- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
I was going to post a reply found in the Gearbox forum, but, the person who posted seems to have beaten me to it. Thanx again PeterLJr888. you've been a good help in these initial endeavors and hope you will continue to be in the future.
I think most of us know about some kind of IP address scanner. I use one myself to set up and sometimes contact TeamSpeak servers (necessary if you are part of a Local Area Network because the address your computer acquires is not that of your gateway, the real IP address of your house and required information if you plan to run a server other people can use). But it won’t help. With the advent of DHCP and roaming IP addresses, games which use IP to block players are being overrun. It's simply a matter of restting the gateway, and wamo -BLAM-o; new IP address for your house. also, i recently heard (in the Gearbox forum) that dial-up users acquire a new IP address every time they dial in.
To my knowledge, Halo PC does not use IP as its means of banning. They seem to ban the ID number, requiring people to purchase a second copy if they wish to play Halo PC servers that they have been permabanned from.
So ISP scanners are novel, but ultimately useless in an admining situation. What Mr B has suggested is, in part from giving accesss to a few trustworthy individuals for admin purposes, that a monitoring program be set up (if one has not been already) where people can send in the event of a TK, allowing an admin to access the "registry" after the fact, see ME=KING Quiter TKing, and ban himfrom the server. While such a registry will not prevent other types of teamkillers, as it no system can monitor all the events in game without massive ammounts of memory to stor it, the registry (and the admins) can begin curtailing the Bungie server TK problem and at least remove the worst offenders.
So, if they ban by use of product code, and not IP, then these codes must be monitored for any successful ban to work. If the code is monitored, then it can also be saved in a registery. All that's left is to send an admin an email in regards to a specific time in which ME=KING or his ilk play their game instead of ours. The admin doesn't even have to be in the game if one of these programs is installed to the Bungie servers and (god willing) a patch for other dedicated servers in the future for CE (these jerks will migrate as they begin to lose targets. it's what they do).
Of course, all this requires an admin in the first place. A point of which the Bungie servers have lacked for a very long time.
[Edited on 8/29/2005]