Players abusing Login Confirmation to "reserve player slot", preventing others from joining

T

trevorjd

Refugee
Hi FunPimps,

Our server has become quite popular during the A20E phase and we're getting quite a few people reporting that the server is refusing them entry due to "Server Full" despite that we've only got about 3/4 of the slots full. Having snuffled about, we've come to the conclusion that some selfish players are disconnecting for blood mood or to go for dinner, reconnecting immediately and leaving their game sitting at the "Login Confirmation" page aka rules page. They are connected to the server and occupying a slot but not spawned in, so are safe from Z's and idle timeouts. Unfortunately this prevents some players from joining.

To address this, we've removed the login confirmation text. Unfortunately this also means that our server rules are no longer being displayed prior to the player joining the world, which is less than ideal. Please consider moving the login confirmation from the last step to the first. That is, the client would download any confirmation text and require confirmation prior to a formal connection attempt being made. Once the connection is established, the player is immediately spawned.

Thanks,

Trev

 
It's both sad and funny that this is a thing.

Could you not just make a global message that in the future, you will ban anyone who does this from now on? That should at least deter a few from doing it, and the ones that continue doing it... ban them.

 
The trouble is that it's extremely labour-intensive to manage. The only way I can think of is for an admin to log in, do an LPI for a list of connected players then teleport around looking to see if they have a toon in-game. If you get there and there's no toon, now they're a suspect. You need to wait a few minutes to see if they were just AFK for a quick pit-stop. How long do you wait on that player to show up before you label them as a bad guy and swing the ban hammer? At the risk of unfairly punishing someone who was just getting yelled at for failing to take out the garbage before they sat down at the PC, do you use the 2lb tappytap or the 10lb sledge?

On top of that, when you've got a server with 20 slots, most of which are full and the player list is constantly changing due to people coming and going, it takes a long time to do and it's confusing to keep track of who you've checked. Far better for the game mechanics to simply not create the situation in the first place.
 
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A couple things. When I left myself at the acknowledgement screen, I don't come up on LPI, so I'm not convinced they take a slot?

Secondly, if you want to monitor the logs, you could easily write a script to look for something like:

2021-12-21T20:31:33 98465.632 INF RequestToEnterGame: EOS_000291ac1595339cc7f4985e67739e16/Pernicious

Without a line like this:

2021-12-21T20:32:23 98514.902 INF RequestToSpawnPlayer: 183, Pernicious, 7

Within say, 60 seconds. You can see within my logs I took 50 seconds to click through and spawn.

You don't even have to do it in real time. Just put up a warning that reserving slots won't be tolerated, then once a day, run your script and ban those who do it anyway. Problem solved. (Excepting rare cases where someone changes their mind and decides not to join right then)

 
It's now 9:30pm here with 18/20 on the server and I haven't had any complains about people not being able to get in, so there may be something to it.

I like your script idea very much. I know nothing about scripting but I'm sure I can teach myself. Output_log is the one to search, right?
 
Yes, that's the right file. 

Python is probably the most worthwhile language to learn, as it's actually broadly used, so once you learn it, it can be useful for some many other things in life and server admin (I once wrote a little script that polled my solar panels to see what they were generating, and if it was more than 3kw, it'd turn my car charger on during the day. Otherwise, my car charger would only turn on when off peak electricity kicked in).

Perl is much older and far less used, but in my opinion, a bit easier to learn for manipulating text files... Oddly enough, perl stands for "practical extraction and reporting language"... It was designed to manipulate log files. You'd be learning a dead language not used for much else, but it's quick and dirty and it's up to you whether you want to put in the extra effort to learn something more useful.

 
trevorjd said:
It's now 9:30pm here with 18/20 on the server and I haven't had any complains about people not being able to get in, so there may be something to it.

I like your script idea very much. I know nothing about scripting but I'm sure I can teach myself. Output_log is the one to search, right?
Click to expand...
and if you put the rules by pressing "ESC" ?, and in the player inventory say press esc to read rules I used it on my server

 
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