BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

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Pesky_UK
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BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by Pesky_UK »

Why does the BZ client not enforce registration before allowing new players to play? Forget about map / server owners, the client should be enforcing it.

I'm getting fed up of chasing unregistered cheaters and listening to unregistered players spouting their vile drivel. Kick / bans / mute / silencing them is not the proper answer as all they have to do is change their player name and they can start their crap all over again.

Every other online game requires registration before being able to play so why must BZ be the odd one out?
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by Zehra »

The game was never designed with online play in mind. The original design was simply a LAN game.
Even if a new (non-protocol breaking) release were made today which prevented people from joining or playing on servers as unregistered, it wouldn't be effective, since people would download the previous release or simply patch their clients.
Even if added to a future major release, it wouldn't be effective, since you can't trust the game client. (That's why many cheats are possible, due to so much being handled on the client end.)

People are free to run their servers as they wish and badly run or managed servers tend to quickly drop in rank and risk being delisted, but on the other hand, this should not mean that it should be time-consuming or difficult to administrate or manage a server, and a few people have worked on lessening its burden, but the speed at which it is happening is quite slow.

When the next major release occurs, it will solve and reduce quite a few of the problems listed, but the extent it will reduce them is unknown.

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tainn
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by tainn »

I have mixed feelings on the matter, but an actual prompt and guidance for registering being available from the client itself would definitely be a step in the right direction towards getting more legitimate players to register.
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by Zehra »

Much has been discussed on the matter of improving the way to make it easier for new players. Registration should be less of "required", but more of where one gains some nice benefits from registering.

If abuse of chat permissions is an issue, then limit chat permissions to registered players.
If cheating is an issue, then limit the ways people can cheat.

One issue is how counter-intuitive registering is, since one has to register for a "forum" to "register" for the game. This is confusing for a lot of people, since in quite a few games, it is possible to register for the game from within the game.

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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by kierra »

Short & sweet:
Pesky, I'm sure you remember many years ago when some servers required a registered nick to play on them. They would allow an unreg'd player a min or 2 of play with msg ('register....etc' i forget exact wording) and then you were auto kicked.
It certainly would damper the nonsense chat/trolling from aliased players. Ofc, hosts could make it so aliased players couldn't speak, as seen on a few of allejo's servers, ie: Urb Jungle.
Cheaters/abusers could be id banned.
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by blast »

I don't see it changing until we replace our authentication system, which is needed for IPv6 support and in-game registration. So sure, someday registration may be required, but that's a ways off. Talk with server owners of well run servers about making changes. It is possible, for instance, to disallow certain permissions (such as talking) to unregistered players.

It is possible to silence all unregistered users in your client if you use 2.4.12 or later.
It is possible to silence all unregistered players in your client by silencing - (the minus sign or hyphen), similar to how silencing * (asterisk) silences all players. Additionally, the /silence and /unsilence commands both work correctly now and support both special cases.
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alfa1
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by alfa1 »

Let's analize it a bit:
- mute: it is right, player just needs to rejoin and mute is off --> use plugin 'permanent mute', or something, or just take a stronger action
- kick: it is valid as a warning; no problem with it
- ban: you have here several ways for doing it: by IP, by IP family and by hostname. A very good way to fight cheaters here is to disallow players using proxies (it doesn't show the hostname).

You just need a better admin's action. Registration is not a matter here. Internet/networking always was and always should be without the need of it, in general.

If you mean propietary games, which are run by huge enterprises, of course they want people to be registered; they want to know everything of them. Do you think anytime about people's rights? About what necessity there is to ask something from people? On this time of brute and huge invasion of privacity, we need 'the less, the better' (and we need to use our brains and knowledge, not just following advertising, masses or fashion things). (Related and important: if you think things need to 'evolve'... for your information, Evolution is a big... lie; just a silly hypotesis. Again, let's use our brains.)
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by macsforme »

The main barrier to mandatory registration as I see it is that the process for registering an account is not intuitive. Once that is remedied, the opposite problem may occur, where people can easily register throwaway accounts (although that is already true to an extent) and hop from account to account and therefore dodge bans on their accounts. Ultimately, I would like to see some kind of player reputation system, similar to what was envisioned with plans for the karma system back in the day. Then, if there was some basic requirement to level up your account before you can play on the most popular servers, and especially before you can play in leagues, and if your reputation was vulnerable to being reduced below the baseline level for bad behavior, I believe this would be a better system to counter abuse.
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by tainn »

I think that may be a plausible idea for the league, considering it is filled with regulars, but a really bad one for generally popular servers.

Many times, the majority of online players playing on the popular servers are of the type that do not want to have any unnecessary attachments. They do not converse, they come and go without any restraints, and I would assume some of them also choose to play an open source game to truly have some aspect of freedom in their gameplay.

Our current activity is not something I would risk lowering even further, especially with changes that do not foresee a possible increase in it.
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by Zehra »

The solutions presented here seem to mainly treat the symptoms of a greater problem, which was the part of this game never having been designed for online play.

For the league, they could simply add a minimum number of "required" public matches before adding a member.

For servers in general, simply using the '-advertise' option to 'verified' or limiting private chat to registered players would reduce a few problems.

In addition, improvements to the polling system and a hostmute option would solve quite a few problems as well.

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The decisions we make are the ones we look forward too and the ones we regret. ~Zehra
There's a difference between knowing my name and knowing me, one shows respect to my name and the other is to who I am. ~Zehra

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WorldOfTanks23
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Re: BZ Client, force registration before being allowed to play

Post by WorldOfTanks23 »

You cannot stop cheaters as long as the game is open-source.

Even closed source games can be modified, although that would be beyond most peoples' abilities.

Forced registration would add nothing, except irritate new players who just want to jump in and play immediately.
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