if someone was cheating, it's quite obvious if you watch the demo. After you watch the demo, who cares? You want to listen to little whiners cry that they didn't cheat, good for you. I couldn't care less, if I catch you cheating, you're banned, end of story.
We know that's what _you'd_ do, and most other people running one, or a handful of servers, but we're running hundreds of game servers for a large company and we don't have the liberty of just ignoring people when they lodge an inquiry about the status of their ban. If we do, they go to the parent company and start all kinds of complaint processes rolling about how they were unfairly banned. Again, yes, this isn't an issue for the majority of server maintainers. I'm glad its not an issue for you. But it IS an issue for us. You've just repeated the same things over and over - that you don't see why they need to be kept, or whatever. But even if you don't understand or believe us, just assume, for the sake of argument, they do need to be kept. Whisper's flying-off-the-handle comments aside - we rely on those demos to be able to conclusively shut down users that complain about being banned unfairly (in fact, its one of the more sweet aspects of the job - when a user insists that he wasn't cheating and you supply a demo that clearly shows that he was, and then you get the story about his "little brother" or neighbour or whoever - everyone has been there). Demo viewing is a core part of how our servers are moderated. In the continued absence of an anti-cheating solution it is one of the most effective way to keep cheats and troublemakers out of the servers. However, as they can no longer be played for technical reasons and it doesn't seem likely that this can be corrected we'll simply have to investigate other avenues of dealing with this problem (rendering them to AVI isn't really going to happen, we have more than ten thousand records of this type that we'd have to go through - not to mention the disk space that would be required). Anyway, I think this conversation has been done to death. -- trog _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
