Griefers acting in concert in NE region

[princeshiloh]

Three griefers are acting in concert in the New England region on the public "The Stinking Merm," "Here Piggy Piggy," and "Catch that Splumonkey!" servers. They log in around day 25, when a server has five or fewer people, and vote-kick everyone else. Assuming five dedicated players, that's around ten man-hours of work down the drain, which would be intolerable in most any other online game. 

It is so frustrating to play on these public servers that I'm considering quitting the game. These players are infamous among the local community and I've been warned multiple nights when they make their rounds. Klei can do whatever the heck it wants, but my impression is that if they fail to act, they will be losing legitimate players and will face weakened interest in the game. I certainly will not be playing on these public servers in the foreseeable future. At the very least, a ban of these three players from Klei's public servers is warranted.

I'm not providing steam profile links because I do not wish to start a witch hunt, but will provide this information to a mod if requested.

[Mr.Tarunio]

@ImDaMisterL,there is a double topic thread

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

I'll be addressing this and other issues in an upcoming topic of mine about the game's current problems that need fixing/solving/changing/tweaking. I'll release it after ANR is finished, so as not to keep the devs from finishing the set of updates.

Klei, please, if you truly care about your game, like a lot of us do, then I would advise and wish you will take note of what will be said in that topic. All of it, I'll try to structure it as clear and cut out as I possibly can.

[ShadowDuelist]

I was there today, saw that, and got kicked. Seconds later the game was restarted.

It's the same guy with 2 or 3 botted accounts. We need to be able to see who starts voting, at the very least, so they are easier to identify.

[princeshiloh]

It seems like there's a straightforward solution for Klei: base votes on seniority. There are multiple ways to do it:

1. Only allow players who have survived for at least five days to vote. There are limits to what a griefer can do on day 5 anyway. 
2. Give players who have survived longer more votes. The server is sorta/kinda theirs while they're on anyway.

I don't see any drawbacks to either implementation and they prevent most abuses of the current voting system.

[Kitty Cat Meow]

I stopped playing this game for months because I was so worried about people burning my stuff that I could not focus on enjoying DST.

There's a few solutions I can offer to this problem, They're probably not silver bullets, but I'm sure they'll help:

1. Steam Family Sharing

I think that steam's "Family Sharing" feature needs to be disabled for DST.

In a nutshell, If you have a copy of DST, you can create infinite alt steam accounts with access to that same copy at no cost.

Those steam accounts would each get their own unique "Klei ID", meaning you can just hop accounts and get away with whatever you want, Or you could make some "vote-bots" using this too.

2. Voting Abuse

This may seem counter-intuitive, but I think voting should be disabled on klei servers.

Imagine voting as a filter: It stops the disorganized "nooby griefers" but gives the organized "griefer teams" access to weapons of mass destruction.

If voting were disabled on klei servers, players would no longer be protected from those "nooby griefers", But that's okay:

Those that mindlessly log on and burn stuff lack proper survival skills and often die before finding a base to burn, (assuming that it's not at the portal.)

Although people would not be safe from noob-griefers, The griefer teams would lose a significant amount of power since they can't "nuke" the world anymore, They would have to resort to the old-fashioned ways of "track down people and burn them", but chances are: If you place your base properly, even organized griefers won't track you down before they get bored.

From my personal experience, the voting system made griefers not as common but orders of magnitude more dangerous, I'd much rather deal with 48 disorganized dimwits that can't find my base than 3 criminal masterminds in a group with access to world-destroying tools.

[Electroely]

Klei, I recall you said that you have a priority list. While we do understand that bug fixes are important, can you PLEASE set this problem up in the top of your list and get it fixed? People have suggested many ways of fixing it and I really hate seeing players quit because of this. So please do us all a favor and change the way the voting system in the game works for it not to be as abusable. Having to survive 5 days before being able to vote is fair enough, since a griefer would have to survive at least 35 minutes on each account to be able to do this troll.

[cezarica]

7 hours ago, princeshiloh said:

They log in around day 25, when a server has five or fewer people, and vote-kick everyone else. Assuming five dedicated players, that's around ten man-hours of work down the drain, which would be intolerable in most any other online game.

Actually 25 in game days x 8 minutes in real time equals 3 hours and 20 minutes. With 5 players that's actually 16 hours and 40 minutes down the drain.

Anyway, I feel your pain and totally agree with you. There are multiple ways to deal with this pesky issue and some of the ways have been mentioned above. Meanwhile until Klei, that I need to remind you is a small team, finishes the ANR update and fixing whatever bugs they are dealing at the moment do yourself a favor and stop playing on official Klei servers until at least the voting problem is fixed one way or another and play on community based dedicated servers where there's at least some way to get in touch with the owner or it's team of moderators to quickly deal with the issue and revert the damage.

A hand full of community dedicated server owners have decided to exchange information of incidents like yours in order to prevent them taking their "fun" to another server and ruining other people game time in there as well. So, would be great if you could share the information (Klei unique ID's and/or steam profiles) in private as the forum rules doesn't allow naming and shaming, not that would do any good.

[The Curator]

6 hours ago, EuedeAdodooedoe said:

I'll release it after ANR is finished, so as not to keep the devs from finishing the set of updates.

You make it sound like the developers will heed your word immediately on command.

Where is the Willow fix then.

It's a tough call between which is the greater act of incompetence, poorly nerfing a character to stop a crisis and then never buffing them to be playable after two years; or having one of the most exploitable voting systems ever conceived.

 

People also randomly mention to use steam groups to get into servers but they never actually name the groups they use for this.

[Spaartan]

51 minutes ago, The Curator said:

Where is the Willow fix then.

Look, the devs are on a lot of work here, games like oxygen not included also need fixes. Although they are taking long to fix Willow, it is fine. As stated by others, some don't care about overly buffed or nerfed characters, we get to play the game the way we want it. Another reason it will take long to fix is because we exploit anything and everything. So, they have to do some fixes to stop us from doing that again, making the fix longer. When they had to nerf Willow, they had to make sure the griefers couldn't do it again. Since we are in the same community, we receive the same nerfs and fixes. The fault of one is the fault of many, that's why I think the real fixes should come from us. If we didn't burn each others bases then we wouldn't have to nerf Willow at all. I hope we can find a way to fix our problems.

That's what I think, what about you guys?

Spoiler

If the writing is weird its because I had many brain farts in the writing.

 

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

6 hours ago, The Curator said:

You make it sound like the developers will heed your word immediately on command.

Where is the Willow fix then.

It's a tough call between which is the greater act of incompetence, poorly nerfing a character to stop a crisis and then never buffing them to be playable after two years; or having one of the most exploitable voting systems ever conceived.

 

People also randomly mention to use steam groups to get into servers but they never actually name the groups they use for this.

Lol, I mean, did you read the second paragraph of my post?

The point of it will be to put most of generally major things that to my knowledge have been reported by multiple people or have been discussed here and there many times over, all in one place. I don't know how much Klei has actually put on their list of things to do for the game, so it's more like an overview than anything. And ofc, some stuff will be just my opinion, although I'll try to justify myself as best I can.

[Null1314]

17 hours ago, EuedeAdodooedoe said:

I'll be addressing this and other issues in an upcoming topic of mine about the game's current problems that need fixing/solving/changing/tweaking. I'll release it after ANR is finished, so as not to keep the devs from finishing the set of updates.

Klei, please, if you truly care about your game, like a lot of us do, then I would advise and wish you will take note of what will be said in that topic. All of it, I'll try to structure it as clear and cut out as I possibly can.

Fix the issues with ping such as "???" which majority of servers have.

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

2 hours ago, Null1314 said:

Fix the issues with ping such as "???" which majority of servers have.

Not sure what your point here is...

Ping dropping for hosts, clients can be caused by numerous things. One I know of that Klei can affect is the amount of things that are on-screen at a given time causing lag. Today, pig skin farm caused a lot of lag because so many pigs were out, going for that piece of yummy rot

[CarlZalph]

14 hours ago, The Curator said:

People also randomly mention to use steam groups to get into servers but they never actually name the groups they use for this.

When you had asked me for a server in that other thread I couldn't respond in part because I administrate over some of them, and would inject my bias into the fray, and another part is that it would be a form of advertisement which as I gather should only happen in the server postings subforum.

So my only suggestion for finding servers is the generic 'join one, see if the regular people are to your liking and is properly administrated/voting disabled and then stick to it, else find another server on the list'.

A word of caution though is that from what I experienced generally non-dedicated servers are going to be people who don't know that passwords are a thing, and get kicked/banned frequently from these self-hosted servers.

 

However, there's nothing stopping anyone from searching me on Steam or something and looking at the groups I am apart of to determine where I generally find myself frequenting whilst playing DST.

[cezarica]

@The Curator If you adjust the filters to something like:

• PvP: Off, unless you want to do PvP (player versus player) and not PvE (player versus elements)
• Mods enabled: No, unless you want mods
• Password protected: No, unless you actually know the password
• Server type: Dedicated, unless like Carl said you like to be kicked and banned cos people can't be bothered to password their server if want to play alone or with their friends

and rest leave at default to Any or Yes, I'm 100% confident you will see a short list (right now I see 16 out of 1878) of servers that are worthy of some testing like Carl suggested.

@Null1314 The "???" ping issue is not from Klei's side but from yours. If the server is behind a router then you need to port forward the ports that are used by the DST servers towards the machine that is running them. I run my own dedicated server and did that and see the actual ping instead of "???" and also the actual ping from all of the servers with the above mentioned filters.

[Null1314]

15 hours ago, cezarica said:

@The Curator If you adjust the filters to something like:

• PvP: Off, unless you want to do PvP (player versus player) and not PvE (player versus elements)
• Mods enabled: No, unless you want mods
• Password protected: No, unless you actually know the password
• Server type: Dedicated, unless like Carl said you like to be kicked and banned cos people can't be bothered to password their server if want to play alone or with their friends

and rest leave at default to Any or Yes, I'm 100% confident you will see a short list (right now I see 16 out of 1878) of servers that are worthy of some testing like Carl suggested.

@Null1314 The "???" ping issue is not from Klei's side but from yours. If the server is behind a router then you need to port forward the ports that are used by the DST servers towards the machine that is running them. I run my own dedicated server and did that and see the actual ping instead of "???" and also the actual ping from all of the servers with the above mentioned filters.

Thats funny cause i did port forward the correct port already, other people have too and it doesnt do anything.

[cezarica]

@Null1314 What exactly did you port forward? I have the ports that are used to connect to master (in Master/server.ini at server_port i have 11002) and caves (in Caves/server.ini at server_port i have 11003) and nothing else and works as intended.