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[00Kevin]

Hackers.

That's it in a nutshell. People who know where you are every time, start shooting before they can actually see you, and always take you down in a nanosecond.

If there were lots of people playing (there aren't) or if we had lots of servers (we don't), it wouldn't be a big deal to go play somewhere else, but with such a small community, a single hacker can ruin the whole thing.

Thankfully I've only seen one hacker so far. Granted, there were others who could own me that tempt me to accuse them of hacking, but nothing like this one fellow, Sam something or other.

Seriously—who puts out a hack for a mod that's only in beta and has maybe twenty people playing on a good day? At first I didn't believe there could be such a thing, but it didn't take more than one Google search to find it.

Are GES servers VAC secured? If not, is there anything to be done or should we just give up and stop playing now?

[Konrad Beerbaum]

A bit dramatic don't you think?  There will always be hackers for any game, and the easiest way to avoid them is to play on servers with active admins and a solid banning policy.  When I played CS, I usually stuck to clan servers, because there were always active admins who quickly kicked hackers and had permanent ban lists to keep them from coming back.  Once we release the next patch which will greatly improve the gameplay experience, and more people start playing, it will attract more hackers, but also more people and solid servers to combat them. 

[Xanatos]

oddly enough, as lame as it may seem, its been done.

just stick to decent servers with good administration, that advice never fails.

[00Kevin]

Right. Well, feel free to point me to any server with an admin.

Drastic? Hardly. The point was that at this point in the mod's history (i.e., when there are so few servers and definitely none with admins present), even a few hackers are enough to drive off the community of players, and without players you have no mod.

Again, it's no good saying "Go to another server" when there are two whole servers up and the guy just follows the "crowd" of five players back and forth.

The mod is freaking awesome and I think (for what my opinion's worth) it's got potential to be huge, which is exactly why it's imperative to take something like this seriously at this point.

Probably coming off like I'm complaining, so I'll just go ahead and apologize for that ahead of time. 

ETA: Konrad, I didn't give due attention to your statement about the new patch, so let me say that I certainly hope you're right that the community will grow, because that's actually probably the best solution to hackers, isn't it? Good show.

[WNxSauron]

theres a whole lot more people accusing others of hacking than there are actual hackers. Personally i haven't run into any hackers playing..and i played this game since Alpha release, i guess im lucky..

Though if you run into anyone that are hacking on the WN servers , feel free to PM me, and ill see what i can do about it. Of course with evidence such as a recorded demo.

[00Kevin]

Will do. Certainly don't like when people accuse others of hacking just because they (the accused) are better than the accuser. Sadly, nobody's ever accused me of hacking! 

[Jonathan [Spider]]

one of my freinds actualy hacks on CS quite regularly, and let me tell you guys this, it doesnt matter if the server is VAC secured. that doesnt stop hacks for crap, and there really isnt anything a lot of admins can do for hacking other than just kicking people out... and even that doesnt always work. you have to actualy get caught doing something kind of over the top like speed hacking, or obvious wall hacking things like that.

i can say flat out that nothing can stop hacking. i would suggest just to play the game in smaller groups that in huge rooms of like 20 or more people. that way your odds of bumping into a hacker decrese.

[MetalLizard]

one of my freinds actualy hacks on CS quite regularly, and let me tell you guys this, it doesnt matter if the server is VAC secured. that doesnt stop hacks for crap, and there really isnt anything a lot of admins can do for hacking other than just kicking people out... and even that doesnt always work. you have to actualy get caught doing something kind of over the top like speed hacking, or obvious wall hacking things like that.

i can say flat out that nothing can stop hacking. i would suggest just to play the game in smaller groups that in huge rooms of like 20 or more people. that way your odds of bumping into a hacker decrese.

Time to get a new friend then, eh? Using cheats on a multi-player game is just trash. I'd personally rather just watch paint dry than use hacks, but I think these people do it to get laughs at the other player's frustration. I think the less and less a person likes a decent challenge, the more inferior the person is.

[kraid]

The first few times i played this mod, i started to believe there are some hackers.
Because there were people who killed me with very small amount of shoots even when i got full health and Body-Armor.
At the same time when i shoot these people, their health was constantly the same, no matter how often they were hit by my bullets.

But now i know better: ZMG is fucking overpowered and the Hit detection is sometimes a little strange.
So when you see you've hit your opponent, it doesn't really mean the Server gets the same results.
As you were getting the Position of the other Player, he could have moved on for a millisecond or something and you're shooting onto something else.
This kind of 'errors' happens, just imagine you're playing against people which could be on the other side of the world.
Its nearly unbelievable that it works at all.

The only thing you can do is to choose a Server with low Latency-Times. (hope this is correct)
But even this is no garantie.

[Jonathan [Spider]]

Time to get a new friend then, eh? Using cheats on a multi-player game is just trash. I'd personally rather just watch paint dry than use hacks, but I think these people do it to get laughs at the other player's frustration. I think the less and less a person likes a decent challenge, the more inferior the person is.

haha nah, my buddy is a cool guy, only reason he hacks, is because CS is actually really boring without hacks. trust me on this you wouldn't believe the number of people who hack on that game. i would say its around 1 in 10 people probably from the servers i have played on while watching my buddy play. when your hacking its REALLY easy to tell when someone elese is a lot of the time.
add that many hackers, with valves hitbox bug, and well you end up with a pretty boring and frustrating experience.

a lot of the things people see as hacking in our game, was a result of the invulnerability. there was a big bug we didnt think of where the lag of the player, and server client communications would be kinda funny. and as a result people would shoot someone see blood, but the player still had full health things like that.

in the end guys, hacking isnt something we have the man power to really tackle properly. theres a lot of games out there, that have veery little if any hacking, but the way valve has things setup, HL2 isnt one of them.

[WNxSauron]

What bad excuse to cheat is that...
If he finds the game so boring, play something else then. I'm not a big fan of CS anymore, but there are thousands of people out there playing and are really good at it, what gives him the right to ruin it for everyone else?

Do you share his view on this? Being Project Leader/admin of GE:S and saying hey, if the game gets boring, its kinda glitchy then hell why not cheat some..is it just me that finds that kinda scary. 

[Jonathan [Spider]]

i personally don't play CS, simply because of so many cheaters, and kids who play for 12 hours a day, that are so good that average people cant compete. it gets kinda boring and rather frustrating. though i do occasionally play the ice world death match servers those are fun, and cheating and skill  is less of a factor towrds the game play.

i have another friend who played CS professionally during college, and got paid to go around the country to play. he lost a lot of his friends, contact with his family, and dropped out of college to get to a top level. he eventually quit playing, and specifically owns a crappy computer now so he cant get hooked again. i got to know him after his CS days. you have to give up way to much to be able to compete with people like that... and theres a lot more than a handful of kids out there that are as dedicated as my buddy was.

i don't condone cheating at all, but with a game like CS, i understand the motivation to do it, when such a large portion of their community is cheating, or overly dedicated. theres not really much space for a more casual playing of the game, for people who like to have fun.

the way CS and its community is built isn't for people who want to play the game for fun, so people who want to have fun with the game, cheat in order to compete against people who don't play the game for fun.

heres something thats kind of strange about video games. the consumer is a co author of the product. like it or not, the public one day will take what you have made, and modify it to their interests. be that hacks, mods, machinima, what ever.  all those things are an extension of people making the game into what they want it to be. thats why theres cheat codes on console and single player games. to allow the player to go through the game the way they want. granted hacking is taking the cheat code one step further and altering the play experience of people who don't want their game play altered. but its still kind of in the same vein of what im talking about. people are always going to find ways to alter the game play experience of any game. including this one. its just something you have to learn to deal with, or chose to not be involved in by doing lan party's or playing against bots or single player, or what ever what ever.

im not saying OMG HAXXOORZzz this mod cause itll be fun. im jsut saying, this is something that is happening, and will continue to happen, and no matter what we, valve, or anyone does will always be around in some shape or form (screen doting anyone?)

[kraid]

The skill difference of the Players is IMO a huge Problem.
For instance: Yesterday i joined a Server, played for a while, everything's fine.
Somewhen WNxSauron joins the Server and defeats us all.
That was the Point the Fun of the Game reduces to a lower Level (not a critic at you Sauron, you're just to good for the most players).
It's not only a problem of HL2 or CS, it's one for the most Online-Games.
IMO there should be a Ranking System for Players.

You're starting at one * and can get up to lets say ***** (five).
For a good ranking in a Multiplayer Match you will get points.
When you got a specific amount of points you will get a further *.
The opposite will happen, when you got a bad ranking, so you can also loose points or even *.
So the Reason for this is:
A *** Player can get access to *** Servers (or higher if he prefers) but not to * or ** Servers.
Ecept the Server runs a Team Mode so the skilled Player is one Team and the others are the other Team.

OK, i know there are not enough people who are playing GE:S at the moment, but what about other MP-Games with more players and Servers.

[nowhere]

The reason most MP games (Like HL2DM and CS) don't have a ranking system is that it would require the company that made the game to host a server for all the rankings to be on. Could you imagine how much money it would cost Valve to host a server that held a rank for every person that played CS?

Even just right as I type this that would be hosting the rank for 164,000 people and having it accessed by the 80,000 servers currently running the game.

[Jonathan [Spider]]

actualy, valve wouldnt have to have control over that, people could just make servers based on rankings

i own a server, i want it to be for new players so i just say its a rank 1 server. then as people play my game, and improve their rank goes up. rank for the game could be tied to their steam ID. high rank players cant play on low rank servers, but low rank players can play on high rank servers. (if you were pro, but just didn't get the rank right off the bat, or if you wanted to step up.)

if ranking was just tied to the IDs, based on the multiplayer games you played on steam, that wouldnt be to tuff for valve to do... doubt they ever will though.

[nowhere]

They'd have to store the rankings somewhere, or else it would just be server specific. You'd level up on one server but it wouldn't transfer over to other servers unless Valve stored it somewhere. Also, then there's all the problems of how to calculate rank and there'd be no way to stop people from just going on a server with friends and killing each other until their rank went up.

[Jonathan [Spider]]

storing that information on valves servers wouldn't be any worse than the amount of information they currently have. i wouldnt be suprised if valve already tracked a lot of that information already for demographic purposes.

and calculating the rank would be simple, just clock the hours played per session per day, and kill to death ratio.

and it wouldn't matter if friends killed each other all day to boost their rank, the whole point is to keep a set of easy servers for people who dont play as often, and keep the more hardcore competitive players a place to only fight against the top players.

[sirtom93]

when i was playing i saw someone using speed gear and it slowed up my already slow pc.

[FlyBMXer4130]

I think what a lot of people call cheating or "hacking" is due to the server's ass-backwards settings at sometimes (WNx much?).   The way I understand it, is that it's set to (basically) one hit kills, unless you have body armor which isn't affected by a server-specific damage factor.

[Loafie, Hero of Dreams]

or it could be on LTK

[WNxSauron]

Que? The WN server is running normal DM-mode. In all its invul-time glory. Pains server has no invul-time, meaning you will die faster. But its still not LTK-mode.

EDIT: btw, our servers are currently down cause e-frag ceased all operations after 7 years in the server business. So were currently looking for a new host.

[olileauk]

The reason most MP games (Like HL2DM and CS) don't have a ranking system is that it would require the company that made the game to host a server for all the rankings to be on. Could you imagine how much money it would cost Valve to host a server that held a rank for every person that played CS?

Even just right as I type this that would be hosting the rank for 164,000 people and having it accessed by the 80,000 servers currently running the game.

to be honest though, those systems exist and work - not on a multi-game scale, but in individual games. In C&C 3, you have a rank, and you can play matches again those within +-5, 10 or 15 ranks of yours. So you play agains people of your skill. now of course this isn't an RTS,  but the fact is those systems exist, and if they wanted to i expect valve could set up and keep a server or a number of servers keeping track of player ranks.


Though IMO, I'd rather play with people of all skill levels. CSS is good, IMO, because any given server can have good people and utter noobs and me sortof down the lower end, and still be awesomely good fun. I have yet to find a server full of pros where the game is no fun.