Apr 7 2007, 1:11 pm
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Strawgate
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I would simply put in something that requires the latest version to run, and a remote shutdown command. I love the new DD features. It allows you to add administrative commands to a game without administrative commands. If there isn't a good ban feature, BAMM, Dream Daemon has one! I would simply give administrative commands to my multi keys and if anything bad happens use those to control the server or prevent the server from running.
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I'm not quite clear on all of the differences between the Dream Daemon versions, but I think the ability to check a passport with a key instead of needing a client would help ease concerns over this issue. The new Dream Daemon could then be welcomed because of its host key feature.
I have to admit that I find the argument slightly entertaining though. Some of us would love to have others host our games instead of going straight to the Live section. ;) | |
I'm a little conflicted. I completely believe in the rights of a creator to control their work.. but once you release a game to be hosted by the public, you have released an arrow in flight. Trying to reclaim it at that point is a little foolish.
That having been said, I believe in the right of publishers (which would be you, in this case) to license their works rather than selling/giving it outright. If you include a licensing agreement which specifies your rights as publisher and their rights as host (rather than as "owner of a copy of the game."), you'll have better standing. If you don't include such a licensing agreement, then I don't believe you, as developer or publisher, have any moral or natural right to have access to all hosted copies. The makers of Monopoly do not expect that anybody, anywhere who sits down to play a game must keep their door open in case the game's manufacturer wants to come in and play. They still own the rights to Monopoly, but they do not, from that right, gain the right to access any copy of it on private property. This applies if the game isn't actually available for public download, but given to select trusted hosts. It's your job to spell out what rights they're being given. The default assumption is that when you give them a copy of the software, they own that copy. As for how to protect the rights you reserve... hub.password, anybody? | |
I think hub passwords were designed to keep different programs from using the same hub page. However, the goal here is to list different instances of the same program. Perhaps you can use the hub password as an end result to hide a game, but it won't help you distinguish who should be hosting.
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This seems like a dev decision. Most games don't need to allow any special dev access. But, if the dev decides he wants to limit host power, he can. So where's the problem?
Sure DD now allows some options that could circumvent this (banning a dev, for example), but that is easy to get around. Just require the host to validate with a remote file. If you pull their name, no validation, no hosting. If connectivity to the file is an issue, you could even give them a trust time (say a week) between validations. Easy! | |
Because, that's really how it is. A host is mealy a conduit for which the game can be enjoyed. They are donating their resources to me and I as the developer have the right to terminate their ability to host or play the game. Not the other way around. You seem to be confused. You gave up your resources, and have given them to another party. From that point on, it is only a 'conduit for which the game can be enjoyed', assuming you've made arrangements for such. Otherwise, the host is free to do what he wants with it, and he most likely will. After all, he has the little button that says 'shut it down' and 'start it up'. All I have to say is, if you don't want people NOT letting you connect to the game that you publicly release and allow everyone and their brother to host, I suggest you not publicly release it at all. You can go out of your way to stop people from doing this, but you are on your own with it. I can understand not wanting a rogue public host (one that you've assigned to host the resource specifically for your game) to continue hosting, but once you release it publicly, you're giving up your ability to moderate and control the games that are put up. (I'm not sure about BYOND's stance on people that release source codes that do not belong to them, but I know they stopped a few people from doing it in the past) | |
I'm one of the biggest opponents of the whole "game is yours, server is just borrowing your game" mentality.
Number one, where are there examples in real life where it works this way? BYOND developers have some kind of crazy power trip where they assume that their game is always theirs, even when they scatter it to the winds... something that doesn't hold up in real life. You hold the rights, sure, but you don't hold the right of access. Lexy's Monopoly example describes this better than anything I've ever seen. Number two, you are the ultimate arbiter of who gets to host your game. Whosoever you give the downloading privilege to will host your game, without your intervention and with your implicit permission. If you want to make it explicit, then only distribute the files to free, registered subscribers or use some other hosting scheme that ensures you have control over who can host. However, this does not in any way entitle you to have power over someone else's private property (their server), and complaining until you're blue in the face about it just smacks of childishness. If you give it to them, they can use it. Don't want them to use it? Then don't give it to them, or build in ways of allowing only certain people to take it. Their server is their property. Your game is your property. You can prevent them from hosting games if you want, but the session (and thus the server itself) is theirs. I mean, seriously, Tiberath, you're making it sound like you're an ardent supporter of Digital Rights Management. | |
@ACWraith: Ah, that's right. It's been a looong time since I hosted anything.
hub.password might still provide a means for creators who want to protect their reptuation, I suppose... Anwyay, this comes down to relationship. What relationship does the host have to the creator? If you hire somebody to host your game, they have a total obligation to you. If you release a game without a licensing agreement, they have no obligation to you. Any licensing agreement would put it between those extremes. Note that I say this as somebody who gets the screaming jibblies at the thought of somebody misusing her creations. I would LOVE to have the power to reach out across the ether and strangle anybody who hosted a game I created and then was an asshole, or banned me, or didn't subscribe to my personal and political philosophies, or whatever. I would love to have that power, and would totally use it if I did... but I recognize on another level that I've got no intrinsic right to that kind of ability. Very few of my games still exist in a playable form, but most of them were never intended to be hosted by others, for the very reason that it was important to me that I retained ownership over them. At some point, you have to ask yourself what's more important to you... that your games are completely available for people to play, or that they're absolutely within your control. [EDIT[ And, @Jtgibson... this is why I'm not morally or philosophically opposed to DRM, even as I'm loathe to buy anything that includes it. I feel rights-holders (which includes original creators as well as massive evil conglomerates) -should- have the ability to license rather than sell their output, and -should- have the ability to take steps to insure the licenses are being followed. | |
One possible solution:
Hard-code it so that your key/IP cannot be banned, and that your key has admin rights on every server. They can still pager ban you of course, but as long as you have a second key coded in, and you know how to reset your IP, you can still log in. Possibly even banning the host from their own server. | |
[EDIT] Whoops, guess I'm behind the times. I generally don't keep up with the comments in BYOND Labs posts. I suppose technically I agree with the principle of hardcoded overrides for host bans but I generally fail to see the necessity. If someone is the sort of person who wants to ban me from their server for some petty reason, then clearly they are not the sort of person whose server I have any interest in playing on. And if they're "denying" me the right to play a game I developed--so what? They could just stop hosting any time they wanted and "deny" me that way. The fact that they would be allowed to let other people play but not me does not have any bearing on my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of my own game. There is the issue of how your work is being represented by public servers, since so many players around here seem incapable of making the distinction between developers and public hosts. But if I was really concerned about that I wouldn't be relying on my (or my chosen moderators') ability to log in and personally police their server, I would be implementing measures to allow me to strip hosting rights (and probably wouldn't make hosting rights completely public to begin with). So... since I'd be doing that anyhow, it's not like the new ban system would be adding any extra burden to me. | |
Jamesburrow wrote:
One possible solution: And that'll be worth jack-squat when BYOND 4.0's Dream Daemon is ready. | |
Jamesburrow wrote:
Possibly even banning the host from their own server. See, this is where it goes from "strange" to "tacitly ludicrous". Using the Monopoly example again, say Parker Bros. doesn't like it that you've made a rule that anyone who wants to can bribe another player at any time using their money, because it's not built into the game. Parker Bros. further doesn't like it that you told Jimmy (a son of one of Parker Bros.' board members) down the street not to play because you felt his insistence on the rules "as they were written" made the game less fun. Parker Bros. comes into your house and kicks you out of your house. | |
I haven't read any other of the comments (nor do I know where this has originated from), but I have to agree that hosts should not have the ability to override developers. I don't feel like going into detail, but if you made the game, you should have power over those who host it.
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Personally, if the game is hosted privately, I don't really care what the host does, or what power they have. Dream Daemon could find and distribute all the verbs in the Admin datum for all I care. But if the game is public, then it's a concern. That's my image, my game, my efforts being flushed down the toilet by some want-to-be moderator and his power lust.
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If your public image is being destroyed because your game is being hosted by people who shouldn't be allowed to host it, you have only yourself to blame. Imagine instead if you were a weapon manufacturer. You sell your guns to anyone who wants them. Someone starts murdering people with one of your guns. Who is to blame? It's perfectly all right if you're manufacturing weapons, but if you have moral issues with people using them improperly (or personal issues with the protests that it's causing outside of your building), maybe you should be a little more careful with who you're giving them to.
If you want to control your product and ensure it is used in ways that are in keeping with your policies, you should control the distribution of your product or control what the product actually does. If your product gets used against you (e.g., if a submachine gun of yours is fired on police officers), that's a sign that something's wrong with your distribution methods. | |
Jtgibson wrote:
If your public image is being destroyed because your game is being hosted by people who shouldn't be allowed to host it, you have only yourself to blame. Imagine instead if you were a weapon manufacturer. You sell your guns to anyone who wants them. Someone starts murdering people with one of your guns. Who is to blame? It's perfectly all right if you're manufacturing weapons, but if you have moral issues with people using them improperly (or personal issues with the protests that it's causing outside of your building), maybe you should be a little more careful with who you're giving them to. Depending on the type of game, the only time someone shouldn't be allowed to host it is after they've already proven they shouldn't be allowed to. Thus, after the damage has been done. In the broader area of things, what if I want to be able to release the game for people to host privately? Granted I could program in something which allows only an array of hosts to host it publicly (I think I could do that, anyway) but the point is, I shouldn't have to. | |
Tiberath wrote:
That's my image, my game, my efforts being flushed down the toilet by some want-to-be moderator and his power lust. Perhaps, but only because of the very idea which you champion--that as creator you have absolute control over everything, everywhere, all the time. It's largely due to this misconception that so many people fail to distinguish between the actions of a third-party host and the nature of the game. And it is, in fact, a misconception. Regardless of however you structure your game's hosting controls, a host has ultimate control over their own server: they have the power to decide when to host and when not to host. This is the single most fundamentally important hosting function, and one which rests solely in the hands of the host and not the developer (you can include functions to allow you to forcibly stop someone from hosting, but unless you find a way to pack in a trojan virus you can't force someone else to host for you.) Since the decision to host lies in the hands of the host and not the developer (assuming that the developer releases hosting capability to the public, which after all is what is being discussed here), it should follow that the consequences of the host's server belong to the host and not to the developer. Of course, most people don't seem to quite grasp this fact, in large part due to arguments such as yours. You claim to need absolute authority over public servers because of a tacit assertion that players expect you to have this authority (if they didn't expect you to have it, then they wouldn't let the actions of public third party hosts who have no relationship to you or your game to impact their perceptions of your image; the fact that they do let hosts' actions sway their opinions implies that they have that expectation of you). But players expect you to have this authority in part because so many developers such as you assert that they should: circular reinforcement. Sever that false expectation in the minds of the public and the whole issue becomes moot. Of course that's really not going to happen. Since it's not going to happen, you have three options: 1) Stop caring about what some jackass chooses to do with their server. If people choose to believe that you are associated somehow with that server in spite of disclaimers to the contrary, screw 'em. 2) Implement measures that allow you to prevent abusive hosts from hosting. 3) Don't publically release your game for hosting in the first place. It doesn't really seem to me that the new ban system has an awful lot of impact on any of these three options. True, being unable to bypass bans does preclude a couple of quick-and-easy variations of #2, but while these implementations would be quick-and-easy to implement they would also probably be quick-and-easy for hosts to get around. A good hosting prevention system probably does not really require you to be able to log into the server. | |
Hosting isn't a power, it's a choice. A lot of people don't seem to understand that either.
I'm not going to hold a gun to someone and say "Host this game!!" It's their decision to do so. And in doing so, they agree (as per the disclaimer I put in the original post) that the power to control the server, belongs to me. I don't care if they chose not to host, because if they didn't, there is bound to be one person, out of the ever expanding populace of BYOND that will. If they chose not to host, that's their prerogative, but should they decide to, then the little power the developer gives them, should be all they get. If the developer believes the host has all the power, they're well within their right to give it to them. But if the developer believes as I do, they should have the right to take it from them. All of this, should be decided by the individual developer, not the programs we're given to use. | |
Tiberath wrote:
I'm not going to hold a gun to someone and say "Host this game!!" It's their decision to do so. And in doing so, they agree (as per the disclaimer I put in the original post) that the power to control the server, belongs to me. Why exactly is this necessary, though? If they're not going to run their server the way you want them to, and you don't want them to (publically) run their server the way they do, the best solution all around is simply deny them the privilege of hosting. Where exactly does power to control what goes on within the server enter into it? Tiberath wrote: All of this, should be decided by the individual developer, not the programs we're given to use. Perhaps BYOND should include a disclaimer saying that by running BYOND you are donating your computer's resources to advancing BYOND, and that power to control BYOND programs belongs to BYOND staff. Problem solved, eh? ;) | |
This is a power struggle that's been going on forever; developer versus host.
Developer doesn't control their distribution and havoc ensues. Host doesn't control their temper and havoc ensues. On the average, hosts are decent people with a sense of responsibility and humility, but as per Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad theory, normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad. This thing should be right up there with Gupka's Law, Becker's Theorem and Murphy's Law. The problem is that power can't be evenly distributed, because the game owner typically knows what they're doing and quite often selects people that are respectable to hold power in their games, but as per the classic broken record argument in the host's favor, "they're contributing their bandwidth and time to host the game". While true, the host is willingly DONATING their time and bandwidth and should be given remedial administration ability, if anything; in the case of those developers who pay people for their bandwidth, this shouldn't be an issue at all. On the other hand, hosts shouldn't need anything in return to begin with. People look for games with host ability just to be the grand pubaa of their server and throw their weight around to ban Naruto1234 because he called their imaginary online girlfriend (who's really a guy) a slut. Delegation of power should remain as it is, where the developer decides who recieves power. Those who trust their game to the host can do so, and others that staff their creation by themselves should be able to continue doing as such. Though, with Lummox's stand in favor of the host, this issue is decidedly closed and isn't open to argument. | |