Hi Tonninseteli,
Firstly, a big thank-you for taking the time to enlist here and write this detailed report of your experience playing on our Wake Server so far. I can't tell you enough how much I value this excellent feedback as we strive forward in our ongoing mission to be the best BF2 community around.
As most (if not all) of our members lead busy lives we can unfortunately not be available to monitor the servers manually at all times. For this reason we use AutoAdmin software. Whilst I'm sure you are not fabricating this, I must say I've found a few hours to play on our Wake Island server lately in the evening and on the whole, I haven't had to kick or ban too many players, perhaps people are behaving more-so when they see me in the server and see someone get kicked or banned. In any case, If I'm not mistaken, when I've checked to see who is playing during morning-to-afternoon European Hours, you often fall into that category. This is currently the worst time possible in general to try to find an admin online. However, we are doing everything possible to ensure a good playing experience for all (at whatever hour you choose to play) and have been working hard lately to make improvements to this.
We recently made [LS] b29az an Officer, meaning he has ingame-admin, as he lives in the U.S you will quite often find him online at times when the Europeans are at work. He understands the rules well and is effective at tackling problem players. As all of us will do, if we confront a problem player live in-game: it will first be a Warning, then a Kick if it continues, then a Temporary Ban (60 minutes) followed by a Permanent Ban. If the offence is Racism, Gender related or Sexual discrimnation, Redlining or Stat-Padding, the perpetrator will be permanently banned with no chance of appeal. We will also be appointing 2 new Officers this weekend to help out and try to fill the gaps in human administration a little more.
Around a month ago, myself and BlackEmperor completed the migration of our BF2 Servers from Windows to Linux. Due to certain changes we were forced to make, our AutoAdmin software ceased to work almost entirely in terms of actions, along with many of our other server features. Since then I have worked very hard to repair this and fortunately had a little help and advice from the original developer (qSek) who was kind enough to share his source code with me so I could modify it myself. In addition he has even written the code for various new features entirely. A lot of our features are now back online including: AutoAdmin, In-Game & Standalone Admin Software but we can only work in the hours we have available and let me assure you, we have been working very hard and long hours to fix stuff. Similarly we are continually testing and tweaking our AutoAdmin Sourcecode & Settings to improve the quality & effectiveness of it. It's of course been an extremely busy period, and we are not through and out the other side of the tunnel entirely yet.
In other good news, a few days ago I managed to get our Server Auto Messages functioning once more. Due to the OS Migration an entirely different and new method was required, there were some challenging roadblocks to clear requiring problem-solving and Black-Hat IT Skills and a good 4 or 5 hours just to do this. The plus side of this is that players will now see the rules scrolling in each server every 15 minutes. Up until this week, since we moved the BF2 servers to the new OS around a month ago, this was not functioning, meaning the burst of new players would be very unlikely to know that there are rules at all. Let's give players a chance to read them and abide by them. Most would assume we were running no rules servers when they can't see any, especially considering all of the official servers are no rules.
Please ensure you use "+r fullplayername problem" for
Each offence that a problem player commits I check the reports on a daily basis and if I keep seeing the same names then there have of course been and are consequences for them to face.
In order to answer your question on the problem player protocol. I mentioned the process above that a human administrator would be expected to follow. Regarding the AutoAdmin, we are well aware that warnings are not tracked in continuation after a player is kicked. They can come back, break the rules again and they will only be kicked again, not Temporary or PermaBanned. Admittedly, this is a major flaw and I have spoken to the original developer about this. He has continued to be a great friend & asset to this community by agreeing to help implement this as soon as possible, along with some other additions and tweaks we are looking to make. Obviously, AutoAdmin can't and never will detect everything though. If you provide us with good / irrefutable evidence that a player has been cheating or regularly breaking rules then it will be a permanent ban for the former and atleast a temporary ban for the latter with the length of punishment dependent on the nature & gravity of the offence(s) and our best judgements based on years of BF2 and Admin experience.
I will be modifying a few things on the servers this weekend to ensure players are made aware of the need to follow rules and they know they can come and read them in detail on the website.
We will be monitoring this situation closely now but please also consider that as the game has opened up to a much larger market since it became Free2Play, it has brought many children (and some '
adults 'who behave like children) with it. We are doing our best to ban these but for every 1 good player that installs BF2 these days there are 4 idiots/trolls/cheaters determined to keep Admins busy and leading such pathetic little lives that it makes them feel good to abuse others online (something they would never have the balls to do to your face in real life) because it fulfills their need to feel powerful, superior or simply a bit better about their low self-confidence.
Let us know if your experience improves at all over the next couple of weeks. If not, we'll consider implementing an immediate Temporary Ban after the max-warnings is reached for rule-violations instead of a kick. In which case I will put a vote up for my team here. This will itself be a temporary solution until we can track total warnings after a player has been kicked and returns in order to move to the next level of punishment with the AutoAdmin.
(Finally, perhaps you accidentally had "preview" my post ticked in the check-boxes at the bottom of the "New Topic"? In which case to then post the topic you would need to remove this before clicking the final "Post New Topic" button).
Thank-you once more for bringing this to our attention, let me know if you have any further questions.
Cheers,
5tarLine