Build and Shoot

I meant to address this issue some time ago, but never actually got around to doing it before. I would like to create awareness about this problem, because it does not only affect server hosts but also the entire Ace of Spades player base. People have been doing this for a long time and especially in times of an overall declining player base we need to have clear rules for those who decide to not play fair and manipulate their servers playercount.

Now for all of you who do not know what I am talking about, here is a quick explanation:
Player count manipulation is a modification in the pyspades/pysnip code to make the server appear more full on the master server list eventhough it has less players e.g. the master server shows that 6 players are playing on a server even when there is actually not a single one playing. This manipulation can be done in various ways: Servers can have a fixed player count, which means they will always have the same amount of players appearing on the master list e.g. always 30/32, they can also have a specific amount of extra “players” so that the amount of players listed will always be a bit higher than the servers actual population. There are also more subtle ways to manipulate the player count e.g. only adding additional players when the player count falls bellow a certain threshold.

Now what is so bad about this you may ask. 3 additional players are not going to change anything, right? As a server host I can clearly tell you that even smaller manipulations can change a lot. Even only 2 or 3 additional players can determine whether a server will be full for a whole day or remain completely empty. Players are more likely to join populated servers and that is where the problem lies: Servers with manipulated player counts will inevitably become more and more popular eventually making the player base shift from other servers towards those servers with fake numbers. It is just not fair that server hosts who do not resort to such measures will be the ones suffering from this.

Right now there are probably 2 servers using these fake player counts and ever since those servers were started the popularity of servers like *Sauerkraut or HOMO (oh yeah, the former HOMO servers also used this stuff, along with IceCraft, Call of Liberty and the old Stormwind servers) clearly declined. I do not want other servers to loose any more players because of this unfair advantage others take. I would like to encourage players to take note of this and report suspicious servers to the admins. As for the BnS admins, I hope you will be stricter about this in the future and faster take countermeasures e.g. temporarily blocking servers to prevent any further use of these foul tactics.

k thx for reading

If you know of any specific servers give me a pm or query on IRC and ill look into it.

It really would be good to see more people being aware that joining a server showing 20 players and then only finding 15 ingame isn't necessarily lag or a bug in the serverlist, but could be the result of intended manipulation.
I also hope that blacklisting such servers is considered an option.

I remember when servers would get "cached" though like the stormwind servers would show 5 but there would be no one one.

Would be great if you actually told us the names of those servers.

At this point I think it is save to say that "#1 skynet Aos [TC]" is using fake player counts.

This is why we need a blacklisting feature, to get rid of servers that are poorly moderated and unjust like these.

we have blacklisting

Lincent wrote:

This is why we need a blacklisting feature, to get rid of servers that are poorly moderated and unjust like these.

moderation and faking player counts are completely different topics

Jdrew wrote:

Lincent wrote:

This is why we need a blacklisting feature, to get rid of servers that are poorly moderated and unjust like these.

moderation and faking player counts are completely different topics

Faking player counts is unjust tho, read the other half of his post.

Manipulating player numbers is indeed a major offense and servers found to be doing this have been and will continue to be blacklisted from the master server.

Lostmotel wrote:

As for the BnS admins, I hope you will be stricter about this in the future and faster take countermeasures e.g. temporarily blocking servers to prevent any further use of these foul tactics.

In the past, first time offenders were only temporarily blacklisted, but I understand the importance of the points you raise in this thread and I agree we need to be stricter about this problem. Please report such servers in this thread to bring about public awareness as well as notify us about them so we can get them permanently blacklisted.

Morph had to shut down all but one of the Homo servers :'(

Lostmotel wrote:

I meant to address this issue some time ago, but never actually got around to doing it before. I would like to create awareness about this problem, because it does not only affect server hosts but also the entire Ace of Spades player base. People have been doing this for a long time and especially in times of an overall declining player base we need to have clear rules for those who decide to not play fair and manipulate their servers playercount.

Now for all of you who do not know what I am talking about, here is a quick explanation:
Player count manipulation is a modification in the pyspades/pysnip code to make the server appear more full on the master server list eventhough it has less players e.g. the master server shows that 6 players are playing on a server even when there is actually not a single one playing. This manipulation can be done in various ways: Servers can have a fixed player count, which means they will always have the same amount of players appearing on the master list e.g. always 30/32, they can also have a specific amount of extra “players” so that the amount of players listed will always be a bit higher than the servers actual population. There are also more subtle ways to manipulate the player count e.g. only adding additional players when the player count falls bellow a certain threshold.


Now what is so bad about this you may ask. 3 additional players are not going to change anything, right? As a server host I can clearly tell you that even smaller manipulations can change a lot. Even only 2 or 3 additional players can determine whether a server will be full for a whole day or remain completely empty. Players are more likely to join populated servers and that is where the problem lies: Servers with manipulated player counts will inevitably become more and more popular eventually making the player base shift from other servers towards those servers with fake numbers. It is just not fair that server hosts who do not resort to such measures will be the ones suffering from this.

Right now there are probably 2 servers using these fake player counts and ever since those servers were started the popularity of servers like *Sauerkraut or HOMO (oh yeah, the former HOMO servers also used this stuff, along with IceCraft, Call of Liberty and the old Stormwind servers) clearly declined. I do not want other servers to loose any more players because of this unfair advantage others take. I would like to encourage players to take note of this and report suspicious servers to the admins. As for the BnS admins, I hope you will be stricter about this in the future and faster take countermeasures e.g. temporarily blocking servers to prevent any further use of these foul tactics.

k thx for reading

Damn, that explains why whenever I join goonassault or a map of the sort there isn't ever anybody on :/