HerrKhosse

Keep track of how often players DC and look at Outliers (repeated DCs between two players are less important then the same player getting DC'ed/DC'ing with different players) -> ban them and have them prove to some moderator who looks once a week into his mailbox to unban them.

Having people pay money to be able to play is not to avoid cheaters, it's to get money, successful online games these days are often F2P (League of Legends, DOTA2, Heroes of the Storm, Dirty Bomb ...) and cheating is not an actual problem with these games. The most obvious reason why having a paywall for CNCNET would be disastrous, would be that nobody would pay for it. How big is the current playerbase? Do a survey, ask them how many would pay for it. So why do matchmaking and a ranking system at all, if it'll only benefit an incredibly small margin of players? The "competitive" and "elitism" argument I see here is completely ridiculous, you don't have a ranking system and matchmaking to grow these games into an esports because these games aren't good esports games to begin with. The reason why still these things are _incredibly_ important is because of getting more people to play these games and having a good time with it. What I see here is a bunch of old-timers and loyal fans, who are part of this community, proclaiming they really don't care about making this a pleasant experience for newcomers and currently it really, really really isn't. I'm saddened to read hifis view on this as essentially: our service is one that can't scale, you've got to have a small circle of people you know and that's it. Isn't the whole point of CNCNET to bring C&C to bigger masses? Saying a ranking system would invite cheaters is like saying buying expensive electronics invites theft, so you rather twiddle your thumbs, of course you'll get more cheaters if more people have a reason to actually play the game. I can go into detail with my experience when I played RA, but it boils down to: nobody in his right mind is going to repeatiedly get rejected when trying to find a game, or partake in some male dominated circlejerk hierarchy in order to find strangers to play your game with and none of the people who are willing to do this are going to pay money for it either. Cheating in popular F2P games seems to be usually mitigated by: * Adding time-intensive barriers to rise in ranks, maybe you need to play X unranked games before you can participate in the ladder altogether (e.g. DOTA2), this works much better then requiring money because you can't have people pay a lot of money either or you won't have a playerbase so it'll end up that cheaters will just buy a new account. Once they get banned they have to do a lot of work to able to participate again. Once your game gets big enough they'll hire indians that do that for them. But this should be none of CNCNETs issues. * Game-design, don't make a game that has mechanics that are easily exploitable, RTSes that heavily rely on partial-information via fog-of-war are very susceptible to this, but it really depends how significant that is to the outcome of the game, e.g. it's incredibly important in StarCraft 2, much less so in StarCraft 1 * Have an automated report system and ignore everything but outliers. I find Grants initial post to be completely unrealistic, as especially with old C&C titles, there's so many ways to cheat and preventing cheating at all in RTSs (e.g. Maphack) is an impossibility in itself and even the biggest AAA titles (StarCraft 2 etc.) can't prevent it. A step that would need to happen in parallel with developing the tech behind the ranking system and matchmaking would be to finally get some honest players together and give them incentives to build a map-pool.

if I remember correctly, they were pretty much gone in Westwood Chat, you join a lobby (in westwood chat), set the settings (in westwood chat) then press start, it maximizes CnC again and starts everything up with the players. The thing is that chatting inside the game is incredible akward, of course you still need some sort of lobies, but taking the GUI out of the game is what I think would be important, because it didnt age well enough. I pretty much thought about taking the whole lobbie/seting up a game system out of the game, thats pretty much exactly what they've done with westwood chat ages ago, so they to must have thought that it would be helpful About packaging: What I meant, is a big link on the CNCNET Page which just lets people download the full-to-play game in one installer, I love your work, but I think that the installer isn't that user friendly, in particular, it asks you about stuff which is great if you know CNC and know what you're doing, but if I'm a newcomer and I hear "alternate grenade sound effects", I'm not interested to worry if I should check that or not, IMHO, it would help alot if there is simply a CNCNET "standard" installation (with CNCNET written all over it), which doesn't "overwhelm" newcomers with different options, but instead let them play as fast as they can without worrying about anything. Obviously, these are just suggestion which I thought would help from my experience with it.

Hey there, I love what you're doing with CNCNet My suggestion in short would be: - replace the current built-in lobbies with something useful and tie them together with chat channels, like direct links to open games inside IRC and an built in IRC Client in a CNCNet Launcher or something like that . - Add a way to synchronize maps, if you want to play with 4 people and someone is missing the map or has the wrong version of it, everybody is just fiddling around - Provide a map preview in game lobbies, so people can actually see what maps they are going to play - pack a complete CNC95 Edition - Auto Downloader/Launcher, which verifies files, checks ports and provide support for chat channels/lobbies I'm impressed with UPnP and I think you guys are on the right tracks, its just currently not THAT easy if you really think about it, most users would be completely overwhelmed with the complexity as it's now, you have to download this DLL put it there, here are the map packs (which I only got through IRC) etc. etc. , probably providing a plattform for maps would be most important, like uploading maps to a DB and when you connect to a game it checks the map against it somethin like StarCraft 2 has (probably quite ressource intensive). Keep up the impressive work! PS: I don't think ladders are the way to go currently, there are, imho, way more important things to do