Forums » General
Limitations for TOR, VPNs and Proxies.
In terms of "upcoming changes", as a bit of a corollary to the previous 32bit Windows deprecation announcement, I wanted to also mention that we're going to be eventually limiting the usage of VPNs, TOR and anonymizing proxies for both the website and the game.
To be clear, I'm actually an advocate of personal security and privacy, and between this and a desire to support players in countries with difficult governmental censorship issues, it has made approaching this policy somewhat challenging.
Unfortunately, the significant and increasing amount of spam, attacks and other issues that have come in from these sources have become more and more problematic, over the last few years. This keeps elevating the administrative overhead of problems we need to deal with, making this an issue we need to address before we begin pushing for wider marketing and generally increasing the scale of the userbase (the scale of problems will increase with the userbase).
I don't know exactly what this will look like to players, in the final implementation, but I can say that we will try to start out with a fairly limited approach whenever we can. For instance, we'll obviously allow "anonymous sources" to read the website & forums, but probably with greater limits on account creation, posting to the forums, or access to the "Configure Personal Information" region in Account Info.
Similarly, I'm not sure what this will look like for the game, but we may still allow these sources to log into the game, but without access to chatting on 1/100, along with other potential limitations. The idea being to try some kind of "limited" game access that allows, say, Chinese players to still engage in the game to some extent, but similarly limiting the headache of in-game spammers, ban circumvention issues and related administrative challenges.
If this doesn't work well enough, we can always be more aggressive later, but at least the mechanics will be in place.
I don't expect this to impact 99.9% of players, these changes will be completely transparent to most people. Generally speaking, playing the game through a VPN is a substantially worse experience, as it adds to latency and "connection-jitter", making combat less enjoyable. Users gaming through VPNs is a very, very limited group.
People who web-browse with universal anonymization tools and VPNs may be a bit more common, but it should be pretty easy for them to "whitelist" our specific site, if they want to participate on the forums, etc.
To be clear, I'm actually an advocate of personal security and privacy, and between this and a desire to support players in countries with difficult governmental censorship issues, it has made approaching this policy somewhat challenging.
Unfortunately, the significant and increasing amount of spam, attacks and other issues that have come in from these sources have become more and more problematic, over the last few years. This keeps elevating the administrative overhead of problems we need to deal with, making this an issue we need to address before we begin pushing for wider marketing and generally increasing the scale of the userbase (the scale of problems will increase with the userbase).
I don't know exactly what this will look like to players, in the final implementation, but I can say that we will try to start out with a fairly limited approach whenever we can. For instance, we'll obviously allow "anonymous sources" to read the website & forums, but probably with greater limits on account creation, posting to the forums, or access to the "Configure Personal Information" region in Account Info.
Similarly, I'm not sure what this will look like for the game, but we may still allow these sources to log into the game, but without access to chatting on 1/100, along with other potential limitations. The idea being to try some kind of "limited" game access that allows, say, Chinese players to still engage in the game to some extent, but similarly limiting the headache of in-game spammers, ban circumvention issues and related administrative challenges.
If this doesn't work well enough, we can always be more aggressive later, but at least the mechanics will be in place.
I don't expect this to impact 99.9% of players, these changes will be completely transparent to most people. Generally speaking, playing the game through a VPN is a substantially worse experience, as it adds to latency and "connection-jitter", making combat less enjoyable. Users gaming through VPNs is a very, very limited group.
People who web-browse with universal anonymization tools and VPNs may be a bit more common, but it should be pretty easy for them to "whitelist" our specific site, if they want to participate on the forums, etc.
100% support this
+10
You get my support on this
+1
+1
This might only impact .1% of players but something tells me it's going to impact gameplay by about 30%.
Good news.
Good news.
That's kind of an odd comment? I don't expect it to impact day-to-day gameplay much at all. We have some Chinese players, but otherwise this isn't a very common case. Glad to hear it's good news, though.
On my phone, I use DuckDuckGo's browser's vpn service; this doesn't route through any server, it merely is meant to help track and prevent "tracking" attampts by apps on your device (I get about 20k-70k per week that are blocked, sometimes from apps i'm not even using!). At this time, do you know if I'd have to whitelist my browser and VO apps, or potentially just disable that vpn in order to play without these restrictions?
Huh, interesting, I was not familiar with that service (also another article here).
The absolute answer is "I don't know for sure", but my read of the tea-leaves from that first article is that it probably should be fine, not an issue.
The DDG app is "registering" as a VPN to gain access to all traffic outbound from the device, and then using that to compare the destinations against some kind of "tracking services list", and selectively blocking things that attempt to hit those services. Like, Facebook's tracking servers.
VO isn't likely to appear on DDG's bad-services list, so it shouldn't block any of our traffic. And, at the same time, it isn't actually a VPN, so your packets will still be reaching the VO servers from your own IP. So, we shouldn't have a problem with DDG, or them with us.
I will caveat that with a thought: depending on the amount of analysis they're doing on outbound packets, it could be CPU burden for a game like ours, under certain (uncommon) circumstances. Companies like DDG probably don't expect people to be transmitting a lot of data from their phone, outside of special cases like video or whatever. If they're trying to do inspection of a lot of time-sensitive UDP traffic, that would be "not awesome" for VO. But.. I would guess they probably are not (probably just looking at HTTP traffic, for that matter), and I guess I wouldn't worry about it unless you start to experience a problem.
The absolute answer is "I don't know for sure", but my read of the tea-leaves from that first article is that it probably should be fine, not an issue.
The DDG app is "registering" as a VPN to gain access to all traffic outbound from the device, and then using that to compare the destinations against some kind of "tracking services list", and selectively blocking things that attempt to hit those services. Like, Facebook's tracking servers.
VO isn't likely to appear on DDG's bad-services list, so it shouldn't block any of our traffic. And, at the same time, it isn't actually a VPN, so your packets will still be reaching the VO servers from your own IP. So, we shouldn't have a problem with DDG, or them with us.
I will caveat that with a thought: depending on the amount of analysis they're doing on outbound packets, it could be CPU burden for a game like ours, under certain (uncommon) circumstances. Companies like DDG probably don't expect people to be transmitting a lot of data from their phone, outside of special cases like video or whatever. If they're trying to do inspection of a lot of time-sensitive UDP traffic, that would be "not awesome" for VO. But.. I would guess they probably are not (probably just looking at HTTP traffic, for that matter), and I guess I wouldn't worry about it unless you start to experience a problem.
Pi hole ftw
Granted these filters don't generate conflicts with the gameserver and aren't time consuming to implement I'm all for it.
For what it's worth only a small subset of the community is responsible for the bulk of the abuse and I've got a feeling you've pieced most if not all of it together by now.
As such you might save yourself some time by bustin' out the hammer; I've got my doubts about the efficacy of the quick and dirty suggestion you put forward If you want it to have a chance instead of combat 1 make it 0/0/0/6/3, It's unlikely it'll do much but if it's a quicker and less risky solution then it's better than nothing.
"Half the players here dont seem to agree with you" that was a kick to the metaphorical nuts and I took it personally.
And now a bit more than a year later most of the bullshit is finally layed bare and I hope you can forgive me for the stab I took at you earlier today.
Do with my ass what you will I ran out of fucks roughly two years ago.
For what it's worth only a small subset of the community is responsible for the bulk of the abuse and I've got a feeling you've pieced most if not all of it together by now.
As such you might save yourself some time by bustin' out the hammer; I've got my doubts about the efficacy of the quick and dirty suggestion you put forward If you want it to have a chance instead of combat 1 make it 0/0/0/6/3, It's unlikely it'll do much but if it's a quicker and less risky solution then it's better than nothing.
"Half the players here dont seem to agree with you" that was a kick to the metaphorical nuts and I took it personally.
And now a bit more than a year later most of the bullshit is finally layed bare and I hope you can forgive me for the stab I took at you earlier today.
Do with my ass what you will I ran out of fucks roughly two years ago.
Eauuh.. not everything is about you? I didn't even see your response until way later, Luxen deleted it almost immediately. And seriously, stop the alt-BS will you? Your main is only perma-muted on Suggestions.
I've seen you rambling on 100 about how you're going to be banned and blah blah, but, you're blowing this out of proportion. If this were "all about you", you would know. You did last time, right? It's not like I minced words before. So, chill out.
Notwithstanding my irritation when I responded on the Hive Queen thread, the primary reasoning behind the policy change in this thread is upcoming scale. Or, as I wrote above "an issue we need to address before we begin pushing for wider marketing and generally increasing the scale of the userbase".
This policy change isn't really about existing people or challenges, which are neither new or surprising to me (heh, I didn't have to "piece anything together"). There's always a tiny percentage of people who behave like idiots, it's just that it's something easier to ignore / quietly-mitigate when it's a pretty tiny total number, but it's potentially far more problematic when it's "the same percentage" of a much larger number.
For instance, there's always some percentage of new players who show up as "crazed toxic nazis" or something; and some percentage of those, after they're banned, start coming back on VPNs and ToR nodes, to try and "get even". We deal with this regularly, although I think most players aren't even aware. But at a "large scale" it becomes much more of a hassle.. the more issues I can "mitigate in advance" (keeping them off 1/100, etc), to give our guides and admins an upper-hand, the better.
No, I'm not going to make Suggestions-posting require "0/0/0/6/3", for the reasons I already stated. The point is to allow newbie participation in Suggestions. If I'm giving up on that, I'll just lock off Suggestions-posting entirely, like the PCC, and make it read-only for everyone else.
"Half the players here dont seem to agree with you" that was a kick to the metaphorical nuts and I took it personally.
Okay.. I've said variations of that to so many different people, over the years, it took me awhile to even dig up what you were referencing.
But seriously, if that's bothering you, it's for the wrong reason? You basically started the thread with a terrible post, because your entire OP was filled with angsty, self-righteous BS, berating how terrible and awful a weapon was, berating me, berating the game, and so on. That isn't a way to communicate like a reasonable adult. And "communicating like a reasonable adult" is supposed to be the basic rule of Suggestions.
That is not for "no reason" or "because gentle carebears!", it's because otherwise it's just too draining and stupid for me to bother reading.. and I try to maintain that forum-channel as a way for you guys to communicate with me.
I don't personally need Suggestions, it's for the playerbase, not for my benefit. So, when you guys choose to crap all over it, that just ends up being self-defeating?
It's also not like Luxen and LNH haven't put in the game-time to have the right to their own opinions, either? And pointing out your fundamental arrogance was the goal of my statement. If your response is to be angry with me (a year later?), for pointing out how dumb you made yourself look, your anger is misdirected.
I've known you long enough to know you don't always behave like that, so chill out and give it a rest?
Anyway, I think we've probably about wrapped up the initial point of this thread, I'll lock it off for now.
I've seen you rambling on 100 about how you're going to be banned and blah blah, but, you're blowing this out of proportion. If this were "all about you", you would know. You did last time, right? It's not like I minced words before. So, chill out.
Notwithstanding my irritation when I responded on the Hive Queen thread, the primary reasoning behind the policy change in this thread is upcoming scale. Or, as I wrote above "an issue we need to address before we begin pushing for wider marketing and generally increasing the scale of the userbase".
This policy change isn't really about existing people or challenges, which are neither new or surprising to me (heh, I didn't have to "piece anything together"). There's always a tiny percentage of people who behave like idiots, it's just that it's something easier to ignore / quietly-mitigate when it's a pretty tiny total number, but it's potentially far more problematic when it's "the same percentage" of a much larger number.
For instance, there's always some percentage of new players who show up as "crazed toxic nazis" or something; and some percentage of those, after they're banned, start coming back on VPNs and ToR nodes, to try and "get even". We deal with this regularly, although I think most players aren't even aware. But at a "large scale" it becomes much more of a hassle.. the more issues I can "mitigate in advance" (keeping them off 1/100, etc), to give our guides and admins an upper-hand, the better.
No, I'm not going to make Suggestions-posting require "0/0/0/6/3", for the reasons I already stated. The point is to allow newbie participation in Suggestions. If I'm giving up on that, I'll just lock off Suggestions-posting entirely, like the PCC, and make it read-only for everyone else.
"Half the players here dont seem to agree with you" that was a kick to the metaphorical nuts and I took it personally.
Okay.. I've said variations of that to so many different people, over the years, it took me awhile to even dig up what you were referencing.
But seriously, if that's bothering you, it's for the wrong reason? You basically started the thread with a terrible post, because your entire OP was filled with angsty, self-righteous BS, berating how terrible and awful a weapon was, berating me, berating the game, and so on. That isn't a way to communicate like a reasonable adult. And "communicating like a reasonable adult" is supposed to be the basic rule of Suggestions.
That is not for "no reason" or "because gentle carebears!", it's because otherwise it's just too draining and stupid for me to bother reading.. and I try to maintain that forum-channel as a way for you guys to communicate with me.
I don't personally need Suggestions, it's for the playerbase, not for my benefit. So, when you guys choose to crap all over it, that just ends up being self-defeating?
It's also not like Luxen and LNH haven't put in the game-time to have the right to their own opinions, either? And pointing out your fundamental arrogance was the goal of my statement. If your response is to be angry with me (a year later?), for pointing out how dumb you made yourself look, your anger is misdirected.
I've known you long enough to know you don't always behave like that, so chill out and give it a rest?
Anyway, I think we've probably about wrapped up the initial point of this thread, I'll lock it off for now.