Hi. Well written, aprone. I agree that a topic like this would be good. Me being the developer of an online game my self I can say i've had all of these issues. Speaking of your rasis comment you get, some said people decided they were going to throw together an entire force to destroy my game. They thought I hated them because of whare they lived, so got every blind person they could that had heard of my game together and they started devising ways to cause me the most trouble they could. Yay for me coding a bad banning system... ![big_smile]()
anyway, that's something I would recommend to people who want to develop an online game. You really need to try your best, before releasing any multiplayer game, to have a very very secure banning system. Now don't take that hard, that's one of those things that's very hard to do and theres usually gonna be someone on this e
arth who is going to be able to go threw it like a cloud of mist, but you really need to put a lot of work and detication into it, in my opinion. That's what I learned the hard way. What happened, was that hole group of people was totally kicking my butt. Ok, makes me sceme like a baby, I know. Hehehe. They were busting threw there bans in litterily 2 minutes, because I only spent an hour developing a banning system to keep players off the game. Hmmm, that... wasn't smart? I'd recommend spending a lot of time developing a good banning system to make these issues easier to deal with. Those people used to break threw there bans and then spit at me telling me I can do nothing and that all I can do is try to temperarily ban themn and that it was only my quote dream quote to ban them for ever. Well, after a long process of talking to people who new what they were talking about in turms of security, those same people now beg me to unban them over and over and over, and it&#
039;s more of an annoyance rather than something game threatoning. You should make your game expecting hackers. Sad but true, it's going to happen, no matter how good your game is. It just happens. There are some real jirks out there who only want to cheat and make things as bad as they can, and if you just expect smooth sailing, that's litterily your first mistake. When making a multiplayer game, you have to expect it to be rough from the start. Maybe you'll have the off chance that it won't but chances are, it's probably going to happen. I don't write this to down anyones spirits, but the topic sort of entails, what to expect. so i'm just telling the trooth. And as aprone mensioned, you have to somehow make sure your good at moderation and professionalism in most cases. I sucked at this for a long time with my game and many people will tell you that. It even went as far once as me posting someones IP address publicly, which is the worst thing you
can do as an online game dev. I learned that mistake the hard way and hate my self for doing it. The only advice I can give you is... Don't ever do that. It's a really bad thing to do, and exposes loads of privacy issues, and it's just mean. People will trust that your server is secure and safe, and for the main mod to post an IP address... You have the people, most people who will forgive you. But if you were to make that mistake, you have to understand that there are major consiquences that you shouldn't even try to avoid. Well ok, I don't want that to come threw in the rong way... If you read this you would know i'm telling you you have to be really careful if you are trying to be an online game dev. I wasn't, and I learned my lesson, and am glad I did. I didn't try to avoid the fact that people would get angry at me, or that people would stop playing my game because I did something very stupid and immature. Because unlike how an offline g
ame is more controled by your updates and the people playing it, an online game is way more controled by you and if you do something bad... Ok i'm sure i've repeated my self about 20 times here so i'll stop, but in short, moderation is something you need to think about and take very seriously when creating an online game. I didn't, and well, that's what happened. I let my emotions get the best of me, and could have put someones privacy, that the players trust you with, in danger. So that's my hole take on the matter and just what i've experienced. Some of this stuff might sceme very odviest, but it's good to have a reminder, that would have helped me. Someone did finily just tell me flat out I wasn't doing a good job and i'm glad they did. It allowed me to try to fix what I was doing rong. I was a really, really, really crappy moderater in survive the wild when the game was newer. Anyone who played the game in those days would know t
hat. Sence then, i've been trying to fix that and do what i'm supposed to in turms of moderation. But my moderation problems is something to be discussed elsewhere, haha. I hope I didn't write this to bad and that you all get something out of it, and sorry if I got a bit too repetitive.
