Realistically speaking, I am fairly sure they would have tackled this. They could start by having a very good Anti-Cheat system, as well as a system that (at least tries to) prevents alt accounts. They could also make the application process very difficult so that only the most dedicated and determined players can become staff. Also, they can simply only select the most active and dedicated members of the Unturned I and II communities. Requirements could include:
-Gold Membership in Unturned I
-Gold membership (or similar) in Unturned II
-Early Access in Unturned I and Unturned II
-Experienced Beret in Unturned I
-Active member of Unturned discord, forums, and steam
-No previous VAC bans
-Pre 3.0 in Unturned I
-At least 3+ years on Steam
With such requirements, only a minority of the community will be able to participate. Plus I am sure they will accept reports, and will often check if staff members are abusive. I am sure they will add very extreme punishments, such as a game ban on Unturned I and Unturned II, for staff abuse.
With all of these measures in place, I highly doubt there will be much abuse.
Still doesnāt get rid of the chance of abusive staff possibilities at all. Gold Membership, Early Access, Experienced Beret, no VAC bans, and 3+ years on steam are all statistics that have no correlation to abusive staff, and you can be all of this but still be abusive. These requirements donāt trim out any chances of abuse.
A simple solution for that would be to ask moderators to not play on the same servers they moderate. I.E. If I moderate on Official Server #1 I only actually play on Official Server #2. Fairly simple solution that should solve that. And if they do decide to use an alt account etc etc they will be removed from their admin position and replaced with someone more competent.
TL;DR This whole thread is like the bank worker problem. Bank workers have to know the security codes and such to get into banks to do their job, which means they COULD do massive amounts of damage to the company by stealing money; and while that does happen very rarely, we donāt see it almost ever; In the end, people who are hand picked and expected to perform honestly usually do and do it with a sense of honor. Other than some occasional scandal which is essentially as bad as a hacker attack, there isnāt really a problem.
Basically this. Give mods a reserved slot and keep them from actually interacting with players by means of PvP/raiding. They are basically just a floating freecam.
Itās not at all intimidating, Iāve just been sitting on this one for a little while and finally decided to let it loose and it came out insanely long as you pointed out.
The idea behind the 7 ranks thing is that yes it would be VERY complicated to get it going but after about 4 months or so assuming the promotions are expedited to fill the higher ranks it would essentially stabilize and require little to no mandatory intervention from Nelson or his reps. The idea is that there are 7 ranks to balance the load of monitoring the lower ranks for abuse and such (Ranks 1 and 2 purposely have essentially no power, just a title) so they can also perform their own jobs as well. Itās just to keep the dickheads from gaining any actual power unless they can stop being dickheads, because someone is in a higher position than them and the higher ranks are heavily vetted for assholes (hence their inferiors voting to see if they are actually good leaders).
And I did it againā¦ Why canāt I seem to make a simple one or two line post like a normal person?
Again, I can see what you are going for but unless you start with some existant trustworthy staff that idea is kinda hard to get of the ground and still complciated.
I much prefer @Llamaturkey101s approach.
Bank workers have to know the security codes and such to get into banks to do their job, which means they COULD do massive amounts of damage to the company by stealing money; and while that does happen very rarely, we donāt see it almost ever;
Bank workers canāt actually compromise their job though. There is a major difference. Bank workers have to sign contracts and promise they donāt do that and in turn get paid decent enough money to not need to steal more.
Unturned moderators are unpaid, usually under the age of 18 players and if they get removed from the staff team then who cares? They can still play.
There is still a price that is paid for what is essentially betrayal. Being banned themselves, loss of respect, and other things; Likewise I imagine that Nelson would at least meet through skype or something similar with his prospective staff at least once to verify their maturity.
As far as implementation goes it is already possible on Unturned 3 but would require hella server plugins to do because it would require additional privilege options other than āadminā or ānot adminā. It would actually be very simple to incorporate into the base server code, essentially all it would need is a simple database file with a list of administrators and their permissions and code in the server back-end to check the permissions to keep the guy with no give command access from freely giving out tank cannons on the server. It could actually be done using simple if-else statements to check permissions before actually executing the command and the only way it could be bypassed would be by finding the file after logging into the actual server machine as root (good luck finding it, Nelson seems to love storing commonly used files in RAM due to its better speed and response times) and editing it or they would have to edit the serverās already compiled code again as root (not an easy task and easy to stop with an intrusion detection system, any attempt at editing the compiled binary would cause the IDS to send Nelson a nice little email or maybe even a text message saying that somebody is dicking around with his server code). The level of skill it would take to actually pull it off would actually be security enough, as the hackers would much prefer to hack a bank or a couple of voter registries instead of an Unturned server that would benefit them not at all and might even get them caught. Actually the best of the best in the hacker world tend to work as āwhite hatsā, basically helping to fix exploits by using them to figure out how to patch them.
Short posts are overrated, and your thought out replies (along with a general mellowing out of the replies) are why Iām unmuting this thread. Welcome to the forums, @radiskull2000.
They can, but they very rarely choose to do so.
Iām sure Nelson would have his staff agree to follow some sort of standards. Thatās not really something exclusive to banks.
If all that it takes to stop staff from abusing is to offer better incentives to not abuse than to abuse, then Iād say the opportunity to continue staffing and playing on official servers clearly outweighs the absolutely nothing they gain by abusing. This is like the bank worker paradox, except thereās nothing worthwhile to steal in the bank vault and the workers are just there because they like hanging out and helping out, and the owner is a really cool dude.
I mean they definitely trim out the possibility and by a HUGE margin. Yes, there might still be some abuse left, but pls read the rest of my earlier reply to see how to combat this.
The server watchdog bots cannot ban because they are more likely to ban for nothing than a human. If worst came to worst the Rank 7 admins and Nelson would have direct console access and Nelson would have direct access to the actual server (as in physical access) and they would be able to solve the problem if it got too far.