How about shaming cheats, bullies etc?
These are pretty heavy demands to be resting on the shoulders of the only developer of a game with a community of this size.
Little do you know jitspoe has implemented initial zbot counter-measures,
probably the best speed cheating protection found in any quake2 game/mod and likely a couple small hack protections against things I'm not even aware of, as well as the swear filter which were all initiatives he took upon himself(just going back to what you were saying about bullying).
Providing even a
moderate level of cheat protection to this game would require more development than the actual game itself. There are also quite a bit of implications surrounding the fact that the game is released under the GPL license. If you look at Q2 cheat protection clients such as Q2ACE and NoCheat you can see that these forms of cheat protections were in a very gray area in terms of abiding by GPL regulations and their protection mechanisms were more or less
easily circumvented by skilled hackers (not the wall variant; the kind that can actually program and reverse engineer algorithms in assembly after circumventing the binary protection or anti-disassembling measures taken to protect the external cheat protection .dll from them).
In addition to this, even if such cheat protection was created, it would typically require a centralized server capable of performing updates to clients and servers as new cheats have been leaked to the public. These things cost money, and I don't think that the community can provide enough donations to support the burden of on-going operational fees. The community led cheat protection projects of other games much like
Cheating-Death consist of groups of numerous developers equally if not more skilled than jitspoe and divisions of intelligence teams that are obtaining private cheats as they become 0day. Commercial cheat protection alternatives such as PunkBuster also work in the same matter, but I can only imagine how expensive their services would be, once again too expensive for this community.
The responsability of shaming these people typically falls in the domain of
server admins and the
community.
The ability to record demos of players is something that everyone has access to. The ability to ban players is something every server admin can do. There are plenty of people on the forum that appear to be wallhack critique experts when it comes to demos. So why don't you start calling out the people who can't be bothered to record demos of players but instead whine and complain in server chat, then make there way to the forums and do the same. Or how about the server admins that refuse to ban any of the players:
A) who have admitted to recent cheating
B) who have solid evidence of cheating against them
C) who constantly bully, hassle and disturb public servers in a vulgar immature way
Blitz and I took on all of these responsabilities ourself when we ran the public eR33t servers and never once had it become so time consuming to make it not worth doing. The cheats haven't changed since much, the wallhacks used then are still used today, the only difference is a group of server admins who aren't taking the initiative upon themselves to keep their server clean, and it's very unfortunate that legit players have to be constantly subjected to the type of play that goes on in the public game community. The solution is
not giving more people op-login to the server(that'll just contribute the map-change fury).
Please feel free to move this post to a more appropriate forum as you see fit.
P.S. loial21 this is not a personal attack, please don't respond with your apologies, flames or anything irrelevant to this post.
