Whilst adminning for BlueYonder Natural Selection, I thought I would write a short note to help with some of the complaints that have been coming into the BYNS admin channel recently. I've reproduced the data here, for those who need a few pointers in gathering evidence. As admins, we are thankful for help in keeping our servers (by ours, I mean our community's) a friendly and happy place, and commend you for it. unfortunately, some of the evidence gathered, whilst donated at the cost of volunteers' gaming time, is insufficient for us to make a judgment. here are a few tips.
DEMOS
Demos are by far the best method of recording evidence. they contain messages, player perspectives and chat logs, as well as voice comm usage. we like these the most, but they are most effective when accompanied by another form of evidence. after you have recorded a demo, you will find it in your mod folder (i.e. the folder for the HL mod you are playing).
sound
when recording a demo, it is important to remember that a bug in the current coding causes some HL mods to crash if someone is using voicecomms when you press enter atfer typing "record". therefore, to stop the crash, simply type "stopsound; record demoname" in the console, and HL will stop whatever is playing, and initiate sounds afterwards. this is particularly useful for people abusing voice comms.
perspective
fortunately, NS does not suffer from many incidences of cheating. However, in some other mods, cheating has been proven to be rife! if you suspect someone is cheating, and no admins are around, then you can help your admins to assess the situation by going to spectator mode and making sure that the camera option (you change it by pressing enter) is set to "first person camera" or "locked chase camera" and you are following the player you suspect. this allows admins to assess the pinpoint accuracy of players, and demos like this are still better than your standard chase camera or free look demos. unfortunately, some mods do not support first person camera, but that is expected to change.
submitting
demos are usually quite large in size, but compress well. tools such as winzip or winrar will get the demos down to a very agreeable size, whilst maintaining their integrity. remember to compress demos, to save yourself time in transmitting them to your admin team.
CONDUMP
Condump basically outputs everything that is in the console to a text file. this includes teamsay messages for your team, but not your opponents' team. simply type "condump" in the console to get a record of everything said in public say or on your team's teamsay, and any console commands you have used. they will be in your HL folder, indexed by number (condump0001.txt etc). particularly useful for recording abuse of text, especially as demos don't always show it all.
remember, a warning from a player is as good as a warning from an admin, and your condump is the proof of the warning you have given!
SCREENSHOTS
Screenshots are another very useful tool. in particular, they help with collecting WONIDs. to get a screensot of the WONIDs of the players in the server, pull down the console and type "status". when the console displays the status, hit your screensot button (default F5). they will also be in your HL folder, indexed by map name and number (e.g. NS_hera0001.bmp)
submitting
once you have your screenies, which are in .bmp format, it is best for you to change them to .jpg format, which is much smaller in size and quicker to tramsit. nearly every image software package can do this, including mspaint. screensots can also be used for demonstrating offences, but they are not as conclusive as demos, or condumps.
SUMMARY
if you have gathered evidence, the best thing to do is to write a short note outlining the offence, including the server number, offender name and rough time, zip it all up and hand it in. remember, if someone is being silly on the servers, ripping into them or giving them a hard time is not the ideal thing to do, it's best just to warn them, then gather your evidence. if they are being really silly, gathering won't take long.
Admins will compare your evidence against our server logs and if an offence was commited, will act accordingly, but they can only really do that with concrete evidence, which is where this post comes in.
I hope this post helps you to have a hassle free time on the servers where you play!
How do I find my WON/STEAM ID?
First, let me say what a WONID/VALVE_ID is.
Each copy of Half-Life or retail Day Of Defeat has a unique identification number. For Half-Life this is know has a WonID, which will be a few numbers. For Day of Defeat retail this is known as the Valve_ID.
This is YOUR unique identity to Half-Life. No matter what alias you go by, no matter how long you have owned the game and what updates you put on it... unless you buy another copy of a Valve product, the WON/VALVE ID will always remain the same.
So, heres how you find your wonid out:
- Connect to a server Server List
- Bring down your Console (default key: ` or ~)
- You should then type "status"
As you can see above, the one in the square is your won/Valve ID
