I have noticed, over the past few days that since the beta has been out, there has been a lot of spillover from the general Source / L4D community consisting of griefers. In one example, a person by the name of "Walter P. Cunningham" (ingame) was playing in ge_caves. This person camped the RC-P90 and Body armor area the whole match, raking in some 50 odd kills and dying 10 times. He/she waited until a person would spawn at the area where the caves split off ahead of the player (with the exploding generator on one side, and behind the player a ramp area going off into another part of the map), then they grabbed the armor and RC-P90 ammo and wasted the player before they could make it out of the room. On the few occasions that a player or group of players could dispatch this individual, when they were without their armor and weapons, they were short work.
The griefing makes for an incredibly frustrating experience on an amazing and incredibly fun mod. I didn't really bitch much about it, I just left. The problem is, that Goldeneye in this incarnation is built on an engine and client/server technology that utilizes a new rule set, which will of course allow people to take advantage of said technology to grief other players.
A question I have is whether it is possible to code in a contigency against people spawn camping in this manner. I know that from a mapping standpoint, it is possible by tweaking weapon placement and spawns, but not everyone is going to be able to perfect that as the amount of people playing on the server increases. My thoughts were to code something in that would take the event of a new player spawning as one variable, then counting how many times the griefing player would kill that new player within 5 seconds of the new player spawning, and then either kill or kick the player griefing. I figured it would be possible by calculating a radius from the spawn points of so many game units, and seeing how many times that player killed someone spawning from that point within so many seconds of the victim spawning.
Could be something to supplement an admin mod also. I realize some people like to grief other players for fun, but it is annoying when other people are trying to just play. I know that what is "fair play" is really a semantics debate, like killing people with slappers if they run across your sight, and I don't really worry about that so much because I do it myself sometimes.
Barring that, maybe another solution would be to increase the spawn protection of spawning players, and detonate all proxy mines within x distance of the player spawn, flagging unarmed newly spawned players by an aura, and causing damage to the armed attacker?
Sure this seems like a HURRRRRR post but I think the way this mod is played by other people could perhaps show people in the community who are fundamentally responsible for the experiences of people who play their servers how to make things a little more balanced/fun, and people who make these mods.
So far, this is the only thing I have noticed has been a problem with the way people play.
I hope my feedback can be of some assistance.
Rock on guys!
(P.S: Mod still kicks ass)
(P.P.S: I know that keeping track of up to 32 players spawning at one point could possibly be taxing on bandwidth for a server, but can any coders expound on the feasibility of doing this?)