Thanks for the info, but a toxic system banning servers like that.... I can't believe you guys allowed this while I was gone
Most people are quite sick of how otservlist only cares about the number of players online with absolutely no consideration for the quality of the service and so people have created new lists. With that said, the sad reality of the matter is that otservlist has been around for such a long time that anyone that has played OT since that long ago time that comes back to OT occasionally just instinctively types in otservlist.org and half of new players don't even know/care that otland exists which is the only way they would find out that a new server list exists.
But like I said in my previous post, there are options so that you can allow people to afk for an indefinite amount of time if that's how you want your server to work. Personally, I just made it so as soon as the players client is closed, the afk timer is activated. This means that so long as a player is connected to the game server, they are always considered "active". This was the best idea I could come up with after several exchanges with Xinn, at the end of the day all he wants is to make sure that each player being reported to the list is an actual player. For such a long time people were making no-logout zones on their server and xlogging tens if not hundreds of characters in said zone and they would just stick there until the server was rebooted thus boosting that servers player count. Then people try out the server expecting a nice populated community only to find that it is a barren wasteland.
Here are some other simple changes you can do that will not effect the players gameplay experience at all and still allow your server to fit within the set of rules otservlist has:
- You can remove the kicking of an afk player after 15 minutes but simply not report them as an active player.
- You can allow as many MCs as you want but only report up to 4 of them to otservlist.
- You can use no-logout zones but prevent the server from reporting players who have been idle for 15 minutes inside of said zone.
- You can prevent the server from reporting any player that has no client present (when a player x-logs).
These changes would allow your players to utilize all of said systems without actually breaking the otservlist rules. The only difference is that players using those systems would not be considered "active players" for the sole purpose of otservlist (you could still display them on your own website).
@Peonso
I know this reply may be too long for your attention span but please do try and put a bit of effort into reading it before you shitpost me. I will post a tldr for you as well just in case.
You are being extremely ignorant to the actual problem at hand here. He simply changed the idle time on his server from 15 minutes to 30 and this change is what is being discussed. He personally doesn't feel that 15 minutes is sufficient time for his players to be kicked from the game. Your opinion on the matter is irrelevant as you don't know the reasoning behind it. For all you know, he could have a system on his server where you ride a mining cart from point a to point b and it could very well take 20 minutes to reach said destination. Given this fact, kicking the player partway through his journey would be extremely annoying for the player if he/she wanted to start the journey and go eat while he "drives" to the destination. Now... would this be terrible game design? Yes it would. It is your place to tell someone they cannot put said system into their server because you don't like it? Not in the least.
Also what you fail to understand is that otservlist does not give a shit about you allowing players to do what I just described. Xinn specifically cares about servers that are reporting fake/non-existent players. The issue is that some his methods of determining if said server is "spoofing" do not consider the fact that there is a config option to change the idle time of a server. He simply assumes that if you don't get kicked within 15 minutes, then you have disabled afk kick and are most likely spoofing. It would be different if the 15-minute idle time was hard coded into TFS so that it wasn't so easily changed but the fact of the matter is that any noob can pick up a server, put it online, go into the config to start setting everything how they want it, and they could easily see the idle-kick option and say to themselves "oh yea being kicked every 15 minutes is annoying, I'm going to make it 1 hour" and in doing so, they don't even realize that the moment Xinn (or whoever he has doing this) logs into the server to check the idle-time, his server is going to be banned from the list for 30-days.
tldr
If you cannot be objective and/or don't know/understand all of the facts, maybe you should refrain from posting and making yourself look like a complete asshat. This is a discussion about a server that was potentially banned for simply changing the idle-kick time from 15 minutes to 30. Based on the information in this thread there was no intentional spoofing on the servers end.
For you to instantly jump to this conclusion is childish and ignorant, grow up...
Amazing rant!
"I have this rule in my server that I send 100000 online players information to otservlist but they all afk and botting, or even not online at all, and you don't accept it!!!"