BZEthics: Observers

jftsang · Post by **jftsang** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:14 pm

Sometimes a teammate joins the Observer team (or even the enemies) and then feeds details to us such as "ST base" or such, or even shoot their teammates to help us. Is this ethical behaviour?

slon02 · Post by **slon02** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:25 pm

Definitely not.

jftsang · Post by **jftsang** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:28 pm

well, the TKing goes without saying

However, I notice that many server admins don't put that in their rules:

They often include cheating, swearing, TKing, spamming, but they don't seem to notice this... and yet it is common.

F687/s · Post by **F687/s** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:53 pm

> Sometimes a teammate joins the Observer team (or even the enemies) and then feeds details to us such
> as "ST base"...

It depends. On places such as the GU League, where you actually have permanent teammates, this is a very good strategy. Such a "coach" can make or break the team, by viewing things that other may miss. But TKing is always bad.

Just my thoughts.

Triumph of the Soul · Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:51 pm

F687/s wrote:> Sometimes a teammate joins the Observer team (or even the enemies) and then feeds details to us such
> as "ST base"...

It depends. On places such as the GU League, where you actually have permanent teammates, this is a very good strategy. Such a "coach" can make or break the team, by viewing things that other may miss. But TKing is always bad.

Just my thoughts.

Just because you can give one team an unfair advantage, doesn't mean you should. I don't believe there is a such thing as a "permanent team mate", but if there is, they shouldn't express their affinity during a match they don't directly participate in. You can't always count on the other team having similar "permanent team mates", or even an equal number of them.

And one question F687/s:

> Why do you quote like this...
>

When you could press a button and quote like this?

Just something that's been on my mind.

Joe-Schmoe · Post by **Joe-Schmoe** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 1:43 am

If the teams are full, I can easily see Observers feeding hints being ok. The advantage given by such an observer is probably minimal, and the observer can have fun by contributing to the battle.

Sometimes I single out a player to follow and give advice. However, when I do this I usually set the observer mode to "following", so that I don't have any information the player doesn't have.

There is a related problem: people join the observer team to force the hand of the FairCTF plugin, preventing a legitimate capture.

F687/s · Post by **F687/s** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:36 pm

A Distraction wrote:Just because you can give one team an unfair advantage, doesn't mean you should. I don't believe there is a such thing as a "permanent team mate", but if there is, they shouldn't express their affinity during a match they don't directly participate in. You can't always count on the other team having similar "permanent team mates", or even an equal number of them.

By "permanent team mate," I was kind of speaking of league team mates. But if you're just going to be an observer on Missile Wars (or something similar), I don't think that holds nearly as much importance. Maybe if you give out hints to both teams, but that's not really that much fun to either team. Observers are made to observe

A Distraction wrote: And one question F687/s:

> Why do you quote like this...
>

When you could press a button and quote like this?
Just something that's been on my mind.

Mainly because I also frequent a few boards that do not allow direct quoting (mostly homebrew forums software). I do use the built-in quoting if I need to quote large pieces of text, but it takes a lot less time (for me) to quote things using the first way, especially if I want to quote multiple people.

think_tank · Post by **think_tank** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 4:06 am

This happened today on MW as well. The admin kicked him and I fully approve.

Tank 52 · Post by **Tank 52** » Tue Feb 26, 2008 2:02 am

Yes its pretty common, today, someone used geno on his own team and then switched sides, that is really unfair, but observing and giving hints is fair if the teams are full, seems okay.Some servers should have rules on this sort of thing if they want, and me personally, think they should.
just saying

Saber · Post by **Saber** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:26 am

It kills the fun when I'm sneaky with ST and some observer says "Watch out, there's an ST right there".

tw1sted · Post by **tw1sted** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:53 am

IMO, this is not a bad thing. Observers have their name for a reason. They observe. They can choose weather or not to pass along the information they observe to other players.

RexFlex · Post by **RexFlex** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:53 pm

I consider it unethical to pass information on as an observer that the player could not otherwise know.

Offering strategic advice isn't a problem because it allows the recipient to become a better player over time and it is something a better player may already know as the recipient.

But alerting of a stealth position because the observer can utilise how the observation process works is the equivalent of using a cheat client to see the tanks that are supposed to be stealthed on their radar. If I caught an observer doing this then I would not hesitate to sanction a removal of the observer from the server.

Post by **joevano** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 5:17 pm

I have to agree with RexFlex. I have been thinking about this for a while and hadn't come up with a good analogy. RexFlex hit the nail right on the head. IMHO, under ansolutely no circumstances is passing information on to a team, that they (the team) does not have access to through their own client(s) (at that point in time), ethical. A teammate can say ST behind you... but an observer with all seeing powers is quite unfair.

PS. I was the admin mentioned above that kicked an observer for passing on just this type of information

Ride · Post by **Ride** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 8:41 pm

I also agree with RexFlex. The observers using roaming in the correct way can see every thing going on in the battle field wheather it be ST or someone about to turn the corner to snipe with laser. It should not be allowed for an observer with massive seeing abilities to call the shots in battle. Helping with strategies is fine but giving away unfair information such as Rex said about the cheat client analogy is exactly that. It is cheating. Because you are swaying the game in someone's (or in some cases some team's) favor. If I'm not mistaken that is what most cheats do...