While I personally am in favor of requiring this on every bot, I understand and appreciate the concerns that others have that such a requirement would drive people away from ENT. That is why my proposal is to launch only a few bots that require it and test to see if it works and proves popular. After a month or so, we can decide whether to expand the program, shut it down, or just keep it going as-is.
Here is how I think it should be implemented:
- 1) Label any bot that requires registration and linking [ENT-AH] (for anti-hack)
2) Have a temporary lobby appear for those that try to join the game that are not registered (similar to the temporary lobby that people see when they are banned). In that lobby, have a message telling them that this bot is an Anti-Hack pilot bot and requires registration to play on. Tell the player to come to clanent.net, sign up for the forum, and link their account.
3) Require email address confirmation in order to sign up to the forum (I can't remember if this is already required). Just send a link to their email address when they sign up that they have to click to activate their account.
The benefits of this are obvious:
We already do everything we can to discourage map hackers by banning and stripping their stats. This works great for players that actually care about their stats, but it does nothing to discourage those that seek to cheat at any cost and ruin games. There are plenty of players on our bots that do just that.
These are also the people that are most likely to ban dodge. If they get caught, all they do is create a new BNET account and change their IP -- and they are back playing on ENT bots. The [ENT-AH] bots would require said hackers to sign up for a new email address, change their IP, come to clanent.net, sign up for a new forum account, log back into their email to activate their forum account, sign onto bnet to create a new bnet account, go back to clanent to link their bnet account, and back to bnet to confirm the link. These additional steps would discourage hackers (and ban dodgers) from playing on any [ENT-AH] bots, and they would likely take their hacking and ban dodging elsewhere.
The additional benefit of such a system is that it would drive more people to the forum, thereby increasing community participation (which we rely upon for ban requests) -- and more ad revenue to keep ENT going :)
"Suspicious Subnet Alert"
Of course, this is not foolproof - but aside from banning subnets and innocent people in turn, there is little more we can do. To protect against those who would go through all the above hoops just to ban dodge, we could make a "suspicious subnet alert" -- that is, if someone comes onto clanent and signs onto the forum from a subnet where a map hacker was recently caught, we would get an alert and know to keep an eye on them.
Conclusion:
I hope this wasn't too long for you to read. I obviously feel passionately about this and my only motivation is to make ENT the best gaming community on bnet.
Please let me know what you think of this idea and if it would be worth at least trying.
