[ghostofmybrain]

Let me paint a picture of the North American CS scene for those like guawong who don't quite understand the issue still, and think people are complaining about nothing.

The NA CS scene is a set of mutually exclusive subsets of players. For example, there is the set of players who don't even know community servers exist. These are the idiots who cry on reddit for Valve to create servers that already exist in abundance in the community. ("Valve, make scoutzknivez! Valve, unranked competitive!") These people will never play in community servers.

There is the set of people who only play CS for a very specific mod. These people surf, play Jailbreak, alternate between CS:GO and CS:S, play Garry's Mod when their favorite CS:GO TTT server is empty. These people will never play in community pubs.

There is the set of people who think they're going to become a pro, and keep giving ESEA money every month even though ESEA keeps fucking them right up the asshole and playing in 100 pugs with friendly fire off isn't going to make you good a the game. Those people will never play any community server.

But there is a key set of players in the CS:GO community that is currently disenfranchised. These are the players that migrated over from CS 1.6 (or CS:CZ) when those communities died. They don't want weird mods, or they would have been playing Source a long time ago. They don't want to play in an anonymous Valve server. They're the type of people who spent years of their lives playing only in Lobby of Laugher, Clandestine Uprising, NcB, Brass Monkey Militia, MEAN. They played those servers every day at the same time, knew all the admins, knew all the regulars. They cared about how much fps a server ran, and refused to switch to Source because it just didn't run as well. These people currently have nowhere to play.

The reason they have nowhere to play is because of !ws plugins. For every one community pub server, there 30 pub servers that only exist to generate ad revenue off of afk people sitting in spawn looking through a !ws menu. These servers are immensely successful at generating that ad revenue. They generally have 6-8 people in them at all times. If you go into one of those servers, you'll see 6-8 people at 0:20, and 2-4 person at 10:0 who is about to leave the first time an ad is played. Those 2-4 people are members of the set of players I just mentioned above. They hop from one pub to the next, trying to find one where people are actually playing the game, where a community actually exists around the server, but constantly missing each other like a scene from a bad RomCom. These people are constantly missing each other because the community is currently flooded with servers that only exist to generate ad revenue.

If !ws were properly enforced, most of those servers would disappear, but that would actually be beneficial to the community. The people in the first three sets of players wouldn't be influenced at all. The community of reddit users would still not realize community servers exist and still whine at valve to create some 64 tick bastardization of a mod that already exist. People who play for certain mods would still continue to play that mod. People who think playing with friendly fire and team chat off will make them a pro and enjoy taking it up the butt with no lube will continue to shell out money to ESEA. People who are only playing for weapon skins would just browse gambling websites instead, or maybe pop into a Valve server once in a while. But those players who are looking for a real community pub experience would now only have real servers to choose from. They would be able to actually pick a community, instead of having to mindless join and leave servers that are just ad boxes. There would be fewer of those servers, so the community would naturally become tighter and actually start to grow again.

[fragnichtnach]

Originally Posted by sneaK Since I was mentioned, my thoughts and actions I've pursued on the issue: https://snksrv.com/threads/weapon-sk...d-why-not.533/

I've just read your post. I totally understand everybody using these ws-knife-plugins and I appriciate your fight against these plugins.

There are several reasons, I wouldn't run this plugin myself. but this is one of the main reasons:
- Imagine: faceit would run those plugins (it would be totally economic: 10-15cent a token, ca. 1,80€ a month per server)
- What would Valve do? -> maybe the would go to a lawer and try to get money from faceit for stealing
intellectual property
- Are we save, that they don't do this with private persons? Not really... (probably they won't, but you will never know)

What can we do? Maybe we could start a digital signatures petition including a solution. Would Valve listen to this? We don't know.

But in fact I can't imagine that Valve is happy with the current situtation. They are not making a relevant amount of money with the GSLT-banned-accounts. there is a company that is pulling out 1000 GSLT out of one account that costs actually less than 9€. Overestimate 50.000 servers are using these plugins. 50*9€*3 = 450 € a week. That is rubbish for Valve...

[fragnichtnach]

Originally Posted by ghostofmybrain [..] There is the set of people who think they're going to become a pro, and keep giving ESEA money every month even though ESEA keeps fucking them right up the asshole and playing in 100 pugs with friendly fire off isn't going to make you good a the game. Those people will never play any community server. But there is a key set of players in the CS:GO community that is currently disenfranchised. These are the players that migrated over from CS 1.6 (or CS:CZ) when those communities died. They don't want weird mods, or they would have been playing Source a long time ago. They don't want to play in an anonymous Valve server. They're the type of people who spent years of their lives playing only in Lobby of Laugher, Clandestine Uprising, NcB, Brass Monkey Militia, MEAN. They played those servers every day at the same time, knew all the admins, knew all the regulars. They cared about how much fps a server ran, and refused to switch to Source because it just didn't run as well. These people currently have nowhere to play. The reason they have nowhere to play is because of !ws plugins. For every one community pub server, there 30 pub servers that only exist to generate ad revenue off of afk people sitting in spawn looking through a !ws menu. These servers are immensely successful at generating that ad revenue. They generally have 6-8 people in them at all times. If you go into one of those servers, you'll see 6-8 people at 0:20, and 2-4 person at 10:0 who is about to leave the first time an ad is played. Those 2-4 people are members of the set of players I just mentioned above. They hop from one pub to the next, trying to find one where people are actually playing the game, where a community actually exists around the server, but constantly missing each other like a scene from a bad RomCom. These people are constantly missing each other because the community is currently flooded with servers that only exist to generate ad revenue. [..]

Very good post! You take it to the point.

Valve actually f** these kind of people by doing nothing! I think they just care for esports. But these are the as well people who would by some skins, who bring money into the game. i can't understand the inactivety...

This might finally lead to a dying game...

[ghostofmybrain]

Originally Posted by fragnichnach This might finally lead to a dying game...

I've really been enjoying 1.6 lately. The game isn't even close to as good as CS:GO just in terms of being a game, but you just cannot beat the community. You can really find any type of server you want, not just big rooms whose sole purpose is to serve you ads.

[Ejziponken]

Since Valve wont do anything about it, I wish the SM team would. Like block the plugins someone in the code. Probably wont stop everyone but would stop lots of them.

[DarkDeviL]

Originally Posted by Ejziponken Since Valve wont do anything about it, I wish the SM team would. Like block the plugins someone in the code. Probably wont stop everyone but would stop lots of them.

What would the "SM team" do?

SM is open source, so even if blocks were added to the code, what would "prevent" you from taking the code, and removing the blocking part?

[ghostofmybrain]

Laziness.

[Ejziponken]

Originally Posted by arne1288 What would the "SM team" do? SM is open source, so even if blocks were added to the code, what would "prevent" you from taking the code, and removing the blocking part?

I know some might remove it, but i still think it would stop lots of servers using it since they would have to spread the removed version to all the server owners. Also it requires them to remove it for each update, and maybe they could implement it in a way that would require some effort to remove it and have it working. Maybe they could put it in Metamod or the binfiles.

[DarkDeviL]

Originally Posted by Ejziponken I know some might remove it, but i still think it would stop lots of servers using it since they would have to spread the removed version to all the server owners.

As easy as it is to spread those plugins, as well as the possible "suggestion" for changing core.cfg, as easy it would be to distribute a secondary MM:S/SM set capable of doing the stuff.

Originally Posted by Ejziponken Also it requires them to remove it for each update, and maybe they could implement it in a way that would require some effort to remove it and have it working. Maybe they could put it in Metamod or the binfiles.

A random SourceMod Pull Request #767, and a random MetaMod Source Pull Request #35.

If you look at these "files changed" sections linked, you're gonna see it will be very easy to take the green lines (added now), and replace them with the red lines (removed now) instead, which would be the task needed to simply revert the change and still allow the plugins to run.

With the open source MM:S and SM, I'm afraid AlliedModders won't be able to provide you with a foolproof solution to the issue.

With your suggestions, about the SM team should do something, we're ending up in the classic "security by obscurity" like way, where you are not actually fixing the problem, but simply camouflaging the problem.

Camouflaging the problem alone won't lead anyone anywhere, except leading the people doing it through a lot of wasted time for nothing.

[fragnichtnach]

What is the worst case that could happen to server owners using those plugins?

a) used tokens including the relying account gets blocked
b) Valve comes up with a fix and reimplement ip-bans
c) lawer of Valve came up with a compensation claim
d) ...

What do you think?