[Chdata]

There was some discussion somewhere where someone suggested using SteamTools or something or another to autoban people if they're part of a specific steamgroup, and someone brought up that being invited to a group counts as being in the group (in steam API I guess?) which was a way to exploit it to ban people from their own servers.

I kinda forget where that conversation was and can't seem to find it again.

Maybe it's not a problem with steamworks though.

[404UserNotFound]

Originally Posted by DarkSoroush About the groups: We are only able to detect if user, currently is in a specific group. We cant guess if user invited and accepted, or have a pending invite, etc.

For the love of god we don't need any "Kick if player is in <group>" plugins. Only d-bags use those plugins.

[Pelipoika]

Originally Posted by abrandnewday For the love of god we don't need any "Kick if player is in <group>" plugins. Only d-bags use those plugins.

You don't need/want does not mean everyone doesn't want/need

[DarkSoroush]

For the love of god we don't need any "Kick if player is in <group>" plugins. Only d-bags use those plugins.

The plugin is more about who's to allow instead of of who's to kick. For one reason: You cant kick players based on the private-able information and we use profile information which is possible to be private. So if you want to allow everybody to join to the server and only kick players that are in a specific group, they can simply make their profile private and what we should do then? our default rule is to allow so we failed to achieve the goal.

So there will be no such feature ever. don't worry

Yet, a better use for checking user's groups is to only allow them to play on the server if they are in a specific group. More reasonable and more useful.

[m_bNightstalker]

Very cool plugin, please add those optional additions for trade bans etc.

[Potato Uno]

Originally Posted by abrandnewday For the love of god we don't need any "Kick if player is in <group>" plugins. Only d-bags use those plugins.

I don't see a problem with it so long as this plugin isn't used in quickplay or matchmaking in TF2.

Because I know a good number of server owners will use it in a cancerous manner like they did with that motd advertisement plugin (plus the Free2BeKicked plugin itself stirred a lot of controvery).

That being said, people who use this in non-quickplay/matchmaking servers can generally do whatever they want since players aren't being forced to play on their servers.

It would be nice if this plugin ceased to work if the tf2 quickplay disable cvar on the server isn't 1 (as this plugin clearly breaks quickplay rules yet people will use it in quickplay anyway). For other games, ignore that check.

[Chdata]

There's no difference between "choosing who's allowed to play" and "choosing who isn't allowed to play" because conversly if you are choosing who is allowed to play, you are kicking/blocking everyone else.

'Those' server owners will probably pay someone to privately make this anyway if they really want it. I don't know how they'd do well though, if they're literally preventing people from joining them - what's the point? All you get is less players. I can see this plugin being used for completely private clans and small groups of friends... if they want something other than sv_password.

I personally have no problem with f2bekicked or this plugin because there are perfectly fine ways to use it. Like F2Bekicked on a trade server.

[Potato Uno]

Originally Posted by Chdata 'Those' server owners will probably pay someone to privately make this anyway if they really want it. I don't know how they'd do well though, if they're literally preventing people from joining them - what's the point? All you get is less players. I can see this plugin being used for completely private clans and small groups of friends... if they want something other than sv_password. I personally have no problem with f2bekicked or this plugin because there are perfectly fine ways to use it. Like F2Bekicked on a trade server.

Well yeah, but all of those "valid" cases you mention that would require using this thing would be in non-quickplay, non-matchmaking servers. Trade servers are not in matchmaking and private clans/groups of friends (I fall in the groups of friends part) would absolutely not want their server on matchmaking.

Even if server owners can pay someone to privately make a kicker plugin or something, I'd rather have them pay up and lose money (and someone else profit from their sourcepawn skill) to put that cancer on their quickplay/matchmaking server than to have it be available to everyone for free (as it is now).

But I don't wanna derail this argument to the point of a flame war, so all I ask is for this plugin to check the values of these cvars (for TF2 at least):

tf_mm_servermode
tf_server_identity_disable_quickplay

and if tf_mm_servermode is not 0, or tf_server_identity_disable_quickplay is 0, then just cease this plugin from working at all until the cvars are reversed.

I know that "people will edit the source code to remove these checks" but you can try to make the check obfuscated or extremely annoying to remove from the source, and most server owners don't know a damn thing about coding sourcepawn anyway.

Because honestly, before I managed to install a server, MvM boot camp servers were so full of this type of bullshit that it was not even funny.

This plugin can very easily be used to disobey Valve's rules on server hosting.

[Sreaper]

Originally Posted by Chdata There's no difference between "choosing who's allowed to play" and "choosing who isn't allowed to play" because conversly if you are choosing who is allowed to play, you are kicking/blocking everyone else. 'Those' server owners will probably pay someone to privately make this anyway if they really want it. I don't know how they'd do well though, if they're literally preventing people from joining them - what's the point? All you get is less players. I can see this plugin being used for completely private clans and small groups of friends... if they want something other than sv_password. I personally have no problem with f2bekicked or this plugin because there are perfectly fine ways to use it. Like F2Bekicked on a trade server.

There's already a group/friend kicker plugin right here for anyone that wants it: https://forums.alliedmods.net/showth...13#post1812513 That being said the functionality may as well be added to this plugin.

[DarkSoroush]

There's no difference between "choosing who's allowed to play" and "choosing who isn't allowed to play" because conversly if you are choosing who is allowed to play, you are kicking/blocking everyone else.

We do, yet what I am trying to show is "logical affects of the order of actions":
Deny, Allow => Denies all except the ones with a special condition - In this case it is completely logical to kick players with UNKNOWN (Private) condition as well
Allow, Deny => Allow all except the ones with a special condition - In this case, a player can fake his condition by making it UNKNOWN (Private) and join the server. Based on order of actions and priority of Allow rule it is logical to let him in

So I believe that having the option to kick players of a specific group is not correct nor it is logical.

About the matchmaking, I believe that there are lot of different types of plugins that can affect the gameplay and player's experiences in a server and yet they are out there and server owners using them in matchmaking servers. This plugin is nothing more than them. Comparing to those plugins, this one made it easier for players by kicking them right away instead of wasting their time. If Valve is really concerned about this problem they can simply force a higher level of PURE like command or something similar to prevent installation of plugins/sourcemod/metamod and any other way of modifying the game play in matchmaking servers. If they don't care why should we?
Yet it is not like that we want to destroy player's experience when using matchmaking, so I probebly add a check for tf_mm_servermode and tf_server_identity_disable_quickplay cvars. But I cant think of a way to make it hard for a developer to remove it from the code. I am not very familiar with SourcePawn but I don't think that I can do anything special to make a code very hard to understand. I mean real obfuscation in SourcePawn? How much is that even practical with all that limitations? If someone knows how to recompile the plugin, he probably has the enough knowledge to solve simple obfuscations as well!