Being a server admin ain't easy. 

I have been trying my hand at it just recently and ninety per cent of the time it's fun. But there is that ten percent that makes you quickly forget all the great experiences adminning gives you. Most times, the negativity is caused by a small number of rotten apples that are just intent on causing problems.

In public servers, ridding yourself of these e-punks is a constant challenge.

Call of Duty modder PST*Joker, has a great deal of experience running pub servers and I asked him if there was any automated way of filtering these players out of the server.

PST*Joker and his colleague PST*MeatPuppet have had something like this in mind for months now - and are just about ready to spring it on the community.

Imagine you have set yourself up a gaming server and you have implemented some rules that govern your server's gaming style. There are resources available to help you run your server and keep the gaming experience clean via systems such as PunkBuster and PBBans to name a few.

These only catch cheaters and if players are caught, it results in a ban...a global GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) ban which renders the cheater's game useless for online play.

But what about the mouthy troublemaker who comes in the server and disses you and all the players on your server?  Sure you can ban them, but this requires you to be on the ball and on the server 24-7. There's no automated way to filter out trouble-makers.

However, what if you were able to get intel on each player as they got into your server and you could know right away whether the player was predisposed to being an e-punk?

This describes a new era in adminning, the era of gCOPS.

gCOPS is a system that PST*Joker and PST*MeatPuppet have devised that allows game administrators to tag players in real time for offenses that pertain to their own server's gaming style.

Gaming Community Online Policing System - gCOPS

Procedure:

A typical server that has a set of basic rules that must be followed by anyone who chooses to play on that server. A player has broken one or more of those rules and has been caught.

The reporting administrator will then use rcon (remote console supported by most popular multiplayer game server software) to obtain such information as the player's taken game name at that time, their GUID and IP address.

The reporting administrator will then use their web browser and navigate to the gCOPS site. A base description would be a secure PHP web based front end to a MySQL database. The form is filled out by the reporting administrator and a record has now been recorded concerning the offending player.

In doing so, a consistent and organized history can be generated for the server's security team to reference as well as anyone using gCOPS if the originating server has opted in to using the global system. The whole gCOPS community would now be aware of this player's habits.

Information of import recorded:

- An assigned unique record ID
- Player's Current Taken Name
- GUID (Globally Unique Identifier)
- IP address
- Types of offenses (using predefined codes for the offense(s). Making the tag discreet)
- Time of the offense
- Who tagged the player
- What server or clan the record belongs to (origin)

Now for the interesting part. The option to tag a player is now given once the new record has been saved into the database.

Via another web based form (Tag Manager), a player can be tagged so that whenever that player joins the server or any gCOPS enabled server, a message from the game's console will display a reference ID and a set of associated codes in regards to that player's previous offense(s). Only the game server administrators have the legend for deciphering the offense codes and thus keeping the tag as discreet as possible to the player in question and others in game.

How this is done is by way of a c++ script run by the multiplayer game server application itself (the game engine). This script is reread during any and all map changes and remains resident during that current map. Executing after any player joins during that current map.

The form used for tagging a player simply modifies the server script by adding the tag program code to the script. Necessary information needed in that code is pulled from the associated record in the database. The option of removing a tag from the c++ script is also available in the tag management form.

The option to ban a player's GUID completely from the originating game server (a local ban) is also available to the game server's administrator but will only take effect on that server. A global ban will not be issued by gCOPS.

Technical:

Three existing main technologies are leveraged to make the gCOPS system work.

C++ server side script - parsed by game server software
Web server supporting PHP
MySQL database

The c++ server side script contains code that checks a connecting player's GUID against an array of GUIDs populated by game administrators via input from a PHP based form. If a match is true, the appropriate message will be displayed in game for the administrators to see. Automatically informing them of a possible problem to look out for.

The PHP form (Tag Manager) is designed to process options for tagging a player. This form contains an array of c++ code blocks that can be inserted into the c++ server side script. Eliminating the need to manually edit the server side script. The form can be run locally on the game server itself or remotely on another server over the Internet.

The MySQL database is used for keeping records of offenses and has it's own PHP front end for entering the required information about an offense. The Tag Manager pulls information from the database to dynamically change the c++ code blocks prior to insertion or removal from the c++ server side script.

The end result of using such a system is that the gaming community itself can now police and monitor offending players prior to a global ban from such resources as PBBans and even PunkBuster. The ability of other administrators who may not have access to rcon but do have access to the gCOPS system, can locally ban a player from their game server if a record already exists.

Profiling players in the community and locally banning that player from your own server prior to that player ever logging in is now a possibility.

The possibility of rehabilitating or even educating a problem player prior to an inevitable global ban now exists with even greater success.

The possibility of offering a problem player the choice of game server's that make use of a style of play and rules that may not conflict with their own particular style of play now exists.

The benefits and rewards to the gaming community are exponential.