Duping, Server Hopping, and Exploiting- The Mild Cases and the Bad Cases

[smoq2 221]

Well, duping will certainly be sorted after the hive oriented item system will be implemented and the hive will keep track of all the items. Each item might then have a unique ID or some other identification method, which when duplicated gets marked (or the owner gets marked).

Don't know if they will (but pretty sure they will) try to solve the problem before then.

 

Server hopping however will not be fixed by introducing loot respawn. Mitigated perhaps, and even in that case just slightly.

I would even risk the saying that it might increase, because (from a hoppers perspective) items are most likely to be already respawned on another server. In practice, the hopper has a higher chance to find a fully stocked barracks regardless of the server he chose to "hop" to.

 

I heard from recent Rocket's presentation that they want to divide the map into quadrants, and when a given quadrant has no players for some time it starts to respawn items. IMO this does not solve the problem mentioned above.

One solution would be to respawn items only if a player which was already on the server enters the quadrant via walking, not by spawning in. The problem would be, that if you simply just started playing, you risk running into a loot desert.

Edited April 2, 2014 by retro19

[AzrailCross 48]

 because high pop are the ONLY servers you can PLAY ON, now..

 

Moving from server to server NOW is for me just to TRY to log in to ANY DAMN SERVER without getting kicked, autokicked, whitelist-kicked, friends-only kicked, reset on a beach, admin-booted, etc, because HALF the DAMN servers throw you out after 10seconds to 2 mins, and you have to wait 300 secs to try to get into another one.

 

I can esily spend more time (and in the evenings, maybe much more time)  than HALF AN HOUR to even an HOUR finding a low ping server that will LET ME PLAY on it...and if I'm looking for loot (not specially)  the only loot I'd really like at the moment is a canteen. I don't want military gear, in general I usually want a axe, a sidearm or any kind of rifle, 10 rounds to go with it, any kind of backpack, a bandage and a boonie hat and IVE GOT THOSE - and MAINLY of course I want to PLAY the GAME wthout being kicked by MORE THAN HALF the servers in the damn list, because they SAY they are private, they autokick, they have LOG IN CODES, and plenty of the rest that DO NOT warn you off ARE private and autokick too.

 

Little tip that may help, download a backup & uninstall your firewall and *TEST* the game to see if it's not the reason your having trouble finding a server that lets you play, and try not to call BS on this before you try it - I *disabled* my firewall and still had major issues (invisible zombies, inventory items disappearing and being slow, rubber banding, ect.) then put it in gamemode and ALL issues magically went away, might just be my own isolated fix but it worked for friends and not doing it causes the issues to crop up all over again, I don't fall in the floor of buildings anymore (save the huge apartments, those are still a bit finicky) I don't yellow chain anymore, nothing. So take a chance and try it, if it works maybe a new firewall is in order or some tweaking of the one you used will help. Obviously though do at your own risk, suggest not visiting any websites while it's gone :P

 

Though the rest of what you talk about, whitelisting, private, autokick, honestly I have not come across those yet, was pretty sure they aren't even in game and are server-closing offenses if reported *scratches his head* then again I've taken a 48 hour break just because of how much time I've spent in game the past two weeks so maybe something happen in the last 48 hours I'm not aware of. 

[pilgrim* 3514]

.. // .. the rest of what you talk about, whitelisting, private, autokick, honestly I have not come across those yet, was pretty sure they aren't even in game and are server-closing offenses if reported *scratches his head* then again I've taken a 48 hour break just because of how much time I've spent in game the past two weeks so maybe something happen in the last 48 hours I'm not aware of. 

 

ALL you have to do is set your server filter Max Ping to '0' to list all of the servers

Set your server filter to "KICK"

and SEE what comes up - when you have a good page of "Join=Kick" servers, TRY joining them, see how many let you in..

When you get bored, set your server filter to "PRIVATE"

When you have a page of those, see how many let you in..

other terms you can search for are 'Friends Only' 'Clan only' 'Do not Join' 'Character Reset' 'autokick' 'whitelist'..

You will also notice locked servers with players on them

Some servers ask for a password, instead of just kicking you in the first 5 seconds.

and ETC...

 

OR dont even bother with the above - Just put the Max Ping to '0' and scroll down the list reading what the titles of the servers tell you.

EVERYONE knows about this.

Really.... this is nothing to do with Battleye login problems, or lag, or anything game-side... Servers that have an ADMIN policy to not let YOU play have been growing for months. There are MANY of them.

 

On saturday night, EVERY server with between 1 and 6 players on it IS PRIVATE         (prove me wrong)

 

And I KNOW what the official statements all say about that... (they say 'private servers do not exist'). Im not even smiling, because I know

the statements mean 'private servers SHOULD NOT exist'. Even I understand that. But I'm talking about the REAL situation, not what's supposed to happen.

 

TRY IT : if you find a 3, or 4, or 6 player server that you can log and play at 10 pm saturday night, publish it here... A lot of folk will be impressed.

 

You'll find threads about this - but you WONT find solutions. The official stated solutions do NOT work. And really - really - everyone does know this.

 

In fact - with my workload, I play mainly very early in the morning, then don't come home till late. But weekend evenings are DEAD dude, they are HARD... I can play on a 40/40 server, or play on a 250 ping server (which is kinda cool I guess) but if I want a real server with a moderate/medium pop and a reasonable ping, I have SEARCH for one that accepts me and usually have to to wait till after 2 am. Here I am talking about Europe (all of it) - I cant really say what the USA situation is.

 

So who's complaining - NOT me - (lol) I was only pointing out in this duping and  server hopping thread that Admins cause a lot of the server hopping, not the general loot spawn itself, and those Admins are BADDER than hoppers...

(there are some exceptional admins - and those are the unselfish exceptions I SALUTE).

The real 'free server' and the genuine 'join us' servers, are saving the game from fragmentation and chaos - You, the 'open server' Admins ARE THE GOOD GUYS. You do honest work, honest fun, you carry the spirit of this game and may THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.

 

AzrailCross: Thanks for the 'gamemode' advice. I'm trying it now, but the only 'Wait for host' message I get is for 0 players or for 1 or 2 player (probably the admins?) - it's as though the server is turned off?  For the rest it is as I say above. Anyway, thanx for taking the time to give me the advice. It is appreciated.

 

xx pilgrim

Edited April 20, 2014 by pilgrim

[zeroy 240]

What duping?    Duping was eliminated with the last patch weeks ago.       I have not seen or read about any possible way to dupe after the last patch.       If there is, it is the most guarded secret in the history of a popular game.

 

Plain wrong. seen it done on videos post patch.

[sniperdoc 251]

The way I see it, a glitch is something in the game. If people aren't supposed to exploit it, then the devs should fix the glitch. All glitches are fair game until fixed. Obviously not a fair way to play, and I try to stay away from that, but it's in the game, and therefore, should not be treated as if it were a hack.

And this is where ethics breaks down... if people continue to use the glitch.

Edited April 2, 2014 by sniperdoc

[sniperdoc 251]

I *disabled* my firewall and still had major issues (invisible zombies, inventory items disappearing and being slow, rubber banding, ect.) then put it in gamemode and ALL issues magically went away

Actually, you SHOULD put in an AV Scan exemption for a game's directory in your computer's directory structure. This is why I change the default game install folder to another drive entirely. Easier for me to do exclusions. Not all programs need to be excluded from AV scans, so the Program Files directories should really continue to be scanned... but games? Not really necessary. Plus if there's a lot of scripting, then the game can be severely hampered by AV scans.

[AzrailCross 48]

-Snip-

 

Just in case it came across any other way, it was ment to just be friendly advice. But on another note..

 

I can't say I'd know, I never join 'custom' servers I suppose, haven't had a need to :/ Always assumed they couldn't whitelist ect at all, due to it being a server closing offense and a lot of money down the drain; nor can I recall having trouble on Fri/sat/sun at any hour on the servers I do join,  but you could easily be right. Just not my experience, I'll take a peek at 10pm sometime :D

 

I only join the US East/Central and sometimes 'West' servers (basically none with custom names, even if they say friendly) which on hardcore yeah, generally 0-4 players with maybe one server at 15-20 and .. I believe only on Sat have upwards of 40. Meanwhile on Normal it varies considerably, finding a 1-10 server isn't that hard, and the pings are always between (for me anyway) 40-60 but if I click them (sometimes) jump to 110 .. but get in it and it's stable at 40-60 again. This occurs all week at least in my experience so far, but perhaps I'm either lucky or wasn't online on Sat 'prime time' hours.. my schedule has been all sorts of screwed the past month.

Edited April 2, 2014 by AzrailCross

[pilgrim* 3514]

Just in case it came across any other way, it was ment to just be friendly advice. But on another note..

 

I can't say I'd know, I never join 'custom' servers I suppose, haven't had a need to :/ Always assumed they couldn't whitelist ect at all, due to it being a server closing offense and a lot of money down the drain; nor can I recall having trouble on Fri/sat/sun at any hour on the servers I do join,  but you could easily be right. Just not my experience, I'll take a peek at 10pm sometime :D

 

 

I've noticed a lot of USA servers have 'standard' names - maybe this is not such a problem in USA as here in Europe, the ping is usually high for me to look over there.

 

Yes - thanks for the advice.. I appreciate the help. Thank you.

 

DO try out the full server listing sometime, just to see what is happening, because it IS changing the way the game is played already while we are still early on in the Alpha. I was going to add screenshot I stuck together of "Keep Out" "buy your own server" "GTFO" "whitelist' " Clan and friends only" - but I have done this before, months ago, and the situation is only worse now. Even servers with 'normal names' and no "warning" in the title, quite often have autokick too.

 

To set up an autokick or a whitelist at home on your PC is very easy (as everybody knows - no secrets here) there are plenty of programs that read input to the screen, and send out automatic keystrokes in response. These are not 'interfering' with the Admin's server interface, so not BI detectable, they are just doing automatically what the Admin wants to do anyway.

I don't even say these guys are right or wrong.. I'll leave all that to Bohemia, the server providers and the Admins to argue it out. But it puts a different slant on the "server hopper" stuff when more and more players are 'crammed' into less servers, while the private servers have as much loot as they care to generate (and they are staying on the public hive, too)

To keep the record straight - there are also server Admins that deliberately invite all players to join in. I like these guys even if their servers are full all the time and it gets difficult to find 1 can of beans. They are trying to run a community for all players, and not being selfish about it.

 

But yes - thanks for the advice friend, I will look into it.  I appreciate group spirit and aid whenever it shows up.

 

xx pilgrim

Edited April 10, 2014 by pilgrim

[pilgrim* 3514]

And this is where ethics breaks down... if people continue to use the glitch.

 

Glitches are things that are IN the game, so little by little they are fixed. People discover them,and word gets around. Then they are gone. End of story. A glitch is found, becomes known, it gets fixed.

Hacks are things that turn up whenever some no-life-dude works out a way to mess with the game program, so hacks appear (maybe not often), get blocked, and new ones appear. Glitches are just in-game mistakes, fixable. Hacks are deliberate malice from outside, to mess with players, screw up the game, or to make money from suckers.

 

Hackers are con-artists. If they want to show how cool they are they should go hack a bank.

 

Something that might add to this discussion is 'meta-gaming' which is not-really-a-glitch-at-all, but can be used to advantage:  sometimes reasonable, sometimes unfair. In the mod for instance, you could scope a town from a distance and see if there were zombies active. Zombies in town mean players are there. That was not at all an intended effect of the zombie mechanic, but you can say that it 'fits' the game, and it's very difficult 'not to notice' them, so people used it.

Edited April 7, 2014 by pilgrim

[sniperdoc 251]

***snip***

I don't know how that was relevant... my point is just because there's a glitch, people shouldn't exploit the glitch for their own gain. That is a breakdown in ethics. Just got killed last night by someone that used the wall peeking glitch to shoot through the walls. Pathetic honestly... :(

[jbox88 27]

I could care less if people dupe gear, play how you want to play. The way I see it, one way or another they'll get a gun and we will end up doing PVP. However, if they're glitching into walls, glitching gear (unlimited ammo clips), or actually hacking, thats a whole other story. 

 

The other day I came across a guy trying to kill me in Electro. He walked all the way up to the top floor of the hospital, unloading his M4 every step of the way without reloading. Luckily, I ducked down and he must have been hip firing because it only took me 3 shots to kill him with my M4. I went to loot him when I realized he not only had no numbers on his dual-mag but his ammo crate had stacks of 2k+ M4. 

 

My point, anyone can get a gun, but once you taking it a step further and actually hacking or changing the game, thats where you should be banned in my opinion. 

[pilgrim* 3514]

I don't know how that was relevant... my point is just because there's a glitch, people shouldn't exploit the glitch for their own gain. That is a breakdown in ethics. Just got killed last night by someone that used the wall peeking glitch to shoot through the walls. Pathetic honestly... :(

 

Yes I DO agree with your point 100% - sorry if I went off topic. I was comparing glitchers with hackers. I wanted to say first that a glitch is inside the program (they are program mistakes)  so by their nature they get fixed when word of them gets around. Then they are eliminated. So, in a way it's good that players are victims of glitches because that advertizes the glitch and they are fixed faster. But I do NOT condone it - it is evil when some B*tard does that to you. A good Admin will act against glitchers whenever possible. The glitchers are worthless players. COMPLAIN and keep complaining when you find a glitch. We can clear them out faster.

 

I wanted to add meta-gaming - my take on an OP subject - because it's glitch-like but more difficult to sort out. It means using elements of the game in ways they were never intended to be used. Some say that players moving from one server to another "too often" (whatever that means exactly) is one example, And servers using auto-kick, and private member-only servers, is another - though that is really against the rules - but the rules are ignored and it is very, very common.

 

The result is many servers with only a few (3 to 10)  'private' players, and 'clan-only' servers - with plenty of loot, but also with full access to the public hive. And the rest of the servers with 35/40 players fighting it out or desperate to find a can of beans. It is a common decision for those 'genuine open server' players to move from one server to the next, where they can, trying to gear up or just to avoid starving.

 

So I'm open minded about 'server hopping' (I don't like that term) because I can see reasons and excuses for it. But Duping and Glitching exploits just stink. They can never be excused, as you say, i'ts pathetic, to put it mildly. I don't mind an honest sniper, I don't much like players who log inside a key loot building, but I HATE those dumb exploiters. Why do they even play? Beans to you on that, brother.

 

xx Pilgrim

Edited April 7, 2014 by pilgrim

[Mx7733 2]

Cheaters should most definitely be flocked and hanged by their mouse until they say “ sorry, I (we) will never ever do it again!” :P 

 

Hopping on the other hand, is it fair? Not sure… Playing on a full server as a fresh spawn is a challenge. It will take a long time to get some grub and weapon to defend yourself. And you will have to defend yourself! On a high pop server an axe is not enough. There are not enough zombies running around, and they can run.., to be scared of them. No high pop servers are mostly about PvP instead of surviving. So you need the gear! And if you only have 2 or 3 hours to play, well... hophop.

 

The survival part of the game is, what I hope, still underdevelopment. Wandering though the woods, fighting for your very existence against swarms of zombies, feminine, the elements and other humans that want you food etc… A world where you make need friends so you can craft, sleep and eat, while your mate stands watch. Where you can’t just hang around and kill fresh spawns, because the larger the group the more noise you make, the longer you stick around,..the more zombies will come.

 

Until that’s the case love the sinner, hate the sin!

[Jex 1104]

Exploiting any game to cheat is bad. It affects the whole player base and we all know what happened with AS50's in the mod and how ridiculous that got. So you have player X who plays the game as intended, looking around for gear to loots and player Y and Z who dupe their gear so the other can have it, have an mosin with everything, fully decked out and sniping all of the player X people. 

 

The lack of respawning gear, whilst needing to be fixed, is like RL would be so it's interesting to see how people behave at the moment. All the manufactured shit would be gone or start to decay over time making it useless. You would have to rely on other sources and you would need to build a community as more people = more knowledge = more chance to live. So currently the game is more realistic, we just don't have the options to farm yet but there really would be nothing left in the stores. I always head in land to loot and usually find the next town in land hasn't been touched and I like taking a walk or run through the countrside too.

[sniperdoc 251]

Exploiting any game to cheat is bad. It affects the whole player base and we all know what happened with AS50's in the mod and how ridiculous that got. So you have player X who plays the game as intended, looking around for gear to loots and player Y and Z who dupe their gear so the other can have it, have an mosin with everything, fully decked out and sniping all of the player X people. 

 

The lack of respawning gear, whilst needing to be fixed, is like RL would be so it's interesting to see how people behave at the moment. All the manufactured shit would be gone or start to decay over time making it useless. You would have to rely on other sources and you would need to build a community as more people = more knowledge = more chance to live. So currently the game is more realistic, we just don't have the options to farm yet but there really would be nothing left in the stores. I always head in land to loot and usually find the next town in land hasn't been touched and I like taking a walk or run through the countrside too.

I agree... this is one of the few games, where running from Balota to the military bases, to the NWAF and then the NEAF to Berezino isn't that bad an experience. I actually enjoy the detail of the game's environment. I'm lucky enough to be able to max it out and truly take in the virtual nature. Does it suck that it takes almost 2 - 3 hours to do? Yeah, but that's the realism of the game kicking in. I had a friend play for a couple of hours and he fell asleep running to one of the airfields... it's rather hilarious... but cool nonetheless.

I really hope that the developers think about how to fix the buildings so they can't be exploited like this. I would say an invisible barrier in all the walls (accounting for doorways, stairwells, and windows of course) that stops bullets. While not very realistic, considering 5.56 can go through concrete blocks, it'd cut down on the exploiting of looking through walls. What is kind of aggravating about the development process, is that I find it hard to believe that implementing new stuff wouldn't in some way impact the "fixing process" adversely.

Wouldn't it make more sense to first figure out how the mechanics work by implementing a FEW buildings, that work exactly as they should, no exploits and all that, and then apply the same creation procedure to the rest of the buildings that are being modeled and then deploy them all? Instead, it seems that they have 30 different buildings and structures, yet each one has its own nuances, exploits and what not that they'll have to figure out in the end. Where if they'd have figured out a correct process right at the beginning, the end work wouldn't be so bad...? But, what do I know about game development... ;) xD