I've received a lot of PM's from players that have been banned for cheating (Namely, speed mod, weapons mods, loot mods, and the like), where they post screenshots of the mod manager as proof that they never had had those mods, and also sent me their ini files to try prove they never modded them.
Well, I have to say that sort of proof is not valid, for it can be easily manufactured by anyone who is knowledgeable enough to play the game and edit a text file.
Also, when I ban someone for speed, wepmodding, etc, believe me that I have more than rock solid proof of that.
For example. I get a player PM where he sends me a screenie of his FLMM window, showing only a single mod on it. I took the reference image from my FLMM, and used PAINT (yeah, the crappy paint, that comes with windows) to edit it. And no, its not vista. It's XP 64 with a vista skin :
"Hey plz, i never speedmodded. plz plz, release my chars for i wanna ply fl agein... se3 da pic man, i have n other mod installd. My char is calld 'kaspars1233'"
I then go to the server, see the logs, and find this on the humble anti-cheat tool log viewer:
Yeah, right... you never used speedmod, yet the logs are FULL of it...
Look again at the pattern. Its 100% sure to assume that he did use speedmod on the server, and for a long time indeed.
This one is an example of someone who used wepmod.
I think its very clear that he did wepmodded his ship, despite whatever his claims might be (although I never got a PM from him, one of the recurrent cheaters with a dsl line with dynamic IP).
So, resuming, if you cheat, you're screwed. Badly.
On the other side, there might be some instances where I ban doubtful log entries too. If that is your case, then PM me so I can investigate a bit more deeply about your chars. But remember that there is almost no evidence that you can provide that can get you out when there is a huge log file behind the ban proving that you did cheat.
We are doing all we can to ensure the stability of the server, but flserver is a buggy and not very stable program, we use modded files, we use several patches (flhook, 128 limit crack, multithreading patch) and we're also getting a lot of cheaters/modders lately so all this together obviously causes server to crash and regrettably it's normal.
The software we run server-side is capable of detecting that the flserver is down and it can start it up automatically (it usually takes up to 10 minutes). But it can happen that the server is down for a longer period of time and in those cases you help us all by posting in this thread which draws attention of someone with access to the server.
Post here only under these circumstances:
Server is down for longer than 10 minutes and you are almost sure it's the server (not your connection).
Missions are not spawning any target NPCs and cannot be canceled.
Infinite jumping sequence where jumpholes stop working and turn into an endless loop.
Also, before you post make sure:
No one else has posted recently and you see no one posting anything in here.
Keep your post brief and apposite; no essays, specify the time server was last online
If the server is down for a longer maintenance, you should always find a note in here, so don't post in those cases.
I am more than happy to announce that from now on these people are officially part of the admin team:
Dboy, Vero, Virus, Del, Kuraine
We still wait for confirmation from Virus and Vero, but they sent us their applications, so we hope nothing steps into their way now...
There will however be some trial period of time for each of them before they gain full admin rights (and access to the remote desktop). In Vero's case we might run another poll in the end of his testing period as a lot of people voted no just because they didn't know him, so we hope this might change in near future.
Support them, respect them and treat them well as Discovery needs them!
---- Poll results:
Do you agree with promoting DBoy to RP server administrator?
Yes [143] 69.08%
No [64] 30.92%
Total Votes: 207
Do you agree with promoting Virus to RP server administrator?
Yes [117] 80.14%
No [29] 19.86%
Total Votes: 146
Do you agree with promoting Vero to RP server administrator?
Yes [89] 63.57%
No [51] 36.43
Total Votes: 140
Do you agree with promoting Del to RP server administrator?
Yes [128] 84.77%
No [23] 15.23%
Total Votes: 151
Do you agree with promoting Kuraine to RP server administrator?
Yes [104] 83.87%
No [20] 16.13%
Total Votes: 124