Is it even possible to prevent griefing in ARMA?

Krieg

I was thinking about this a lot lately. Arma 2 is a fantastic online game, but one of its biggest problems is how easy it is to grief a server. I could log onto a server now and within 15 mins, destroy base camp, tk 20/30 people, incite tk'ing between other players, make half the server population leave.

I was just wondering if people had any ideas that would combat griefing in ARMA. Not that I expect BIS to implement anything to prevent it. Its actually quite difficult to think of a good solution


The only true failsafe for griefing is to have an admin on who can immediately ban the griefers, but in my own experience, admins are rarely about, even on clan servers.

It would be impossible to implement an auto-kick/ban for tk. Because we arent perfect and accidents happen, more specifically when you crash a chopper by mistake. You could have 15 deaths in an osprey (more?) and an auto ban for tk that would be unfair. Then again, you could argue that only an experienced player should even dare attempt to pilot any flying vehicle and someone who crashes the plane/heli deserves a ban

The vote-kick system technically works, but from what I can tell it requires a LOT of votes to actually work. Maybe BIS should look at reducing the number of votes required. But of course theres a downside to this and can result in easier griefing.

The ranking system is an interesting approach. Whereby the more you play on the server, the higher rank you gain, resulting in more access to vehicles/weapons, with bombers being usable at top rank.
Looks great on paper and it does work to a large degree. The problem is that sometimes there maybe only 1 person on the server with a rank capable of flying a heli and this one person may have a fetish for flying over AA continually or may not be too skillful with flying or perhaps even have a crap connection and flight is too difficult. The end result is that you dont have access to a heli and the mobile hq cant be lifted to the target location, meaning a 15min drive to the target, which could result in the Mhq getting nuked when approaching the target. This is just one of the issues associated with the rank system, though it does seem to reduce a large degree of griefing. I did have one instance where a guy obtained the rank to fly an a10 and deceided to bomb the base before logging off, for the lulz i guess.

So, any thoughts/ideas?

Maximilian

You could have a demerit system whereby the more TK's you have, the less votes it takes to vote you off the server.

Kinetic^

I think we discussed putting a password on the server that Pog has up for us atm but we just don't have enough people that play to warrant it. If the numbers got better then it would probably be better to protect it.

PogMoThoin

We wouldn't have a prob if the admin ban command was working, we could just leave it open and harvest the player id's of assholes. I'm gonna get gameservers to investingate, I'm thinking maybe admin doesn't have the rights to write to the ban.txt or something simple like that, cos it should be working. Maybe the ban.txt isn't created and the game itself hasn't permissions to create the new file

Cunny-Funt

ArmA really seems to be that kinda game that only works when playing with people you know, or at least currently thats the case with most online game modes on it (any game mode can be possible with arma almost but every plays the same handful of ones unfortunately)

I'm just speaking from my own experience here but basiclly I got ArmA 1 when it came out, thought it was ****in deadly. Went to play online. Started to really dislike the game. I always thought it had potential but never really played it much. Had about 2 games with a mate , coop that rocked. And I always thought back on those. Long story short I got back into it again by making my own missions for the game and playing those missions co-op with my mates.

Had a fantastic time, really got back into it, tried playing online and it was **** as ever lol. So far its pretty much the same with ArmA 2 bar playing on this irish server with you lot, really been the only decent online yet but domination lacks something that I get from playing user made missions. Be cool to mix it up on that server with some user made missions , maybe ones that involve human and AI on both sides. But I'm probably in a minority on that.

PogMoThoin

The main reason the server is running a form of domination is to get the max people to join to fully stress the setup for Gameservers.ie to monitor, these are 30 plr coop and seem to be the most popular online. When we get our own smaller 20 slot I'd prefer to be playing custom missions like we did while we were hosting ourselves, Waldo, We Were Soldiers etc, we seemed to find a nice new one every few days. I'm not a big fan of Domination, its ok, I like Evolution and its ranking system even less. If You have a mission You'd like to play just suggest it.