[New] Blacklist incorporation

[bigmazi]

So, I had an interesting conversation with a VF4 admin in Discord regarding my report about a cheater - which prompted me to create this thread.

I'm running a server and it happened that I had an opportunity to spectate a particular player with my own eyes on my own server while they were using obvious, cleanest aimbot - which led to immediate reaction from my side in the form of a permanent ban.

I shared the STEAMID in the Discord server which was noticed by a particular VF4 admin who thanked me and stated about adding the player to some sort of list of suspicious-looking persons or whatever it is called. And that's all cool... But, let's speak seriously... You ain't just gonna wait for them to cheat on your server, are you?

One can use fingers from a single hand to count the amount of alive servers. If not to work with current servers, there won't be anyone else to work with, and that's a scary thought. So, the idea is: I think it would be productive to copperate in the blacklist tracking on the trust basis.

So far I have only single one banned ID (which also initiated all of this) - the list of previously banned players was lost together with my previous server becoming shut down, that's a shame. Biggest achievement, though, would be readiness to share new ones in the future. Reasons for ban may differ, but, personally, I think cutting roads for cheaters would be a good place to cooperate. I suppose, so far, VF4 has a fairly long list of those?

To end, let's talk about what we've started with - Discord conversation. I shared some pessimistic thoughts there about how sad it is that an admin from one server doesn't trust the other admin even though there are not that many left etc etc etc. But now let me rather make a compliment about how disciplined, liberal and humane VF4 admins may be, ending every single one of their message with how they can't ban someone without obtaining a proof more solid than a word. Yes, let's better view it from this bright side.

 

[VintagePC]

> You ain't just gonna wait for them to cheat on your server, are you?

Yes, we are - at least until we receive satisfactory evidence otherwise to substantiate an externally submitted ban. (and your thinly veiled sarcasm and derision towards our policies isn't helping your case.)

You are painting this as an issue of "trust me", which is a gross oversimplification of the bigger picture. There are a number of policies and processes that our staff are required to follow when issuing bans or other punishments, and and one of those is logging the details and satisfactory evidence of the incident in case there is a need for future review, whether it be a ban appeal by the player in question, repeated infractions, or something more serious like a staff member having been discovered as issuing malicious bans or otherwise abusing their permissions.

If one of our staff has issued the ban, then I or any of the other senior staff can easily find the information we need to review the situation, regardless of whether the issuing staff member is available online within a reasonable time-frame, or even on the team anymore.

However, with bans that come through word of mouth as you are proposing, none of that information is guaranteed to remain available in any way. So in the case of a ban appeal, I would have exactly what you stated at *my* disposal to both uphold or repeal a ban - the exact same word that you are proposing we trust for the initial issuing of the ban - which cannot be independently reviewed for or against the person making the case, and that puts the ban reviewer in an impossible situation. They are now faced with three options:

1. Upholding a ban for something that did not affect us directly, and for which we don't have anything appreciable to substantiate. That just makes us look like assholes.
2. Overturn what could be a valid ban for the exact same reason, That makes us look silly.
3. Tell the person to take it up with the reporter to clear it up. That'll go over well when it's a ban on *our* servers.

None of those are fair to the community or the people involved.

Analogy time:
If you and I both teach a class, you're basically proposing that I flunk a common student because you caught them copying on a homework assignment in yours. I'm certainly going to look closely if they hand me an essay for my class, but I would be hard pressed to justify immediately failing or expelling them for something they did not do in my class. It doesn't matter how much I trust your word as a fellow teacher, I cannot ethically do what you're proposing.

 

[bigmazi]

All right, I've got your point and don't really think I have a reason to convince anyone here.

Though, 2 moments:

Even if you don't want to have other server blacklists as a trusted source, I'd personally would be glad to obtain the list of banned cheaters on VF4 to repurpose it on my server. If there's an easy way to get one, like, those IDs are in a separate config or in a sortable table or anything like that, I'd like to ask for it. If it's something that requires a greater effort to construct, I don't think it's worth it so I don't ask for it in this case.

And the second is the analogy. I love them thus can't resist discussing one.

So, in short, it doesn't follow the core idea of my suggestion. There is no reason to flunk students on tasks they didn't fail. F mark only for a particular cheated/failed work is a sufficient punishment... wait, it's not even punishment, that's just a grade which is a separate type of sanction. Even if you fully trust the mark, there's no reason to extrapolate it further since it's already a sufficient reaction to a closed case. Well, there's no "if" actually, the marks, in fact, are trusted by default - they are used as a basement to wide variety of decisions in the educational process. What's on the other hand? Cheating on a single server sounds a lot like a sufficient reason to be banned from the entire game. Even though such a sanction has a protective aspect in a form of preventing putting fair players together with unreliable ones, that's also a real and well-deserved punishment. So, an example which looked similar on the first glance - turned out to have a diametrically opposite essence: trusted source which you can't use to assert anything (have expectations at best) VS a potentially useful assertion coming from an untrusted source.

It doesn't really matter, but, as I said, I just love analogies, so yeah.

 

[VintagePC]

Yeah, there isn't anything ready to go that's sorted (or filtered) by reasons or duration etc; it looks like it's an all-or-nothing deal that just dumps every entry as a banned_id.cfg for srcds to consume. Sorry. It'd require writing a custom script of some kind that processes the database and makes decisions based on each individual entry whether or not it should be included - complicated by the fact the reason field is technically freeform