Save Empire Earth

Hi!

As I am suffering of a cold, I got some time to implement some stuff I always wanted to add to NeoEE, despite being rather technical. First of all, NeoEE.net now uses a SSL certificate from "Let's Encrypt", so by standard, NeoEE.net is now reached via HTTPS.
Also, I published the source code of the NeoEE server to a private Git repository. Everybody who got a notification by me can now push/pull/clone/fetch from the official repository. The source codes of neoee.dll, the installer and the updater will follow.

Last, but not least, something some users might find controversial: Recently, many players complained about smurfers spoiling games. There were already many discussions here about this topic containing different suggestions: prevent smurfing by cdkey checks, confirm accounts by a confirmation email or make the smurf <---> user name table public (as for now, only I can see which player got which smurf accounts).
On the other side, many players said that smurfing is part of their EE multiplayer experience and would hate it to see it being removed. I therefore rather decided to do nothing about it.
Because of this, many players got frustrated and started to ban every user from their games with names they don't recognize, either expecting them to be noobs or smurfs. It's okay if you don't always want to play with noobs (as long as there are still some players who don't mind to do it now and then). And it's okay if you ban smurfs. But what's not so okay is banning noobs (accidentally). When you only want to play with people you certainly know, please use the "Invite only" or "Ask to join" features and rank your games according to your requested skill level. It is very frustrating for new players logging in and joining a game and then just being banned for no apparent reason.

Anyway, the upcomming server version (Leviathan 0.4.0.7) will contain a somewhat trade-off between the smurf-yay and smurf-nay fractions: Banning from game rooms will now affect any account. So if you have, say, an account "A" and you got banned, you won't be able to join the game by logging in with your account "B". You will stay banned. Same goes for muting. This means: if you smurfed and got banned, don't expect to be able to join the game without having got unbanned before, even if you've logged in with your main account. If you want to join the game, you have to ask the host for getting unbanned, effectively losing your smurf anonymity on this particular account. This will be a test run for, let's say, a month. But if there is no excessive protest, it will stay. And now, dear fellows, argue! I want to see blood.

Jodocus wrote:Banning from game rooms will now affect any account.

The way I see it this effectively will kill smurfing for good. I assume the anti-smurf players will just continue to ban everyone they don't know. Then get happy when 1/50 of those log out, and login to the main/known account and ask: Can you please unban my smurf account "alibaba" so I can join?

Also how will this effect the smurf "teams" who login to each others accounts to make their smurf more believable, Example: Oh it turns out "alibaba" has now played against every eC player, he must be a real korean.
If lets say 4 people has logged into alibaba, and one of those guys gets banned does that mean all those 4 people are now banned?

Ps I know nothing of smurfing and have just heard rumors people might do the above example.


*Edit*
Also you can argue "the smurf can just host his own room and never join anybody else's room while on his smurf account, and therefor never get banned" but this doesn't really hold up since you can manually ban people even though they haven't been in your room.

Arntzen wrote:

Jodocus wrote:Banning from game rooms will now affect any account.

The way I see it this effectively will kill smurfing for good. I assume the anti-smurf players will just continue to ban everyone they don't know.

So smurfing relies entirely on the fact that the game host was too dumb to use the "Accept to Join" option? If a host only wants to play with people he knows, he can already do it like that. And still, there is smurfing. Smurfing someone who really doesn't want to play with smurfs at all is rather trolling - the server should not support that. The banning option now only is getting consequent - what would be its use?
There are also already other methods to find out smurfs: when blocking a player, a striked key symbol (indicating the CDKey) appears next to the head of the user. He/she will not be able to send any messages to you, no matter what account he/she is using. If you host a game and ask everyone to write "Cheese" and you notice someone just will not write it, you can be quite sure that it's a smurf.

My argument is: many players smurf to actively troll and ruin other people's games. When getting banned, this happens for a particular reason.

Arntzen wrote: Also how will this effect the smurf "teams" who login to each others accounts to make their smurf more believable, Example: Oh it turns out "alibaba" has now played against every eC player, he must be a real korean.
If lets say 4 people has logged into alibaba, and one of those guys gets banned does that mean all those 4 people are now banned?

No. The ban applies only to the one who faced the ban. It is CDKey-bound.

My bad, I thought it would be made permanent. This only effects your current game room.

And as a little extra, there will be a prototype for a protection system against fake clan members: creating accounts with certain clan tags will be impossible (including names with identically looking unicode characters).

I like the idea of the banning from a room now affects all of the player accounts. I have recently have had problems with a few players messing up f11 60 games attacking early. When will this be released?

d555killer wrote:I like the idea of the banning from a room now affects all of the player accounts. I have recently have had problems with a few players messing up f11 60 games attacking early. When will this be released?

Released already

Jodocus wrote:When you only want to play with people you certainly know, please use the "Invite only" or "Ask to join" features and rank your games according to your requested skill level.

This is all the really needed to be said.

But fuck those people who can't be bothered to play with new players. EE has suffered for years because of them. It is especially terrible when old players try to come back, get called a noob or a smurf, and then get discouraged from ever playing EE again because the only people left are arrogant assholes.