Nephthys anymore, as Pcube says:
... So for the record, Dante didn't "hack" anything. In fact,
LMAO he used MY console to exploit something in MY gametype, oh god the irony...
About the ongoing discussion:
I've been following this thread with interest. What's being said does not really surprise me. For many years now the Unreal community has been divided into at least two sub groups. One centered about political correctness and ages old netiquette. Traditionally centered around deathmatch / team with a few exceptions. Generally older members at least their prominent persons are. At it's best this group can be a wise parent who gives leadership and knowledge to the entire community. At it's worst they fall down to playing the role of the Unreal police, sanctioning anything that does not comply with their (un)written netiquette. Elitism is another thing to watch for.
The other group has more value for freedom, make their own ruleset and do not limit their creativity to the rules of netiquette. Fun is more important. This group is mostly centered around coop but not the entire coop community is in this group. At it's best this group drives innovation and creativity, providing a great playground to have fun together. At it's worst they fall down to hatred, disrespect and anarchy.
If we ever want to solve the breeding conflicts, a change of attitude is needed.
- First, we need to understand that we are dealing with real people here. In a computerized environment like a gaming community is is easily forgotten. Behind every nickname and character is a a person. People with families, strengths, weaknesses, illnesses, interests jobs and schools. Behind the computer screen it may be easy to judge each other but keep in mind that there is more going on than you see.
- Try not to see anything in black and white, good and evil. The truth is always more complex than that. Even the well-known Packleader can be a great person and surely did good things to the community, only recognized by a few. If you have a problem with someone, don't dismiss him/her as a person but try to solve the problem itself.
- Remember that it's still a game. Nothing more than a game. Rules are fine but the primary rule should be: Have fun and enjoy the game.
- Why all the hatred? IS it really needed to put a 'jerks' list on every Unreal site? Don't try to stigmatize people.
- By the nature of the medium, internet is an environment that provides great freedom to it's users. Since the possibilities are there, anyone should be welcome to write bots, radars and research the protocols for weaknesses. As said, without hacking and cheating many weaknesses of the game should never have been discovered and fixed. I believe in open source. If you use the freedom to dig into your cache for nice mods or coding ideas, tell the owner about it. Same thing in case you want to re-use anything. And give credits. Programmers put much effort in making their products.
- But a medium with this much freedom also asks for responsibility. Don't use your knowledge of the game to hack and crash people. Respect the rules admins set for their servers, you are playing on their computers. If you want to play or experiment with programming or using client-side extensions (Like bots, radars, consoles, automation etc.), make sure the server owner supports it. Or maybe you can host a server for it. It could be fun to have some bot wars server.
- Without very privacy-invading (spyware-like) measures, hacking and cheating will never be totally stopped. If Unreal would turn towards punkbuster-like behaviour which monitors more than the state of the game itself it would no longer be my game. Don't let the solution be worse than the problem.
- We as Unreal community really are a wonderful group of people with many talents. Let's work together on building the community instead of breaking it down.
