The Nuclear Option

[Dr. Cheis]

I find it very doubtful that Blizzard will include an option to block all Starter accounts from playing an Arcade game. They wouldn't have created Spawning if they wanted that to be possible.

If on the other hand, Blizzard would take it upon themselves to ban players who hack Mafia games (and Arcade in general), allowing in Starter accounts wouldn't be so much of a problem.

(Ideally they would also provide an option to disable lag screen chat, removing the need for Mafia staff to ban players for in-game cheating.)

[Mugy]

Starcraft has its advantages. It's a paid game(or at least it's supposed to be, excluding the spawning concept). It makes our bans worthwhile and harder to evade. Changing your IP won't work because you still need to pay.
So Steam is the way to go right? I don't think it's gonna work; when you have a paid game, you get a smaller playerbase that grows a lot slower too. Starcraft fixes that problem by providing us with the playerbase of the already popular melee aspect.

I don't know about any other options.

[Cryptonic]

Starcraft has its advantages. It's a paid game(or at least it's supposed to be, excluding the spawning concept). It makes our bans worthwhile and harder to evade. Changing your IP won't work because you still need to pay.
So Steam is the way to go right? I don't think it's gonna work; when you have a paid game, you get a smaller playerbase that grows a lot slower too. Starcraft fixes that problem by providing us with the playerbase of the already popular melee aspect.

I don't know about any other options.

free-to-play chat only based game. no fancy graphics or shit at first would work. then could start a fund raiser/kickstarter to pay for the time to put in non-essential extras (like characters & models).

[Mugy]

free-to-play chat only based game. no fancy graphics or shit at first would work. then could start a fund raiser/kickstarter to pay for the time to put in non-essential extras (like characters & models).

In comes burnteskimo.

[oops_ur_dead]

In comes burnteskimo.

One solution is to tie the game to the forums. Someone can only play if their forum account has a certain number of posts and has been registered for a certain amount of time. People who don't want to do that can pay a nominal fee to circumvent it (on the order of $2).

[Slaol]

We should use VIP for this requirements. 30 Rep, member for 90 days, and 500 posts (possibly bringing down posts to 100/200)
R&D is accessible by VIPs and Donors, thus the people that would be available to actually play would have access to the "serious" forum for it's discussion.

[Helz]

I don't feel this a solution at all. The forum version of the game is totally different from the sc version in so many ways. The forum takes days or weeks to play a game while in SC it takes an hour tops. The SC game has animations and pretty buttons while the forum game takes an imagination. And honestly- Without the SC backbone of this forum why wouldn't players go to a similar forum that is much more active in FM games? I feel that this would be the death of this community. We need new players coming to the forums to keep the community alive. No online community can withstand time without growth to counter the loss that naturally comes from people moving on given time. Not to mention bans and personal issues.

Creating a free-to-play steam game gives us the same problems as we have with the starter accounts. We would be limited to IP bans and that is easy enough to break.

The 'Town of Salem' option was good but did not get funded.

With Dark Reverent focused on Starcraft Universe I really doubt he will want to focus on drawing up a game from scratch.

[Apocist]

One solution is to tie the game to the forums. Someone can only play if their forum account has a certain number of posts and has been registered for a certain amount of time. People who don't want to do that can pay a nominal fee to circumvent it (on the order of $2).

May I announce?

[fred]

With Dark Reverent focused on Starcraft Universe I really doubt he will want to focus on drawing up a game from scratch.

You underestimate the power that money holds on Rev. He'll do just about anything for money.

[Killerd33]

well heres hoping to blizzard to actually doing something about this problem otherwise a great game will be missed but i wont hold my breath if something actually is done about it good but it will probably be just ignored

[sixsixsix]

you shouldnt care less raptor about what blizzard did, its their problem. and their mistake. untill blizzard actually fixes this do what you have to do, as long as its with justice

honeslty their TOS expired according the the law when they changed this particular feature. sp if their being assholes just sue them and its guaranteed win.

[Dagaen]

I know it would be great if only verified players could play, but registering on forum etc. would kill this game. Sc2mafia is an Arcade game and 90% of players don't even know about this forum. Try to force them to go here and they just go play something else instead.

I don't know Galaxy Editor but I doubt it has option to make fragile data encrypted, so cheaters in public games will always be there. We also have Skype which allows to cheat on every possible platform. It's a war we cannot win, we can only hope that most public gamers won't care. More experienced guys always have inhouses.

GL Raptor, hopefully one day Blizzard will help us fight the hackers.

[Dr. Cheis]

If this game switches platforms, I won't follow it. I'd expect you would lose around 80% or more of your players.

[Cryptonic]

If this game switches platforms, I won't follow it. I'd expect you would lose around 80% or more of your players.

LOL you're too stubborn. And it won't be around 80%, because people WILL cave and follow. Also, we will gain more players from the online Mafia community that don't partake in SC2Mafia games, so the influx will more than likely make up for any loss from changing platforms.

What is your reason for not following it?

[Helz]

I can say I would play less. I really support another platform but the SC2 mafia game is part of the whole battle.net experience. I have contacts there from 15 years ago playing Diablo 1 as a kid. Sometimes I play mafia over and over and others I throw in a game between some Barcraft or Gladiator or even some 1v1/2v2 action.

Going solo will be rough because it will mean finding dedicated players to come to the game just for mafia instead of having a huge pool of players that find the game through their shared interest of the arcade. No matter what this will mean a huge cut in players unless we push to tap other communities like Kongregate and such..

[Admiral]

^ Is Barcraft back?

[Helz]

^ Is Barcraft back?

Yes. Modders won his Lawsuit and the game is back with new game modes and features. Most of the original players still make up the community for Barcraft and Modders now has cash prizes for league winners. As before it is still lacking players to some extent.. If you want more information on it PM me here or on SC2.

-Edit

Modders is the Dev for the game btw..

[Killerd33]

^ Is Barcraft back?

i didnt even know it was gone barely played it enough to notice

[Aldaris]

Out of curiosity, what does the message for people with high account numbers look like? My worry now is that people may complain that they can't play the popular mod.

[Elixir]

This isn't in the game right now.

We're watching 2.1 to see what happens first.

[Aldaris]

Well, just so you know, a new account named Caylara joined one of my games. ^_^

[fred]

We are WELL aware of the current issues. We're weighing our options.

[Bruno]

What a fucking joke. Are you serious?

It's simple : have the fucking Keepers do the jobs they were hired for. Doing this only alienates an already dying community.

Great fucking thinking, you and Blizzard must be popping the same pills.

[Slaol]

What a fucking joke. Are you serious?

It's simple : have the fucking Keepers do the jobs they were hired for. Doing this only alienates an already dying community.

Great fucking thinking, you and Blizzard must be popping the same pills.

This set of keepers is more on point with maintaining the reports consistently than any batch I've seen. That doesn't mean the tools we have against hackers and cheaters can be used effectively (like at all) if the people we are trying to punish can immediately create more accounts and act like nothing happened.

Basically we have gone from Manning to Brady.

[Gerik]

This set of keepers is more on point with maintaining the reports consistently than any batch I've seen. That doesn't mean the tools we have against hackers and cheaters can be used effectively (like at all) if the people we are trying to punish can immediately create more accounts and act like nothing happened.

Basically we have gone from Manning to Brady.

Or the tactful response.

[AppleyNO]

What a fucking joke. Are you serious?

It's simple : have the fucking Keepers do the jobs they were hired for. Doing this only alienates an already dying community.

Great fucking thinking, you and Blizzard must be popping the same pills.

Starter Accounts can play = Banned members going around our lists.

If we ban new accounts preemptively, we can stop these banned members from doing that. This wouldn't affect old players at all, so I don't understand why we would alienate them. The only downside is that we stop our playerbase from growing.

But not gaining a few new players(Not people who already have SC2 and don't play Mafia, but Post 2.1 New players) VS letting our entire game fall apart because of a few members seems like an easy choice to me.

Of course this was already outlined in the OP.

Specifically for our circumstances, it allows players to entirely bypass our ability to ban them from the map and has resulted in a massive increase in hackers ruining games.

...

Let me be clear, there are only three options here: Blanket Ban, Blizzard fixing the problem, or shutting down SC2 Mafia.

[The_Watcher]

Option 1 and 3 are the same.

[Raptorblaze]

Option 1 and 3 are the same.

Actually we had the blanket ban in place for awhile and there wasn't a noticeable decrease. The majority of players are older members.

[AltFFour]

So all the accounts below 1-S2-1-49500000 can still access the game right? I'm a bit of a scrub and some days I hate it.