My Suggestions (Muliplayer mainly)

[MGSteve]

Ok, Here we go..

1) - Some form of password enforcement - force everyone to enter a company password when you join a game

2) - Or, record who set the company up and if someone tries to join a company which isn't passworded, the existing owner of the company has to approve it.

3) - The ability to all players to vote another player off. - Although could be problematic, but mainly to get rid of players guilty of screwing the game up.

4) - The ability to roll back to a previous end of year (or quarter), so that if someone does really screw around with a map, players can kick him and then vote to roll back a quarter or year etc..

These are mainly aimed at stopping idiots joining companies which have loads of money and ruining the game by trashing the company and the map

5) - The ability to buy a share a company that is about to be cleared as the player left. Sometimes a company going bust can cause other players to encounter trouble if the player who left was delivery cargo to their factories that the factories depended on. Ideally, these players should have a choice to take it over. If a company supplies more than one production industry where another player is delivering goods, it either goes to both companies in shares, or they can blind bid for it, highest bid wins - although that said it may as well go to the player with the most money - would basically be the same)

6) - Kick idle players. Nothing bugs me more than thinking you're playing against people just to find that the 8 competitors you have aren't actually doing anything and just left the game going on in the background.

7) - Get profit share / income from factories that you build.

- Enable voting to turn features on and off - i.e. players could vote to turn on/off breakdowns

9) - Add simple goal system into multiplayer games, so that servers can be easily set to end when a company has shifted x number of cargo, connected x towns, made £x etc.. I personally hate open ended games, you get bored after a while, knowing you can't win as there is no winning condition!

Some of the mods that have been suggested are just eyecandy - IMO you need to focus on the gameplay and fix that. Nothing is more frustrating and off putting than spending 3 hours building up a fantastic system just for some dick to come along, screw around with the map and trash your company simple becuase you forgot to set a password. (Or someone else in the game forgot to).


Thats it for now!

[DaleStan]

I suggest you visit the forum search, and not make suggestions that have been made before.

[dihedral]

1) - Some form of password enforcement - force everyone to enter a company password when you join a game

people are responsible for their own silliness, the game does not need to come up for that!

2) - Or, record who set the company up and if someone tries to join a company which isn't passworded, the existing owner of the company has to approve it.

people can join as spectator, chat, and join the company ones they have the password.

3) - The ability to all players to vote another player off. - Although could be problematic, but mainly to get rid of players guilty of screwing the game up.
4) - The ability to roll back to a previous end of year (or quarter), so that if someone does really screw around with a map, players can kick him and then vote to roll back a quarter or year etc..

dont play on badly or not administered servers!

These are mainly aimed at stopping idiots joining companies which have loads of money and ruining the game by trashing the company and the map

the search feature of forums is

aimed at stopping idiots

from posting old and answered suggestions again and again. - the answer is there, go fetch!

5) - The ability to buy a share a company that is about to be cleared as the player left. Sometimes a company going bust can cause other players to encounter trouble if the player who left was delivery cargo to their factories that the factories depended on. Ideally, these players should have a choice to take it over. If a company supplies more than one production industry where another player is delivering goods, it either goes to both companies in shares, or they can blind bid for it, highest bid wins - although that said it may as well go to the player with the most money - would basically be the same)

if they build in a way that their company depends on another company which has basically no future, then that is their own fault! perhaps they then should not manage a company!

6) - Kick idle players. Nothing bugs me more than thinking you're playing against people just to find that the 8 competitors you have aren't actually doing anything and just left the game going on in the background.

define idle!

7) - Get profit share / income from factories that you build.

you dont 'build' them, you 'fund' them - slight difference mind you!

- Enable voting to turn features on and off - i.e. players could vote to turn on/off breakdowns

if they dont like the server settings they can go find another server! if the admin wants to provide such a 'voting' feature he or she can do so on a website!

9) - Add simple goal system into multiplayer games, so that servers can be easily set to end when a company has shifted x number of cargo, connected x towns, made £x etc.. I personally hate open ended games, you get bored after a while, knowing you can't win as there is no winning condition!

... search for 'goal system' on another note: the word 'simple' is just not right here!

Some of the mods that have been suggested are just eyecandy - IMO you need to focus on the gameplay and fix that. Nothing is more frustrating and off putting than spending 3 hours building up a fantastic system just for some dick to come along, screw around with the map and trash your company simple becuase you forgot to set a password. (Or someone else in the game forgot to).

the game play aint broken, it aint in need of fixing! if you are too silly to set a password (mind you there is a config setting that can set the company password for you) that is your own fault! the game aint your brains and need not compensate if some player is lacking sense!

Thats it for now!

you are welcome!


...
i feel a bit like ever

[XeryusTC]

Out of all these suggestion I think that 5 might be the only original one, all the others have been suggested before and been denied or are in some way implemented already.

[MGSteve]

Well if that's the attitude when listening to a player's feedback I'll leave you to it.

The majority of them were aimed at stopping idiots ruining games. Yes if you don't password your company and your company gets trashed, its your fault. however if the idiot then goes and floods the map or in otherways screws it up - that ruins the game for everyone. I don't know about you but I HATE playing a game for 4 hours just to have some jackass come along and ruin it.

But hey, if you like that, fair enough.

As for using the search, I clicked on the stickies at the top of the page, checked the wiki, its NOT MY FAULT if they don't keep them up to date.

As I said, these suggestions, particularly the first 4 or 5 were aimed and stopping the frustration caused by people screwing games up.

Quite simply, people who have a frustrating game experience tend to stop playing it after a while.

If anyone in charge of OpenTTD had an once of commerical intelligence, they'd realise that. I know OpenTTD is free, but at the same time you don't want to give cause for players to stop playing the game. Any game that loses players, especially in games that are played online run the risk of dying out..

1) - Some form of password enforcement - force everyone to enter a company password when you join a game

people are responsible for their own silliness, the game does not need to come up for that!

2) - Or, record who set the company up and if someone tries to join a company which isn't passworded, the existing owner of the company has to approve it.

people can join as spectator, chat, and join the company ones they have the password.

See points above. Its a game ruiner FOR EVERYONE on that server, not just the poor sod who didn't password his company. How simple would it be for the game to check to see if a default password is set, if its not then prompt for one.

3) - The ability to all players to vote another player off. - Although could be problematic, but mainly to get rid of players guilty of screwing the game up.
4) - The ability to roll back to a previous end of year (or quarter), so that if someone does really screw around with a map, players can kick him and then vote to roll back a quarter or year etc..

dont play on badly or not administered servers!

LOL, not really the answer is it. No admin can be on their server 24/7

These are mainly aimed at stopping idiots joining companies which have loads of money and ruining the game by trashing the company and the map

the search feature of forums is

aimed at stopping idiots

from posting old and answered suggestions again and again. - the answer is there, go fetch!

Thanks for calling me I'm an idiot, how nice of you. Perhaps you could take a hint that if something is being asked about a lot that people WANT IT! Instead of just replying - use the search. Nothing I asked above was stupid or in any way hard to add.

5) - The ability to buy a share a company that is about to be cleared as the player left. Sometimes a company going bust can cause other players to encounter trouble if the player who left was delivery cargo to their factories that the factories depended on. Ideally, these players should have a choice to take it over. If a company supplies more than one production industry where another player is delivering goods, it either goes to both companies in shares, or they can blind bid for it, highest bid wins - although that said it may as well go to the player with the most money - would basically be the same)

if they build in a way that their company depends on another company which has basically no future, then that is their own fault! perhaps they then should not manage a company!

Right, so a map where each player has their own industries is a good thing then? Believe it or not some players do play like the above, I had it last night when someone delivering wood to my saw mill quit and left me with a 50% drop in wood which then had the obvious ramifications. Luckily i noticed it in time and prepared for it. I admit it does put you at a bit of a vulernability as you're depending on them, but in life companies rely on other companies as well.

6) - Kick idle players. Nothing bugs me more than thinking you're playing against people just to find that the 8 competitors you have aren't actually doing anything and just left the game going on in the background.

define idle!

Erm, ones that don't do anything for 5/10 mins. Active players will at the very least scroll the map from time to time!

7) - Get profit share / income from factories that you build.

you dont 'build' them, you 'fund' them - slight difference mind you!

Build / Fund - eitherway you'd have a right to some sort of income either as owner or shareholder.

- Enable voting to turn features on and off - i.e. players could vote to turn on/off breakdowns

if they dont like the server settings they can go find another server! if the admin wants to provide such a 'voting' feature he or she can do so on a website!

Right, there's that find another server suggestion again. What happens if you happen to be on a server you like but get annoyed by the continual breakdowns? Yes you could ask the server to change the config, but it would be a hell of a lot easier (not to mention not very hard) to implement such a voting system - it could be disabled by the server if they wish, but at least the option would be there.

9) - Add simple goal system into multiplayer games, so that servers can be easily set to end when a company has shifted x number of cargo, connected x towns, made £x etc.. I personally hate open ended games, you get bored after a while, knowing you can't win as there is no winning condition!

... search for 'goal system' on another note: the word 'simple' is just not right here!

Yes it is simple. First to deliver 100,000 units of cargo for example - how hard is that? First company to be worth 100m - same again, not hard. I expected this had been suggested, but I thought I'd mention it again, after all, to refer you back to a point I made earlier, if people don't ask for what they want, how do you know which features are high in demand - answer: they get asked for A LOT.

Some of the mods that have been suggested are just eyecandy - IMO you need to focus on the gameplay and fix that. Nothing is more frustrating and off putting than spending 3 hours building up a fantastic system just for some dick to come along, screw around with the map and trash your company simple becuase you forgot to set a password. (Or someone else in the game forgot to).

the game play aint broken, it aint in need of fixing! if you are too silly to set a password (mind you there is a config setting that can set the company password for you) that is your own fault! the game aint your brains and need not compensate if some player is lacking sense!

That may be your viewpoint, my viewpoint is that the game isn't broken, but its also not perfect. It can be improved upon and the suggestions above were my contribution to improving it. As I said above, if you get your own company trashed, that's your fault, but the game should help to prevent an entire map / game being ruined. After all people spend HOURS playing this game, is it really fair that all that work goes to ruin because of one person?

As I said above, people stop playing games that p*** them off. I stopped playing OpenTTD for months before picking it up again last week. However, I'll probably stop playing it again soon as other than the Speedy servers, I have yet to find any decent servers that don't suffer from idiots ruining games.

[Rubidium]

1) Forcing passwords can be even more an annoyance than what you want to prevent
2) Who is the owner when someone loses connection? What if the server is restarted? What if the map is reloaded?
3) Voting players off makes it much easier for bad people to kick people out of the game; you just need to connect "current players" + 1 times, vote to kick and vote yes. Then you can kick everyone. Together with 2 this means you can kick people out of their company.
4) So you join in the middle of the night and don't like how your company turned out; somebody competed you and such. So you (as you're the only one online) vote for the game to be reset a bit.
5) Buying shares is (currently) horribly broken to the point where you can get lots and lots of free money in a few seconds, which makes it very easy to flood the world. I can imagine you just want to take over the whole company at once at bankruptcy, i.e. FS#2769.
6) What is an idle player? I sometimes spent minutes looking at junctions/stations trying to contemplate how to optimize the flow. Should I be kicked for wanting to think the optimizations through?
7) Factories are owned by a company called 'N/A'. This company is a not-for-profit company. Furthermore: why do you need income from factories? It's a transport game, not a economy simulator!
See 3). It makes it very easy to exploit this, e.g. by enabling 90 degree turns and later when people are using them disabling it, or by changing the rail pathfinder to the old pathfinder which likely causes many trains going in the wrong direction.
9) What about having the highest rating at a specific point in time? Sounds like a simple goal system to me.

I know I'm focussing on what can go wrong, but I do this because you cannot trust people. Voting wouldn't be needed if people would be trustable, after all nobody would flood the map, which is what you want to prevent by voting. So if there's a way to misuse the system they will misuse it in that way.

Over time people have tried to come up with many ways to prevent those rotten apples, but none of them works as good as a properly managed server. Starting a server without managing it is asking for trouble.

[MGSteve]

1) Forcing passwords can be even more an annoyance than what you want to prevent

Surely the lesser evil comapared to having a game ruined because someone forgot to set their password?

2) Who is the owner when someone loses connection? What if the server is restarted? What if the map is reloaded?

Surely its not hard for the game to record who set a company up initally? That user is the owner.

3) Voting players off makes it much easier for bad people to kick people out of the game; you just need to connect "current players" + 1 times, vote to kick and vote yes. Then you can kick everyone. Together with 2 this means you can kick people out of their company.

Good point - but you could quite easily ignore multiple connections from the same computer.

4) So you join in the middle of the night and don't like how your company turned out; somebody competed you and such. So you (as you're the only one online) vote for the game to be reset a bit.

Again, good point - perhaps it would be a good option for some servers to use that are goal orientated, rather than open ended.

5) Buying shares is (currently) horribly broken to the point where you can get lots and lots of free money in a few seconds, which makes it very easy to flood the world. I can imagine you just want to take over the whole company at once at bankruptcy, i.e. FS#2769.

Ah, didn't know the shares system was broken. But the normal game would offer a company to you if it was about to go bust, I notice OpenTTD doesn't do that.

6) What is an idle player? I sometimes spent minutes looking at junctions/stations trying to contemplate how to optimize the flow. Should I be kicked for wanting to think the optimizations through?

Yeah, but surely you don't spend 5/10 mins staring at the screen without at least moving it! All it would need to do is pop up a warning saying that you'll be kicked in 30 seconds unless you cancel it.

7) Factories are owned by a company called 'N/A'. This company is a not-for-profit company. Furthermore: why do you need income from factories? It's a transport game, not a economy simulator!

Very true, didn't stop Railroad Tycoon adding them though

See 3). It makes it very easy to exploit this, e.g. by enabling 90 degree turns and later when people are using them disabling it, or by changing the rail pathfinder to the old pathfinder which likely causes many trains going in the wrong direction.

No, I would suggest limiting it to a set number of options - setup by the server admin. So you could specify which options can be voted on.

9) What about having the highest rating at a specific point in time? Sounds like a simple goal system to me.

It is a goal system, but just a quick and dirty one as opposed to one where you say, have to meet more than 1 criteria

I know I'm focussing on what can go wrong, but I do this because you cannot trust people. Voting wouldn't be needed if people would be trustable, after all nobody would flood the map, which is what you want to prevent by voting. So if there's a way to misuse the system they will misuse it in that way.

Over time people have tried to come up with many ways to prevent those rotten apples, but none of them works as good as a properly managed server. Starting a server without managing it is asking for trouble.

I agree, but as I said above, no admin can be on their server 24/7, especially if they have more than 1 server. My suggestions would add tools which would enable players to either manage aspects of the server should an admin not be online. At the end of the day, the ability to control who joins your company would have prevented an attack and game ruining experience the other day which resulted in 3 wasted hours if my life! If there is a way to stop people from joining rich companies and causing game ending vandalism, that's got to be a good thing.

e.g. the player voting system could well only be enabled so that you can only vote someone off who's company has spent over £x in construction (i.e. Mass terraforming) or made a huge profit on new vehicles (i.e. if they sell lots of vehicles). Then people coudl agree to restore the game as it was 1 year ago, before the damage was done.

As with any features, they need to be thought out in depth, but dismissing them simply because they could lead to abuse isn't really the way forward, imo. Otherwise how would the groups feature of been added for vehicles, it makes it very easy now for someone to abuse your company by sending all the trains to depot and then selling them enmasse.

[dihedral]

things like #openttdcoop are well managed - you have multiple admins available at different times of the day, there is a bot that wraps the server and sets a server password providing you only one method to get hold of the password - by joining their irc channel.

well managed servers mostly have more than one admin.

'threatening' to no longer play a game usually does not turn out to be a good threat - nobody really cares that much

had you used the search feature, you would not just have found similar suggestions but also the responses to them and perhaps you would have read the issues that arise with trying to implement, e.g. defining idle is a very tricky thing - the server does not know if someone is scrolling the map! so for your definition of idle - that's a no-go

Thanks for calling me I'm an idiot

you are most welcome did you note, please also note, i accomplished this using your own words

Perhaps you could take a hint that if something is being asked about a lot that people WANT IT!

a lot of people ask for the copy & paste patch - they surly want it - is it going to be implemented? NOPE

Build / Fund - eitherway you'd have a right to some sort of income either as owner or shareholder.

funding does not always give you a right to anything - you give money because you want to support a project, and that's it!
however if you want to get something out of it - i suggest you start using the resources of the funded industry.

What happens if you happen to be on a server you like but get annoyed by the continual breakdowns?

then you contact the server admin - what if the server admin loves breakdowns?? in a lot of cases a server admin will not give a damn about the wishes of a new player - if the player does not like something, he/she/it can go find another server, if the player does not like the rules, find another server...... for those admins who want a vote system, they can use a wrapper application such as autopilot, ap+ or soon avignon - there are also python scripts one can use, and implement the voting via the ingame chat

Yes it is simple. First to deliver 100,000 units of cargo for example - how hard is that? First company to be worth 100m - same again, not hard.

you see a direct goal - we see a bunch of people who all want a different goal, now implementing something that can allow each user to define their own goals is a bit more complicated than just hard coding what you just asked for.

if people don't ask for what they want, how do you know which features are high in demand

the developers of OpenTTD dont just randomly implement what is high in demand!

but the game should help to prevent an entire map / game being ruined.

it does - admins can set server passwords which is required even if you only want to spectate - there, nobody will trash the game

After all people spend HOURS playing this game, is it really fair that all that work goes to ruin because of one person?

well administered games will probably load one of their previous savegames to fix the damage done, however, this currently still means that all company passwords are gone.

As I said above, people stop playing games that p*** them off. I stopped playing OpenTTD for months before picking it up again last week. However, I'll probably stop playing it again soon as other than the Speedy servers, I have yet to find any decent servers that don't suffer from idiots ruining games.

as far as i am concerned - i dont give a damn if you play OpenTTD or not. if you are having trouble finding a server you like playing on, that is your problem not mine! if you dont set a password on your company / server and get the game trashed - that is your problem, not mine! if you think you are being treated harshly by my replies - that is your problem, not mine!

p.s.: someone who cannot code, does not know the codebase of OpenTTD, or how OpenTTD functions in the background should not comment on how easy or hard it is to implement a feature.

[Rubidium]

Yeah, but surely you don't spend 5/10 mins staring at the screen without at least moving it! All it would need to do is pop up a warning saying that you'll be kicked in 30 seconds unless you cancel it.

The server doesn't know you are moving your mouse/screen! So you're going to query the client to ask whether the client is doing something? That would easily be circumvented by the binary always replying "yes my user changed something". Then someone distributes that binary like the copy-paste binary and you haven't solved a thing.

Very true, didn't stop Railroad Tycoon adding them though

So... because 'someone else' has it we must have it too? So based on that we should add (based on a * Tycoon business simulation game):
- selling pizzas (Pizza Tycoon)
- building custom roller coasters (Rollercoaster Tycoon)
- build and manage golf courses (Golf Resort Tycoon)
- run a prison (Prison Tycoon)

I know it sounds ridicious, but it proves my point that 'because X has it' is not a good reason.

[MGSteve]

Yeah, but surely you don't spend 5/10 mins staring at the screen without at least moving it! All it would need to do is pop up a warning saying that you'll be kicked in 30 seconds unless you cancel it.

The server doesn't know you are moving your mouse/screen! So you're going to query the client to ask whether the client is doing something? That would easily be circumvented by the binary always replying "yes my user changed something". Then someone distributes that binary like the copy-paste binary and you haven't solved a thing.

Very true, didn't stop Railroad Tycoon adding them though

So... because 'someone else' has it we must have it too? So based on that we should add (based on a * Tycoon business simulation game):
- selling pizzas (Pizza Tycoon)
- building custom roller coasters (Rollercoaster Tycoon)
- build and manage golf courses (Golf Resort Tycoon)
- run a prison (Prison Tycoon)

I know it sounds ridicious, but it proves my point that 'because X has it' is not a good reason.

I wasn't saying it must have it, just that it added a nice extra dimension.

[Xander]

This post was very asshat-ish and has been removed.

Although the recommendation of stop whining and do it yourself if it's that important still stands.

[planetmaker]

3) Voting players off makes it much easier for bad people to kick people out of the game; you just need to connect "current players" + 1 times, vote to kick and vote yes. Then you can kick everyone. Together with 2 this means you can kick people out of their company.

Good point - but you could quite easily ignore multiple connections from the same computer.

What about several people who use the same proxy? Or maybe two or more sibblings in the same household on the same router?

6) What is an idle player? I sometimes spent minutes looking at junctions/stations trying to contemplate how to optimize the flow. Should I be kicked for wanting to think the optimizations through?

Yeah, but surely you don't spend 5/10 mins staring at the screen without at least moving it! All it would need to do is pop up a warning saying that you'll be kicked in 30 seconds unless you cancel it.

That's no good idea IMO. For exactly the same reason as Rubi states. Yes, I sometimes play this way. Or - as merry spectator, "teacher" and/or admin - are idling a bit, just to be online and having occasionally a bit of building fun, but to be around. No good thing to be kicked

See 3). It makes it very easy to exploit this, e.g. by enabling 90 degree turns and later when people are using them disabling it, or by changing the rail pathfinder to the old pathfinder which likely causes many trains going in the wrong direction.

No, I would suggest limiting it to a set number of options - setup by the server admin. So you could specify which options can be voted on.

I'm here with Rubidium, too. Configuration changes can be made by admins. Any person who has the rcon password in OpenTTD can change these settings. As admin you may even give this to trusted players. But I wouldn't trust a bunch of random players to vote on the settings on my servers.

9) What about having the highest rating at a specific point in time? Sounds like a simple goal system to me.

It is a goal system, but just a quick and dirty one as opposed to one where you say, have to meet more than 1 criteria

Here I kind of agree with you. Not that I need it personally, but it would IMO make sense. But then: whoever wants this badly, obviously has to put some work into a good patch which first of all finds a good place to integrate different goals in the first place into the game. The 2nd step only would be to introduce actually different goals. If it's properly done, both code-wise and the user interface way, yes then maybe people like Rubidium might consider. But as obviously they personally are not interested in it, as they also only do all this for their own fun, I guess nothing won't happen in that direction.

I agree, but as I said above, no admin can be on their server 24/7, especially if they have more than 1 server. My suggestions would add tools which would enable players to either manage aspects of the server should an admin not be online.

For that reason it's desirable to actually have a number of admins, to have plenty and frequent automatic savegames, to use an IRC interface (like ap+ or avignon) for easy online access and control and it would be nice to have a command logging possibility in order to identify and ban offensive players at least a posteriori. As many games are played asyncronously, a vote mechanism is IMO bound to really, really upset players. I don't trust them

As with any features, they need to be thought out in depth, but dismissing them simply because they could lead to abuse isn't really the way forward, imo. Otherwise how would the groups feature of been added for vehicles, it makes it very easy now for someone to abuse your company by sending all the trains to depot and then selling them enmasse.

Not at all. My company is password protected on those servers where I am not admin. Where I'm admin, I don't as I like to coop. And I can easily kick offensive players. Un-occupied companies w/o password can be cleared automatically by the server, so in general they're not a big problem either. Brianetta's standard server has good rules for that.

[MGSteve]

Thanks for your well constructed reply PlanetMaker

As for dihedral, you shouldn't assume anything. I can code actually thank you - professional developer. Ok, I haven't seen the OpenTTD source code, but I would have thought a simple goal mechanic shouldn't be that hard to add. If developed in a thoughtful way, as PlanetMaker said, it could be coded as the foundation of a more complicated goal system and expanded upon later, so it wouldn't be a complete waste of someone's time!

As for the server not knowing if the player is scrolling around - I wasn't aware of that - I don't know how the client / server system works in OpenTTD. However, it could quite easily query the client every minute or so to see if the player is idle as the client would know and could reply yes or no. Although i apprecaite your point about people changing the code so the game always replies yes. But this could apply to anything really. Although I'd have thought for game integrity, you would have a way that a server can indentify a official released build vs one built at home, otherwise they could build anything into it, cheats & all sorts. Although this would rather screw the Open Source concept around a bit I guess?

I apprecaite not everyone will see these suggestions the same way as I do - probably no two players play the game in exactly the same way.

As for the copy & paste, I should hope it wouldn't be implemented, I can't see what use it would be personally and that I can imagine would be an absolute nightmare to code!

"What about several people who use the same proxy? Or maybe two or more sibblings in the same household on the same router?"
- Well, the game can currently indentify players who have been banned, or are they banned via IP? Either way, the client could quite easily generate a unique ID for each client (the NIC is a good place to start as they should be pretty unique) and then the server would be able to tell each client apart and more importantly, tell clients apart who are behind a NAT router.

I appreciate enabling players to vote to change things is going to be devisive, some will like it, others won't. This it the suggestion forum, it was a suggestion.

As for "Although the recommendation of stop whining and do it yourself if it's that important still stands.", I don't get why some people on here are so damn obnoxious and rude. Ok, some ideas have been suggested before, that's fine you always get that on a forum. Yes I should have searched a bit more, that's a fair point - but I did checkout the stickies at the top of the forum, which I'm sure is more than some do!

And what is the point of 'doing it myself'. a) Going by what you say here, the patch probably wouldn't be accepted into the core game anyway and b) that would mean I've wasted even more of my life on this game!

And dihedral, oh yes, making me say I was an idiot with my own text was very clever, give yourself a gold star Anyway, I wasn't pretending to say that if I stopped playing it would lead to a mass desertion of players away from the game! lol, I'm not the pied piper! I was suggesting that if it frustrates a lot of people, then concievably a lot of people could stop playing it.

Anyway, I appreciate my suggestions have gone down like a lead balloon, such is life, didn't quite expect to get shot down with quite so much hostility, but there you go.

[Rubidium]

Although I'd have thought for game integrity, you would have a way that a server can indentify a official released build vs one built at home, otherwise they could build anything into it, cheats & all sorts.

That is why commands are send to the server and the server and all clients check the validity of them. If you modify your game to locally enable cheats and then use a cheat to remove a building that building would still be there on the server and all other clients. After a while you would desync out of the game.

Also there is no way to identify a released build. What is a reliable metric that you can get from the client that the client cannot modify? The client is open source which means anything the client sends can be modified, which means you cannot reliably determine whether the client is a released build.

Either way, the client could quite easily generate a unique ID for each client (the NIC is a good place to start as they should be pretty unique) and then the server would be able to tell each client apart and more importantly, tell clients apart who are behind a NAT router.

You never heard of cheap computers that all had the same MAC address? Now it's easy to change the MAC address. An easier way to circumvent this would be a small modification where the client generates a random unique ID each time it starts. Conclusion: unique IDs send by the client are unreliable.

[MGSteve]

Fair enough, I thought the MAC codes were supossed to be unique. Still, the chances of finding two people with the same mac code on one server is probably more than winning the lottery!

But I do take your points though, the first one is the problem with Open Source really. Only way to protect stuff would perhaps be to stick some key bits in a close source DLL that people can't alter - but I guess that would go against the whole Open Source principle.

[FooBar]

MAC codes were supossed to be unique

Indeed, 'supposed to'. But then they failed somewhere along the line

Even the closed source dll thingy doesn't work. Just modify the open source bits and edit the dll out, replacing it with a different set of instructions.

[DaleStan]

Even the closed source dll thingy doesn't work.

Not to mention that such would be a violation of the GPL.

[DespairsRay]

I know it's upsetting to get your ideas shot down, but don't get so defensive MGSteve. It kind of reminds me of the game developer Derek Smart, but that's on a whole other level. Each person tries to make a rebuttal and it just starts to get ugly.

#5 is an interesting idea though.