In response to this, I’d like to suggest that every player can have their own personal blacklist list that prevents specific players from joining games if they’re the host.
I feel like simple kicking could be abused way too much, and votekicking is also a possible solution, but from personal experience with hackers in TF2, can be frustrating if it doesn’t work perfectly when the player keeps rejoining (such is the case that my friends and I are annoyed over.)
Since the Tower Unite staff will probably not take action against simple unsportsmanlike behavior in game lobbies, I feel like game hosting blacklists would be a great solution for the community to moderate itself, as shitty players can quickly gain a reputation and will have a harder and harder time joining games.
I obviously don’t know how your backend works, but condos already have this feature while also using P2P connection, right?
Actually, you can do this right now. As you mentioned, you can ban people from your Condo. The same thing applies to game worlds. If you ban someone from your condo, they won’t be able to play the game worlds you host, either.
So what you can do right now is grab the SteamID of the offending player and goto TowerBans.ini (create the file if it doesn’t exist already) located in %localappdata%\Tower\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\
In that mentioned file put in it:
[Bans]
SteamID=,0
Then after SteamID= put in their 64 bit Steam ID. It has to be the 64-bit one (also known as their community ID, it starts with 7656119).
Once you do that, that user is banned from all games you host.
I’d just like to see this implemented in the actual games too, there’s no reason not to. If you host and a troublemaker joins there’s nothing you can do in that current session.
Ah, awesome. I will definitely be spreading this information to all my friends so we won’t have to deal with this player. In the meantime, the community really needs to be made aware that they can do this. I hope you consider expanding upon it in the future.
Also, just curious, how do banned players see things? Do they actually see games/condos that they’re banned from and aren’t able to connect, or are they just outright not visible to them?
Alright, I just came back to say this definitely didn’t work. The player we want gone was immediately able to join both my friend’s game and my own as well.
Alright, what am I doing wrong this time? The Japanese player was still able to join our games. I added a second ID to the list, but they were also able to join when my friend was the host, who I had correct his ban list, but with only the single ID like before.
EDIT: Okay, I just tested something by perma-banning one of my friends from my condo and that works. Was that supposed to update my TowerBans.ini file? Because it didn’t. I guess a buddy’s gonna be waiting a bit before he can join my stuff again.
Just another note, I initially created the .ini file, but I didn’t try to ban anyone from my condo before, so I guess it wouldn’t have any reason to be there before.
Does this affect games that are formed from a Tower Lobby
I’m assuming it does
but as the server picks the person with the best net, and this player has a banned user within the config.
Unlike instances among lobby’s which are personal spaces as such, minigames are less of that and are more or less a part of the lobby.
A solution that may be considered is echoing the lobby’s ban list into the game it’s linked up into, so the game accepts everyone who is a part of the instance already, unfriendly players should be managed by the server administrator
However, users joining from the main menu should be policed from both the server ban list, and the game host, as they are joining from outside of the lobby. This is so that players banned from the server cannot invade a game from a lobby they are banned from, but also as they are not a part of the lobby, the game host can control who should be let in or not
