t even say it can’t give a wrong decision. It removes potentially flawed decisions made by people and can analyze things much faster than we personally can but that doesn’t mean the developers of it can’t screw anything up on their end. If one thing is done wrong, the anti-cheat may end up banning everyone that actually isn’t cheating. Another thing that should be moderated instead of just cheating is toxic behavior. AI may be advancing constantly but it doesn’t know every difference there is between regular communication and purposefully toxic remarks and behavior. Censoring inappropriate language would be one way to deal with communication but people find creative ways to get around it and in the case of Roblox, it takes entire conversations out of context and censors them because of one misinterpretation that a person wouldn’t make.

1 Like

I never said it wont give a “wrong” decision, it just wont give a punishment unless it can confirm without a doubt someone is hacking. Not punishing a hacker because it cant detect it is considered a wrong decision, but a safe one.

If an Anti-Cheat without a doubt confirms someone to be hacking who is not, there will be a much larger wave than usual of people claiming they were falsely banned, and rollbacks would be done like any logical dev would do.

Who said we should make rules against toxic behaviour? Toxicity is pretty subjective, and there can be passive defenses against general toxic behaviour, such as anti-spam to counter spam.

“Toxic” behaviour and “staff disrespect” are one of the worst things a staff member could ever enforce because its so up to interpretation that no one person (or small group of persons) should be the dictators and deciders of what is and is not. You’re basically controlling the conversation. This happens a lot in the Unturned Official Discord, where in one example staff members who get called out for prior abuses unfairly warn, mute, kick, and ban people, just like @Paladin did with me.

I believe censorship is a powerful tool that is bad. Even if you could censor everything necessary with perfect precision that would backfire. Rather I’d only want Hate Speech to be banned, and really, since its a game and not real life, I dont even care for that.

Roblox has horrible censorship, but since its such a kid-friendly game it makes sense for them to be extra-careful. But not even Roblox can protect people from things like Fascist dog-whistles and things that seem normal to us but have a known meaning to them. Bots could never understand and decipher such a thing and I never expect them to.

3 Likes