Halo 1 & 2 for PC
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Subject: Admins please.
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Dont bother with the Gearbox forums. Its just full of kids and CE fanboys. They cant even run their own forum properly so any hope of getting help over there is a 'no go'.
If I were you I'd just record the IP addresses of the TKers themselves. There is a program that lets you do this, one guy was using it the other day, he could see my IP and ISP details on screen. I think it was similar to ASE but i dont know what its called.

  • 08.29.2005 6:45 AM PDT
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Posted by: Achernar UK
Dont bother with the Gearbox forums. Its just full of kids and CE fanboys. They cant even run their own forum properly so any hope of getting help over there is a 'no go'.
If I were you I'd just record the IP addresses of the TKers themselves. There is a program that lets you do this, one guy was using it the other day, he could see my IP and ISP details on screen. I think it was similar to ASE but i dont know what its called.

I come from Gearbox Forums and i think i may have found out
who hosts the servers?
Where are the servers?

Think about it, if the EU servers are in Europe how do they manage to admin those servers. They could only be able to manage the ones in United States. Since Microsoft is near where Bungie HQ is, it probably means Microsoft is the admin and is in charge of the BUNGIE servers.

The Answer Lies Here

The BUNGIE servers are set up deep inside the Microsoft datacenter on high end machines with plenty of bandwidth to deliver a solid gaming experience. Please note that the auto-banning functions of the Halo PC Dedicated Server are in full effect. Teamkillers will be automatically kicked and subsequently banned from our servers if they continue to kill friendly players. This ban applies to all of our BUNGIE servers so play nicely!

If you live outside of the U.S., you may have a better experience playing on our "EU-BUNGIE" servers. These servers are nestled away in a secret location in Dublin, Ireland to deliver Halo online goodness to our friends throughout Europe. The dedicated servers are all running the automatic banning systems to prevent team-killers from spoiling the fun but you won't run across any of the HomeLAN admin staff on these servers.










  • 08.29.2005 7:57 AM PDT
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Unfortunately you've told us nothing we didnt already know.
The point is that it is easy to circumvent the auto-ban. What we are looking for in PERMANENT ban, or live admins.

  • 08.29.2005 9:25 AM PDT
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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]

  • 08.29.2005 9:13 PM PDT
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i was playing Battlefield 2, and i discovered something. It's built in console lets you use punkbuster to vote kick using a console command. If halo just implemented punkbuster in another patch, we could be vote-kicking him. I know that he could just come back since it's a kick, but it's better than nothing.

  • 08.29.2005 11:11 PM PDT
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I like that idea. While I can see the chances for abuse, it gives the community both a level of control and some responsibility.

2 problems:

1. Can punkbuster be set up as a patch for halo PC and Mac? Will it work with both?

2. How much money is someone going to have to shell out for it? Is this freeware or do the people who created it only give it out to nonprofits?

I'll Google these answers as best i can myself, but keep the questions in mind.

  • 08.30.2005 12:39 AM PDT
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Alright, Mr B. I've gotten my first response from Bungie. No response from gearbox or MS as yet, but I'm still working on them.

It was, sadly, little more than a form letter saying that they "hear me". IE, they know about the situation. But further requests for exactly what they are intending to DO about it have fallen on deaf ears. Of course, the questions have been posed to MS, not Bungie, so I'll be sending an email to them as well. Just a heads up, and a little bump, to let people know they're not alone...player wise.

[Edited on 9/8/2005]

  • 09.08.2005 7:30 AM PDT
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The HPC DS does not create log files. There is a separate program written by Kybo_Ren at Gearbox's forums that will create log files for the HPC DS. Log files are only standard with the HCE DS, and, even then, only if you enable them.

Unfortunately, Kybo_Ren will be out of contact for the next few months.

The vote ban system would work much better. It's very sad that Half-Life and it's subsequent mods have far better features and far more demanding games (server-side, at least) than HPC, and yet they still incorporate many features - vote ban / kick, voice comm, Anti-Cheat support, Automatically Downloadable Maps, Customizable Sprays, etc., etc.

But it's no surprise. We've known that the port sucked from the beginning. In fact, if the game wasn't Halo it would have been nothing more than a joke, not selling more than 50,000 copies - if that. It would, undoubtedly, had been the most colossal failure in the history of Bungie (or Gearbox - whoever gets stuck with the blame when the music turns off).

I really wish that honest and heartfelt attempts to make this half-assed game something we can all enjoy were met with less cynicism and discouragement, and more help and involvement. Mr. B is a long-standing proponent of the HPC community - he should get a little more respect for that.

  • 09.08.2005 4:32 PM PDT
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I think that only Halo Cutom Edition DS's record the logs you want checked; they record chat and whatever displays on the console prompt. Halo PC DS's don't record logs by themselves, and don't display things such as chat.

  • 09.08.2005 4:53 PM PDT
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Disembodied Soul

  • 09.08.2005 4:55 PM PDT
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I'm double posting because this email is so long. I didn't wantt to cut anything out.

Simply entittled "We Hear You", this is the only reply i have as yet recieved from anyone in the programmer community. the sender was "Dismebodied Soul", a nonadmin/silent profile within the bungie.net forums. You may notice that there IS NO "proper place" to report Halo PC cheaters. Only halo 2 cheaters.

i did not send anything to Bungie after reading the above post from our clandestine Gearbox forum ally, but to Microsoft via email to the company and direct reproting of a bug (explaination of my chosice can be seen below). using bugreporting at bnetbugs@microsoft.com; a place to report in game bugs and bungie forum bugs. After over a 24 hour period, this is the only reply I have recieved. as you can see, it is a standard form letter.

I decided to reprot Jumper TK as a bug after careful consideration of what glitch exploition is. Specifically, exploiting a glitch is using a part of the game that should not exist in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage over your opponent. This is the essence of Jumper TKing.

I no longer clasify this as a simple admin problem. Having recieved no reply, at ALL, from MS, it is my conclusion that they are allowing a glitch to exist within the system and do not care to fix it. they have been told repeatedly that this problem exists and are doing nothing to fix it. the only answers we get on the issue are silence or form letters from Bungie (which means someone here knows customers are growing unhappy, that someone here is actually taking time to read the forums and the reports, even if they have no authority to reply beyond a standard form email).

Either way, this is a call out on the Bungie Forum. Jumper TKs are exploiting a grossly neglegent bug that has existed since the games inception and never been addressed in the slightest. while there are ways to repair or circumvent this issue, the POWERS THAT BE, willfully and grossly ignore this issue an inconsequential, even when the problem has been posed in such a manner that leaves no doubt of its severity.

I don't (sadly) spend as much time as I used to in halo PC or CE. most of my time is spent in the Everquest 2 servers. I may have to pay to play, but Sony fixes their stuff. i hope you can keep me apprised of the in game situation mr B and friends, as I'm now less likely to see them in game.

[Edited on 9/8/2005]

  • 09.08.2005 5:00 PM PDT
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It's been 48 hours now with no reply from MS. Not even a "this is not a bug" email. hmmm...EQ2 has updated maps...

[Edited on 9/9/2005]

  • 09.09.2005 7:21 PM PDT
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Posted by: Mr B
Well Im playing less and less due to the people like ME=King on the servers. And if people have been alert, they will notice the people online in halo gradually dropping...

I'm playing less and less because Battlefield 2 is what i'm officially addicted to right now. The tking problem hasn't "worn me down"...yet. I'll try to play halo tomorrow, and see how much worse things have gotten in a week.

  • 09.09.2005 10:14 PM PDT
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Posted by: Mr B
Oh and I got the impression that Halo PC did retain stuff like chat logs. We always had it. I suppose the other admin must have added something and not told me.


Nope, HaloCE does, but PC doesn't. The way I did it was to add a manual entry to the banlist when we shared trouble maker info....except that requires a server restart to become active.

Oh and for reference, the EU BNG servers are nothing to do with GBX. GBX did provide HaloPC server in the old days and had the mods from the GBX forums as admins, that's long gone now though.

Alledgedly Homelan used to provide administration for the bungie servers. This is the only reference I can find to that now though: linky - scroll down

Easiest solution would be for Bungie to do exactly what GBX did and pick a few respected members of the community and have them admin the servers. Of course the danger of that is they might remove heavies on BG as a gametype and we wouldn't want that to happen would we?

[Edited on 9/12/2005]

  • 09.11.2005 10:36 AM PDT
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Well, I wasn't expecting a reply over the weekend, so instead of telling everyone it's been four days since I sent an email to MS, i thought I'd hop onto the Bungie servers for the day and see if things have gotten any better.

they haven't. While I only saw one Jumper TK on with me during play, there were plenty others to choose from. 2 Passives and one Kamikazee. For those of you keeping score, that's a total of 4 TKers in game on five different servers. From today I'm becoming convinced than ever that we need a vote/kickban utilities like punkbuster if we hope to combat this threat.

[Edited on 9/11/2005]

  • 09.11.2005 5:22 PM PDT
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Hopped back onto halo tonight, just ot see how bad things are getting. i say seven TeamKillers in a single server throughout my entire play experience. In those two hours, I saw one point where there were four of them on at a single time; all of them using direct IP hopping to Jumper TK.

and no, still no reply from my emails in this regard. It has now been one week.

  • 09.15.2005 12:22 AM PDT
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It's now been two weeks and no reply from MS...that tells me they never read my emails. As this was a bug report for halo PC, that also suggests that tech support is desert dry for halo PC now.

According to CBSSportsline, Halo Combat Evolved is number 17 of the top 20 selling games for the month of Augest. Funny that a game still on the charts, making money, would suddenly lose all it's tech support.

[Edited on 9/24/2005]

  • 09.24.2005 3:46 PM PDT
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k wait, I got an idea, maybe we should contact those guys that used to run the servers, HomeLan or something. Although they might not provide their administrative services anymore we can still email them enquiring as to Microsoft's position on administrating the servers, and whether they will allow anyone to admin them again, I really don't have the time to email them unless one of you want to do it.

  • 10.06.2005 8:25 PM PDT

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