Can't afford BattlEye

[L[0ne]R]

Soldat has always had hackers, and we survived just fine before BE ever entered the picture.

I wouldn't say so. I remember very well when even on good popular servers with decent admins I saw at least 1 hacker almost every day. I'm afraid to imagine how many there were while I wasn't playing. After BattlEye was integrated - there were times when I haven't seen a single hacker in months.



Too bad about BattlEye. It's scary to think that Soldat will go back to that hax chaos that was back then. As for donations - I doubt they'll work. They almost never do, not for long at least. And in case of Soldat - there's a very little flow of new players, so even if we manage to get enough people to donate enough money - eventually people will start to lose interest and stop donating, and after a short time we'll face this exact problem again.

Pubbers are who really need anti-cheats since they can't always rely on admins or votekicks to do the job. But you can't expect random pubbers to donate. Those who truly support Soldat are mostly competitive players who play in gathers and leagues. However they already have something better than anti-cheat - they have admins who take their job very seriously, demos are often recorded, so if someone was suspected in cheating - it won't be hard to find out the truth. I doubt they'll miss BattlEye much.
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How's THIS for a solution?

As well as expanding the dev team to more than one person. There never was a good enough reason to have only one person working on the game, and there still isn't, especially now.

[pavliko]

For me soldat with battle eye has came to a stage where people no longer want to cheat in soldat. They preffer counting on lags and luck. Sure hacking is possible but nobody hacks today. Removing battle eye will unleash the great noob cheating machine. Removing BE will cause servers to have more sub admins.

[dnmr]

BE is a great tool that's slowed a slew of hackers over the past few years, but I'd chill out with the disaster talk. Soldat has always had hackers, and we survived just fine before BE ever entered the picture. It'll require a little more diligence on the part of server and league admins, but I think that we'll pull through without triggering Armageddon.

i dont want to spend my whole day catching hackers on my servers you know. And sometimes the only way to get rid of a hacker with a dynamic IP is to rangeban, which would result in banning a lot of innocent people <.< So can't see "having admins" as a good enough excuse for not having BE

[SpiltCoffee]

2 possible solutions:

1. We go back to the original proposal by $able, and server owners pay a fee for BattlEye to be put onto their servers.

2. MM seems to be only announcing this because the fees have gone up. He might be able to still pay for part of it, so maybe he could try asking for donations for half of the total fee?

[Mercury92]

More than 60% of dedicated servers are not gonna pay fee.
Soldat would just die too quickly and will get unpopular.

[SpiltCoffee]

I'd be ok with paying a fee to use BattlEye. The servers down in Australia are dirt cheap at the moment, so it wouldn't be too bad, actually (for us, at least).

I think the only people who wouldn't wanna pay a fee would be people running a server on their home computer (quite obviously, they don't wanna pay for hosting in the first place, so oh well).

[Mercury92]

Yeah. It would become more cheaper to rent host than to run dedicated server from home.

[Michal Marcinkowski]

I see 3 solutions right now if we want to keep BE:

1. Make Soldat pay-for-play
2. Make a wikipedia style donation with a gauge and limit for 200€. If the limit is reached we get a month of BE, if not we wait until it is reached
3. Get a sponsor
4. Server owners pay fee.

[ramirez]

Definitely not 1. It'd kill Soldat. Soldat is played by a lot of young people who couldn't necessarily pay to play, even if they wanted to.

Donation is a good idea, as already obvious from this topic there definitely are people willing to sacrifice that one beer or subway meal to keep BE alive.

Getting a sponsor would be the best I think, but I guess the issue is where to get one, and what would the sponsor get in return (ads in site/forums/game?)

I wouldn't mind paying a fee for having BE enabled on my own servers, as long as it's per-IP, and not per-soldatserver, because at least I host servers for free and I don't really want to pay for every server I host when I don't make any profit from them.

[n2j3]

Sponsor !

<3 google images. paypal could have been a bit more skewed but I'm a photoshop noob :S

[edit]
tried with 200 euro note but a) it's not as easily recognisable as the 20 euro note and b) it's yellow i.e. harder to make out the 200 in that size.

[zakath]

I am with ramirez on this one, I also host a lot of servers and dont make anything at all from it. however what I would want too see is a sliding scale of the fee and with a sliding scale of protection like from say 50-200 euro with 50 euro giving generic anticheat and 200 giving full protection. And I think even sable will think that makeing some money out of it is better then nothing at all.
Or haveing a batteye premium program so that hosts who pay a fee gets the full protection but that you always get a basic protection with say generic anti cheat.

[Mercury92]

Soldat is dying already and making it p2p, well you know better what will happen.

Donatations can work out but not for a long time.
But still we can try it.

Sponsor. Yeah, good idea but who is gonna to be it.

[[SIRS]Foxconn^^2012]

Valve?

[pavliko]

Lets wait for jesus to donate us 2400 euros for a year of BE

[-Major-]

2, 3 and 4 are possible solutions.

most preferable getting a sponsor, but that can be hard to find a sponsor (could probably try some gaming equipment company), however, the cost is very small, so the price wouldn't be a problem for any sponsor.

setting a fee per ip might not work out too well, since we got huge huge server providers like selfkill (having to pay like 1euro a month for hosting 1000 servers isn't very fair), and we got people like zakath and ramirez, who make next to nothing from their servers. surely if he cost was as low as 1 euro a month it would be possible for non profitable server hosters but the amount of money wouldn't be reached.
unless you make some kind of package based priceing, like 0-10 servers = 1 euro, 10-20 = 2 euro and so forth.

To take donations is "risky", since you might not reach the monthly fee every month, and since BE is not something like electricity deliverers, one missed month might screw it up for the next month (since BE needs on-going updates).

[zakath]

2, 3 and 4 are possible solutions.

most preferable getting a sponsor, but that can be hard to find a sponsor (could probably try some gaming equipment company), however, the cost is very small, so the price wouldn't be a problem for any sponsor.

setting a fee per ip might not work out too well, since we got huge huge server providers like selfkill (having to pay like 1euro a month for hosting 1000 servers isn't very fair), and we got people like zakath and ramirez, who make next to nothing from their servers. surely if he cost was as low as 1 euro a month it would be possible for non profitable server hosters but the amount of money wouldn't be reached.
unless you make some kind of package based priceing, like 0-10 servers = 1 euro, 10-20 = 2 euro and so forth.

To take donations is "risky", since you might not reach the monthly fee every month, and since BE is not something like electricity deliverers, one missed month might screw it up for the next month (since BE needs on-going updates).

I would rather have something like Major is saying that you say have a registry file or something with guid or such identifying a account for the server instead of haveing it per ip.

[ramirez]

Either way, if nothing else works, I'd much rather turn BE into an optional component that can be paid for per-server. That way we can at least still support BE on leagues such as SCTFL (we'd just have a requirement that a server must have BE installed for it to be used in league matches).

[Boblekonvolutt]

Well I'd cough up a few bucks even if donations only are a temporary solution. The $12 I've paid for thousands of hours of fun always felt a bit underpriced to me anyway.

[Leo]

Server owners that want BE pay fee, others don't. Easiest and most fair way as I see it. I would definitely pay a fee to have BE protect my servers.

[nEttsE]

The truth is that Soldat really dying is (I'm sure I don't need to explain you why). I'm afraid what's worse, if eats/lags OR getting haxz0rd.

In case of solutions:
People who will donate to Soldat cause of BattlEye will get bored and they will quit it.
Sponsor would be fine, even I'm sure that it's hard to find some.
Best solution probably would be some donations from server hosters - who want's it -> he should pay for it.

Anyway, now it's hard to detect some "higher dmg" hacks (or these kinds) since Soldat eats/lags seriously a lot. And since harder detectable hacks are those, who affect only binks/aiming/and so, I'm sure that eatings/lags/warpings always win in this case. Normal person can see usage of someone's aimbot, since aimbot ain't that perfect and aim's only in front of character, where he is probably going, very often badly. As ages of hacking have past, I think that people will not hack that much, so anticheat would be only good in some serious matches or leagues.

P.S.: Soldat is dying -> People rather play newer games like sh*tty Crysis, or they ragequit cause of eats/lags, which come eventually with newer and newer versions of Soldat. Golden 1.3.1.