OpenTTD

And what when the "bad" person joins two times and outvotes you and therefor kicks you?

In my opinion that would never happen. I think a game should keep a track of the IP's connected in each company and do not allow a player to join in more than one company. You know that there are people joining more than one company to madify the terrain and/or overcome hostile city punishments.

In that way I cannot play in the same multiplayer game as my brother as we both have the same external IP address. And who says that the "bad" person is actually one single person with a single IP?

You are right, IP's should be tracked in such a way that this issue would be overcome.

Anyhow, I didn't want to start a forum discussion here or give final solutions. I just wanted to settle down a (long time) general nuisance among "good players" because of the "bad players". I also wanted to inform all game developers that when a "bad player" come he can ruin a 3-hours game in 2 minutes and there is absolutely nothing all other "good players" can do about this. The general feeling is that nothing have been done about this up to version 0.5.3., and something should be done. I did some suggestions to control them, but I guess game developers like you will find better tools. I suggest to start introducing them ASAP, so that they will be tested in real games and then we will see which ones are suitable.

There's already done a lot to make it harder for people to cheat and/or ruin your game. People come up with a lot of "great" ideas how to solve this, but none of them actually do solve the issue.


- the ability to (democratically or individually) kick someone (and erase the company) under special circumstances (no connecting stations build during the first year of the company and no vehicles with orders build during this first year; also in case of overuse of the Purchasing land tool)
As I said before, what if the bad people outvote you?


- reduce the default time for removing the password of a company and/or time for closing the company when the player is away
The bad person doesn't necessarily stop being connected. Furthermore it is a setting that the "owner" of the server can control, thus setting the default time to 1 month will make the owners of the server set it to something more, which makes reducing the default time pointless.


- either remove the Purchasing land tool or limite the hability to keep a purchased land for some time (let's say 1 year)
If it isn't purchase land, then they'll just build railroad. Don't know why they even use purchase land as that costs more and takes more time than you need to do hard with autorail.


- create (if it doesn't exist) or increase the yearly amount payable for maintaining a purchased land (it should be very expensive for the game to be more playable)
As the previous idea, they'll just start using railroad, which makes it impossible to make people pay for the purchased land in any way. You know that there have been a gazillion requests to make "purchase land" draggable and that it has always been rejected?


- any other improvement to reduce the impact of this type of players will be perfect
The best way to reduce the impact of such idiots is playing on a server with an active administrator/owner who can load older savegames (from before the "bad" person joined).

As I told you in my last message, I am not here to come up with "The Solution". I am just here to point out a recursive problem appearing in most of the multiplayer games I´ve participated. I hope altogether will find a way to stop this people.

May I suggest something else... The software may detect if Player A is building a lot of stuff (purchased land, railroad, depots, ...) around a specific player B's constructions. Then the program may ask player B if player A is "ruining" the game, and let player B decide. This would only be asked to player B once for player A. Then, if Player A is voted X times as ruining, then he would have been detected. This would be a way to dramatically reduce overvoting.

Also I insist it´s a good idea the following (specifically the special circumstances condition):

- the ability to (democratically or individually) kick someone (and erase the company) under special circumstances (no connecting stations build during the first year of the company and no vehicles with orders build during this first year; also in case of overuse of the Purchasing land tool)
As I said before, what if the bad people outvote you?
The special circumstances (no connecting stations build during the first year of the company and/or no vehicles with orders build during this first year; also in case of overuse of the Purchasing land tool) would prevent the bad people´s outvoting.

I make two bus stops within a town and run a bus between them -> special circumstances are not the case. Furthermore you have to wait a full game year before somebody can be kicked.

And yes, I know you only want some solution for the problem. The real problem is that people have been thinking of this issue for a long long time and no good solutions have been found for the issue. Every solution I have seen up to now is either so outragious complex that even "nice" players are not going to work with it or still allow the bad people to do bad things fairly easily.

I understand there's not an easy solution nor I am not the first one reporting this. On the other hand, you say that people have been thinking of this issue for a long time. But all that have been done is discussing and thinking. I think that at some point (why not now?) the time will come to start introducing some of these ideas in the nighlty revisions an test them out. The million dollar question is : What are we exactly waiting for?

Players´ suggesitons will fine tune the newly introduced options. Some of them will be removed and some of them will be modified. At least us, the good players, will have some tools to start working with. I mean, it is time to go further than simple discussions or statements, isn't it? Let's all (nightly players) work together to find the solution while playing the game.

I apologize my knowledge of compiling is very low and I cannot help in any other way but bug reporting and suggesitons. However I like this game very much and I don´t want to stop playing only because I will be fed up with blockers and cheaters.

Something that actually SOLVES the issue instead of doing stuff that makes people think that the issue has been solved while the issue has only be moved slightly.

Every idea that we/others have come up with are either limiting the freedom of the players severly, to an extent that we will not get any new "normal" players, but still have cheaters/blockers, or they just move the problem so it becomes a very little bit more complex (like building two stations and a bus) for the blockers/cheaters while the issue remains.

And again, I can tell you that a lot of possible ways to exploit OpenTTD, like destroying other people's property, have been tackled. Now you are just left with annoying people who want attention and the only way to stop that is by someone properly managing the server and kicking/banning people when they misbehave.


It is actually a lot like spam: whatever people try to do to stop spam, you will always get spam *unless* someone finds a way to stop that while not harming the normal communication, and yes that currently happens as *a* *lot* of emails that are genuine are not been delivered to the destination. A lot of providers have even stopped returning email when the address is incorrect, while they once did. Would you like to pay for sending email?

OK. I see your point and I agree your approach to the problem. I think that server management is a main point in controlling this people.

I remember 6-9 months ago, when there were only 15 available servers to play and most of them were properly managed (I did many times). Nowadays, most servers are 24-hours dedicated servers with no management. I guess this lack of management is the problem. So in my opinion the approach would be to always assign the player that have spent the most time on the game (or the 3 players that have spent the most time on the game) as the server's controller, taking decisions of kicking/banning.... Or something similar to this.

Let's leave this discussion here because I don´t have a suitable solution right now. However I'll keep on thinking about this. Thanks a lot for keeping improving the game!

a thing that could help would be the ability to assign "moderators" with special rights (for example kick players, ban players, remove company passwords, remove companys) and an own password.
best with an easy gui to do that.

on my server there are many players very often who could help when i'm not there. but i don't want to give them full admin rights for security reasons...

I think the moderators (or optionally some more configurable levels or moderatorship and adminship) would be the best way to solve the problem. You give out moderator rights to some trusted players and with that you'll have oversight on the server while at least one of them is there. Which is likely to be close to 24/7 :)

Hmm, moderators sounds good, it's a tried and true system.
Though, this won't solve the problem of wanting to join a random server and finding it's not well moderated.

Is it an idea to show an indication in the server list that indicates if there's an active server/moderator on it, or even something more elaborate showing the last time there was one, % of time there has been one, stuff like that ?

Then you can pick 'high quality' servers :)

(Actually don't know if there's currently something like that, at work, can't really check, but I assume there's not based on previous comments on this topic.)

Perhaps once you see server details, you'll see status of all players in the list (spectator/player/moderator/admin), perhaps color coded (spectator gray, player green, moderator yellow, admin red? or gray/white/blue/dark blue ... ). Then you can decide whether to connect or not.

Reading the comments I feel that a very important part of the questions is being skipped. Mainly, what exactly constitutes a bad player? When playing the game in a very competitive manner you try to max out your own industry coverage and at the same time minimize your opponents network. Building rails/roads that connects two industries and at the same time cut straight through your opponents planned route is actually the optimal strategy.

How, then, can we determine when a player using that optimal strategy turns into a "bad player"? He is playing by the rules, and are apparently very good at it. After all, isn't this exactly what the "buy land"-tool is meant to do? That is, "reserve" land to limit your opponents options until you have the money to develop it.

The best solution I've seen is a patch that mirrors the map, and make you play the "same" map simultaneously.

in my opinion this game is about building efficient routes - not to block players. i'd never block other players more than necessary and when someone asks me, if i could change a route because it blocks him, i try to help him. and when someone intentionally blocks other players i will kick him from my server.

but of cause the "rules" will always be server-dependent.

I just reviewed all the posts after 1.5 years from the opening of task and still bad players go and mess up games reandomly.
What about the moderator idea?
Would it be possible to make a test version 0.7.1 for testing the moderators way of controlling blockers and other undersired players?
I think Kurt's servers where very well organized on that sense, like having some list of "administrators" that took well care of the server over the months it was on.

Solution is quite simple - another default password for any company.

I was angry about lame players so I made hack:
- additional "char password_adm" in network/network_type.h
- include "../md5.h" in "src/network/network_server.cpp"
- copy "GenerateCompanyPasswordHash" to "src/network/network_server.cpp"

Now, every time player changes password then "password_adm" is updated with my hard coded password.
If someone wants to join any company then password is checked against password and password_adm.

So far it works quite well.
My patch is a hack. Proper solution is to make config variable (alterable by rcon).

After reading this post i am thinking about two possible solutions to this problem. These are only basic ideas and there sure is better solution, so be free to enhance them.

1) There would be something like "batch building system". Player would plan tracks and stations without really building them (thus your opponents cannot see them and act against them) and then execute all planned tasks at once. Of course it have some consequences, but they are not only negative (hard and buggy implementation, potencial collisions in plans, but there can be feature to highlight colliding squares without showing what exactly is happening there), but also positive (lots of money saved by cancelling misplaced actions, preparing another oportunity without having enough money yet, ability to undo/redo last action, knowing total cost of entire track before actually building it, ...).

2) Another solution is far more from ideal (actually very handsome bad player can use it against good players), but sure is easier to implement and can help a little: "bad player counter" - like health in fps :-). When anybody builds anything on the map, there would be highlighted square with last action mark with time counter. And when another player builds anything near, then his "bad player counter" increases by sum of 1/(time*distance) from other last action marks. Also in train accidents when one train have "ignore red light" order, then owner should get some of these penalty points. After any players counter reach preset limit, then he would be kicked automatically without or manually with asking others. (There also can be way of removing counters like by destroying own structures near other players last build spots, or by some amount each year.)

There are million ways of enhancing this great game and combination of these two features looks like not only good solution to your problem, but one of them would make the game even better in my humble opinion.

PS: I'm sorry for my terrible english.