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Can anyone pls tell me where there are servers where they do not allow cheating.

Here are my experiences with the servers i played on.
the other players were so much harder to frag than me.
i get fragged by just a couple of hits from the machine gun.
other players were taking up to 4 hits with the rocket launcher.
i was spied on two separate servers by a spectator.
disconnected.

 is Open Arena the cheaters game or wtf.

i've played lots of opernarena and i've never encountered anyone that i suspect cheat.

however, there are a big difference between experienced players and not so experienced players. i'm not saying that you're not good - but accuracy and picking up armour means a lot. also latency can play a big difference when it comes to how to play. i avoid all servers that give me a latency of above 100.

openarena has a lot of very friendly and fun players, it's not a game for cheaters. however punkbuster does not work with openarena, so you can never be sure i guess. and then punkbuster was never perfect either :P

I haven't seen any cheating, just artistry. Quake3 has been out for almost 10 years. There are some VERY good players. I've been playing off and on for about 6 months and I'm still a joke. :)

Have you practiced with the bots any? If you can beat them regularly on "bring it on" difficulty you should know the game well enough to have enjoyable (although non-victorius) games with real people.

...there are many cheaters

I've been contemplating ideas for server cvars such as sv_maxmip and sv_allowVertex and sv_maxfov for more 'forced fairness' servers to be run and kicking out players with inappropriate cvar values automatically. We don't have Punkbuster (And we never will) to do this for us so hrm.

but reactions to these ideas are usually "UGH YOUR RUININ CARMACKS VISION OF A REAL GAME" etc.   If that was true then why didn't Quake3 look like that out of the box?

Vertex lighting is there to help greatly performance of single-TMU cards (Voodoo1/Banshee, most integrated chipsets in the 90s) not to turn off shadows and reveal everyone, completely ruining the 'hiding' element in certain levels. A similar request was constantly demanded for Raven to put in 'ambient light' as a non-cheat cvar in a Quake4 patch. It passed, patch released with it, and many players played without lighting, and the game's popularity died off because no one can ever play a fair game. Thank you, 'pro gamers'. It is funny to see that most of these claim to use FX5200s to support the ambient light request. If they care so much about gaming like a pro maybe they should have shelled out for a card that doesn't suck i.e. radeon 9500 or better. I don't game much myself as much as they do and i'm always consistently 2 generations behind the latest in video hardware and it's not hard to really keep up like that so what's their real excuse?  Well anyway this made Quake4 have less players than OpenArena at any given time of the day, which is a shame, because I really, really liked Quake4 and what Raven has done for it until that patch.

Picmip is for fitting textures into VRAM and reducing disk swapping, not making players more obvious and make the game look what it wasn't intended to look. This should be automatically maximumed to 1 just for detecting a 32+mb card anyway, and only allow higher if there's less of it (4-16MB cards).

FOV, well, people called this as fair as using a crosshair in the Quake days... i doubt it. Enjoy being a fish. Quake2 had a fixed FOV dmflag for servers to sort every player out at fov 90 only but it didn't appear in Q3A. Then again flares in q3a was scrapped too, so...

Thank you for your replies, it is good to hear from you as i was starting to get the wrong idea about this game. i do have a latency problem as the lowest i can get is over 300. i have played  q3 q4 a lot at home with my other sisters (they don't play anymore) and they think im pretty darn good so i would expect to do better than i have been doing. i got my eldest sis to watch as i played the other night (she is the IT one) she laughed and said they were definately cheating.
It would be a good idea to get servers to force more fairness as i never will cheat, it is bad for me and bad for the game.
i guess after a while i will get to recognize who they are.
All in all i think you have a really great game here and i will keep playing, thank you again.

Wow, OpenArena has more players than Quake4? Congrats!!!

I hadn't noticed any cheating. Would any of you vets mind sharing some of the dead give aways for the n00bs in the house? :)

What constitutes a cheat? My screen is very dark. I can't see the indoor areas of OA_rpg3dm2 if there's any light in the room. To compensate for this I tend run with "r_mapoverbrightbits" set at 3. It improves my situational awareness dramatically but I hadn't considered the plight of campers in the shadows. What settings should be left alone to avoid poor sportsmanship?

Thanks.

1) How is that your ping so high ? There may be a few things you could do to improve that (stop downloads, set up a few hidden parameters inside OA, ...).
2) You're wrong when thinking guys cheat. I've been playing OA for months and never saw one, even if I was suspicous towards some. They may have better ping and better training (months of playing online).
By cheat I mean using aimbot or such, not visual tricks which help to make things visible/fluid

I am from regional Australia, and it is unusual to ping under 300 to populated overseas servers (nobody plays on the Australian server).

I'm not a good player, however this is what I have found.

High pings mean people may no longer be where you see them.  This also means they can be shooting you before they appear on your screen, and you can still take hits when on your screen you have ducked around a corner.

I find I need to lead a lot more and rely heavily on hit sounds.  I favour the rocket launcher since it does area damage allowing for more error in my guessing where the player is going to be.  Camping with the railgun can be effective if your opponents don't zigzag randomly.

Thanks again, guys i will take on your advice, i too live in Australia and i guess i will just have to live with the ping times.
i played again last night and did a lot better because i had already started to get used to compensating for the latency.
If anyone else has any tips i would greatly appreciate them.
cheers.

Another Aussie here, and same thing with me: ping is rarely under 300.  So I prefer CTF games which are more relaxed.  With deathmatch games where everyone else has a low ping (like 50) then it feels unfair, being at a disadvantage, and I don't stay for long, though I've had a few fun games where everyone was pinging between 100-300 so everyone was at a disadvantage.

I haven't seen the Australian server (Telstra's GameArena i think) appear very often, about twice in the last two months, which is a shame as low ping games with real people are so much better.

BTW spectating is not spying or cheating, it's a standard part of the game, anybody can watch anybody else.

When i start up the game and get the server list i see two with low latency.
Gamearena Open Arena ping 56
Secluded Deathmatch ping 188
These would be ideal but so far there are never any players.
Maybe these servers could add some bots to get them going, i don't mind fragging bots while waiting for someone else to join in.
At least it could get people to take a look see.
Also it seems to me that the servers where the action is mostly have bots as well.

Ahh that explains why GameArena never showed up, I had "ShowEmpty" turned off!

I'll pop in and hang around more often in the future, though it would be better to have some bots to play against while you wait (which get kicked when real player enter).

Most servers have bots for this reason, but some are excessive (I've seen 12 on one!).

Do you want to nominate a time to try and meet on the server?  Anytime after dark is usually fine with me.

How does 9:30pm sound?

cg_fov 120 is great - especially if you run in windowed mode. It provides a sort of peripheral vision. Being able to change FOV is a must. :)

The best way to chase away players, forcing upon others your opinion of what is right and what is wrong.

look you can't force fov on players ....an example would be myself who runs on a widescreen and fov 90 looks really messed up on my screen it makes everything look stretched out. A fov of 120 is best because the natural human field of view is also 120 degrees.

fixed

It's open source, for God's sake. What's to stop the persistant cheater from hacking the source to his hearts desire?

I'll answer that question for you: nothing. Limitations like that are only going to annoy the legitimate player base.

where did i mention the cvars are cheat protected and engine enforced?
you mean it's anti-choice for a server to define the playable limits the player must play at?

This all stuff that should be done via an admin mod, not the primary game. Limiting clientside options for graphics and such, well, typically it just annoys people and invites someone to hack it up via the source code.

I've lodged a ticket with Gamearena to get a few bots added.  Give one person something to do, and provide a bit more variety if there are only a couple of players.

Thanks ecru, you rock.

Yeah that'll be much better.

A workaround for the server hanging after OA_RPG3DM2 is something like this (though it doesn't work after the server has hanged)

That is also good if we want to play some CTF sometime.

Bots are working on gamearena.

Another option are escapedturkeys servers with 'unlagged'.  http://escapedturkey.com/openarena/

No one cheats in OpenArena, they're just better than you, no if's, no buts!


Any game you can think of has more players than quake4 =).


These are the kinds of things that should be limited in mods (e.g. cpma's fov 130 limit), NOT in the main game. And if you limited (for example) the fov then what to? 110? So that's completley biased against the 120/130 fov players, as the game didn't come with 110 fov out the box anyway, so you should limit everyone to fov 90 and watch all the good players quickly leave the community from all exits.

The higher the fov the harder it is to aim, it's all personal preference as to what value it should be, and you say quake3 didn't come like that out the box... it did! Why do you think the console commands are there? People have been tweaking settings like this since the first quake and these settings have never been banned at quakecon or other competitions.

Casual players come and go, in the end you get left with the better players and if you don't list to them and instead listen to some complete noobs as to what is good and bad for the game then there's no hope for OpenArena.

And on vertex lighting.. it help visibility which is good as quake3 arena isn't a stealth game, though I actualy need it as I can't get a stable fps without it! Some people still have crappy computers.

edit: and saying quake4 died because of ambient lighting, just... lol.

Yeah RAZ3R, i get it now and thanks everyone for being helpful.
When a new player is first confronted with being fragged by someone who is not in their fov but should be because the other player has their fov set at a much higher rate seems like outright cheating. Also the strafe jumping and sheer speed that pro players get seems really sus. i have read the boards and stuff and  know this is not cheating but feel the game loses players at the early stage on account of this. They show up on the server, get their butts fragged a few days in a row and never show up again. If i may put forward a suggestion, a RAZ3R,s page for noobs could work, gives them the knowledge so they can push on through the early stages.
Also it might be helpful if  pro players agreed on some sort of etiquette about noobs, i dunno, just a thought.

I already made one of those http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1651.0 (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1651.0) =).

This is something that's been on my mind too recently.  I'm not a pro player, far far from it, but I can recognise a noob and I'm not really sure how to handle it.  On the one hand I don't want to frag them so heavily that they get really disappointed and not come back.  On the other hand I don't want to deceive them by playing at a lower rate, you can sometimes sense when people are doing that and (for me) it's quite a bad feeling, not a worthy opponent kind of thing, even though they are good sports for doing it.

So right now my philosophy is: if I get into a battle with a noob then I'm going do my best to win that battle, but if I see a noob running down a certain hallway or standing still in a corner shooting the machine gun then some/most of the time I won't go after them (depending on noobishness).

Most of this auto called "PRO players" are jerks, but there are some others like W1zrd --Im talking about him because he taught <<ME>> everything about strafe jumping, rocket j, plasma climbs & runs and some other tricks-- Who help to the new ppl in OA.
I really dont like to call this ppl NOOBs or something simillar, its just cruel and a lot of players have left the game because of that "mistreatment".
Im always trying to help new ppl if they want to learn about sj, rj, etc... Like now at days this guy called Bubba, hes new in OA but I try to encourage him to keep playing and so he will get better, at the very begining everyone of us sucks...

There is the other side of the coin too, some new ppl that really deserve to be called NOOBS, because of their attitudes, some players (including ME) are tired of being called "cheaters" when we sj and of course we're faster than them, so this shitty ppl just leave the game no whitout before calling u "cheater", "looser", "asshole", "freaking-bunny-hopper", etc...

That's one of the reasons why some "pro" players hate or mistreat new gamers ("noobs").

i read your tutorial and downloaded the demo's RAZ3R, before i made my last post. They were very informative thank you heaps.
What i meant to say was it could form the basis of some quick start strategy for new players and be very visible to them, a kind of read this first thing, that they just can't miss not seeing it. It would certainly clear up a lot of the confusion new players have.

Well I don't mind writing more and posting it on this forum, I guess anyone who genuinly wants to get better will visit here at some point. And if any thread is particularaly helpful pester an admin to make it sticky, else eventualy it will fade in to obscurity.

Very true about w1z, always gives sound advice. Some so called pro's listen to any old crap and preech when they lack the understanding themselves.

the way i see it, there are two kinds of "noobs" in the game, real new players and people who are just assholes. truly new players i generally try to avoid so they dont get discouraged, but there are some noobish assholes who play the game (especially DM) who have no skill other than to constantly camp on certain maps to artificially boost their frag count instead of learning how to actually play the game. these people i tend to go after exclusively because they ruin the game for other lesser skilled yet honorable players. they tend to panic once someone like me is able to avoid their shots and kill them. in almost every case, these same people once you get them to stop camping by proactively hunting them down in their favorite camping spots show very little actual movement or accuracy skill. unfortunately almost none of them speak english (in fact, most of them are polish) so even if you tell them to stop they either ignore you or say some random jibberish in their native language and resume camp laming. most of my friends and i have actually quit playing DM because these camping noobs actually make it EASIER for us since they are always in predictable locations. i mean, im far from a pro player yet these kids allow me to almost always dominate DM servers simply because they hold everyone else but me and a few other skilled players down. funny thing is, i dont really remember any of this crap ever really happening on the Q3 servers i used to frequent. ah well, thank goodness for ctf, where most players at least have some sense of respect and have actual skill outside of camping.

ive never really been called a "cheater" or anything for strafe jumping, rocket jumping, or otherwise abusing the OA engine, but i have gotten some nasty remarks from people when i come in the middle of a DM match and end up winning thanks to a camper. ive had quite a few campers just plain quit the server because of it as well. doesnt just happen to me either, ive been in some heated DM's where at least one other "good" player is beating me, while everyone else is in the gutter due to some asshole camper me and the "good" player(s) keep taking out in between the camper getting multiple kills.

ah well, sorry for my rant running a bit long, just kinda been holding this back a while and it had to go somewhere x.x

A lot of hate toward Poles flying around these days, though I can't say I've really seen the evidence to back it up :/.

aw, don't be mean to the polaks. On some servers you get cases of polakititus (I dont know how else to describe it), they are just kids who don't speak much English. They hang around in clumps. They are common on 1.16, I usually control it by telling them only one Polak is allowed to play at one time if they start their nonsense. They normally behave but they like big loud weapons and 700 g_speed with anti-gravity boots. If you create a server with the word KURWA in the hostname it helps contain them a little. Even my Polish friends laugh at them. :D Tell them  kurczak is coming and they will behave. :D

<<ME>> either :D
Not only polish ppl is acting like an ass... remember that...! the nationality does not make any difference when someone is a jackass naturally :(

i didnt mean to make it seem like i hate people from poland or anything, just stating an observation that i personally find to be true in most cases i run into. there are a few people from other countries that do the same crap, but the vast majority in my observations are from poland for some reason.

I once had an idea of a game called "I hate this game" or "JCIVOAPDG (John Carmack's Ideal Vision Of A Perfect Deathmatch Game)"
it'd feature flat bright colors for textures, high fovs, and extreme exploit framerates
and the most unimaginative characters ever. topped off with an original chiptune soundtrack to give you headaches
it'd at least give those 'pros' a home.
i DID do a game like this before in 2003 but that was more of a parody of 1991 and not really focused on competitive play.

hahah.. sorry pika. I know what you meant and of course I dont think you were being mean :D

I fully understand what you mean, yes there are idiots from everywhere but it's a strange observation that most people will never understand. We use a train server and people can shoot but do no damage to other players. Quite often someone will just pelt you with rockets to annoy you and I'm like, ah shit, a Polak. :D 99% of the time I would be right.

Maybe it's just the vast amount of players from there, and comminication is limited so some of them just want to get some kind of reaction. Yes I know many players who I talk with from Poland and we all have a laugh at this observation together. :D

i don't think rocket jumping is cheating though, I also have this habit too since the Quake days, it's a legal use of the rocket launcher.

thats the difference of newbs and n00bs ;)
newbs = someone new, but willing to get better
n00bs = people who are just bad and are assholes because they are bad

I completly agree, there is a huge skill range, and a huge learning curve if your comparing yourself towards the top players. The top players who you may suspect of hacking, probably just have really good a)console knowledge b)movement knowledge c)weapon knowledge. Thats what makes it such a great game.

yea same i've never ran into a cheater and i have been confronted by asshole n00bs
and i dont even think u can even cheat while online play and getting confronted by n00bs doesnt
happen to me anymore bcause ive gone a bit rusty

but the answer for kream is to keep playing i've been playing for 2 years now and im not all bad :)

It seems there are two classes of cheaters.

1.  Those who use external assistance to get an advantage - eg wallhacks, aimbots etc.  I think limiting variables is reasonable providing it takes account of variations needed to make the game playable on different hardware and operating systems, and for different styles.  But it comes back to personal integrity.  In rtcw:et, limiting variables, punkbuster, guid bans, ip bans etc don't stop people who want to cheat, at best it makes them do a bit of research first.

2.  Those who won't play the game how the accuser wants them to.  People who can rocket jump effectively deserve this (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/John_Waller_in_pillory.JPG) (but as soon as I can do it, they should be honoured :))  Similarly somebody who runs the map on rails deserves to be camped, and campers deserve to have their camping spots spammed.  Different maps can favour different playing styles and strategies - this is one of the great things about custom maps.

No way to cheat in a pure server.!



Lovely pic. :D
And Camping.. omg, If you call that a game style then you should use this (http://www.insurgente.org/ficheros/Horca.JPG) right now. Its totally and let me say it again TOTALLY different from a defensive strategy, stay in one fucking place and keep shooting to ur enemies is not "defense" thats -stupidity-, playing at defense is controlling ur entire base, walking like a damn soldier around the flag and running after ur enemy of he gets it. Its not taking over and over and over again the weapons, health, armor, etc... only for you and shooting like a crazy cow without looking where first.

There are ways of cheating in a pure server, and also there are too kinds of camping... n00b camping, which is where you spawn next to the rail gun, then stay there all game until you die just firing all the time, then there's strategic camping, where you may camp armour until it respawns (for example)... camping isn't a bad thing, n00b camping is.

How?

If this so then please let me know as i see no point in pure then.

see pm.

ah ok i get the point. So i think RAZ3R is suggesting that playing on pure servers does not mean that you are immune to cheats and probably best considered an admin tool that ensures that you game mod matches the servers.

Without pure, users can use model/sounds etc, users can freely use their own 'modified' stuff.

In response to the newb/noob, with a funny comic!

(http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comics/20060823.jpg)

LOL!!!
Thanks a lot for that Kit89.. :D

And RAZ3R can u explain me how is it possible to cheat in a pure server... I didnt know its possible.. :(

without risking revealing too much, aimbots and general memory manipulation hacks are still possible on pure servers. all a "pure" server does is check to see wether or not you have the same packs as the server, and boots you if stuff doesnt match. it stops people from manipulating say... pak0.pk3 (as an example) but wont stop people from doing other things (such as aimbotting or manipulating the client itself) to cheat. there is honestly no valid reason NOT to have a pure server, since people can still have 3rd party pak files, they will just be ignored on that particular server. watch the console when you connect to a "pure" server, you will see a lot of "not on the pure list" warnings but you can still connect since the files the server does have listed (by listed it really means the server actually has it) are the same as your client files.

as for camping, i always run into the "noob" campers. camping the armor/health is ok in my book so long as you are only firing upon people in self defense when they get too close or are firing upon you. in most cases i just run into people who instantly hide out wherever the rail or rockets are and only leave that spot when i kill them. a prime example is the rocket room in OA_DM1, as there is almost always some foreigner (again, usually polish) rocket spam camping in the rocket room. they arent going in there to get the rockets then leave, they just sit there firing rockets indefinitely even if nobody is there just because their ammo is pretty much infinite, killing anyone who even thinks about going near that room or the hallway. also doesnt help that there is a hole in the floor there, so they are also camping the room below it. nothing some good armor and skillful strafe jumping cant fix, but still. ah well, thats why that map was never duplicated in Q2 or Q3 i guess.

Pika beat me to it but this is what I understand, although it may not be fully accurate :D

====
 I thought he was suggesting you can bypass pure. But he was referring to cheats in the game. I think pure is mainly for mod files, making sure you have same files as server. But cheats can be settings, and pure is configured to check only what you want it to check, which is usually your mods and stuff (The mod base folder).

Actually pure isnt really about cheat detection, it restricts you changing files. So instead you get a choice to add  changes and let people have the option. 

Another thing to note is don't suggest people cheat or even if you think it's suspect.. its best to give them the benefit of the doubt. Many people know how to configure the game better. They might have an advantage, it's up to you if you want to learn and do the same, or just mess around and have fun. For newer players, sound is probably much more important than what you think. It's common to kill players you dont see on your screen yet using sound.

Some cheats are easy to spot and you can have  a good laugh if you record a demo - which you should do before you suspect anyone of cheating. http://youtube.com/watch?v=8UraH2-9B1o

Even on servers without cheat protection, you will rarely get people cheating... they are usually used to annoy clans who have a problem with another, or some childish exchange between individuals. The saddest cases are the ones who want to be part of a clan and are told they are not good enough. When clan members get caught cheating then the clan have someone who have totally discredited their name, hopefully not many people do that especially since they may become friends with members.

Most often they are isolated cases, they use different names all the time, they have lots of bans, they usually do not talk to anybody, they don't have any respect for themselves never mind others. they sometimes will change names and have confusing names to make it more difficult to be kicked again and again. If people dont seem to miss a shot.. like 100% accuracy then sometimes they will have a bind forced when they kill, or use taunt after every kill. This is something the people who code the cheat add because they dont like people cheating either, they just want to prove they can hack the system.

More importantly, think of someone who has an identity and has become a good player because they hate getting beat. Well if that player were tempted to use cheats then there is a good chance he will get caught, no matter how careful they are. They no longer have an identity, just an embarrasment and can't use that same name again. Very few will  become angry/disturbed  using cheats and have no fun or any competition knowing any win is fantasy.

Even though a player may seem like lightyears better than you, it can often be a couple of simple things that make the difference. I cant even aim at a side of a way without missing yet I can sometimes compete against alot of skilled players using all sorts of stuff like zoom and config hacks.

It's good tactics to frustrate them. For eg. Dont let them camp you, Camp them back.  :) Then their game plan is falling apart maybe without firing a shot, it's less predictable so they might take a gamble or you suddenly find yourself behind them, and can hit them in the back using the saw thing.  :)

hehe... lol nice 1 ;)

generally the best tactic against campers is not to camp, but to simply kill them every time you run into their camping spot on your route. there is really little need to completely change your tactics, just gotta alter them slightly to compensate for the camper's frag whoring.  on a normal DM without campers i play rather relaxed and try to keep the game close, but if a camper is playing i purposely bump up the intensity just to get them to leave after a few maps of me beating them by a mile, with the unfortunate side effect of making others leave :(

as for cheating, there is a time and place for that and its not DM or team matches. im not really advocating this, but the only place i can see to be legit would be the defrag mod on your own server and only if you are playing around amongst friends. generally with defrag most of the maps are either freestyle or pad jumps, so you are only really hurting yourself anyway if you cheat. most cheaters are attention whores unfortunately, so they dont bother following this advice. really the same thing with campers actually, attention whores who think having the most frags == credibility.

Cheating is most definitley NOT acceptable in defrag, the defrag community is a reasonable size and very competitive, if anything it's more acceptable to cheat in a random dm game =).

yepe...its not noticable but i'm not a cheater
cheating...is just dumb spoils the game espically on online play

see, thats why i suggested people do it on their own server. cheating on public servers is never acceptable reguardless of mod.

I saw a guy who used an aimbot in defrag, he got like top score

im not sure how you could use an aimbot in defrag to get a high score, mind enlightening me?
the most i have seen as far as defrag cheating goes are auto-move scripts that point your plasma gun in the right angle for plasma climbing automatically or automatically pointing the rocket gun down for rocket jumps.

Thanks for that, I was thinking "who wants to use an aimbot in defrag my f** God?"
That has no sense..!
And also when u play in defrag there are no scores, or maybe ur calling "scores" to the "best time"??
:( sigh..

ya, the only "score" in defrag is the speed. ive seen some really insane speeds on a few servers in the 80,000+ range, but its not really anything special to be the fastest person. defrag isnt about speed as much as it is finesse and bragging rights anyway.

ffs.. is it got that serious that noone recognises a bit of humour? Well I thought it was funny :D

the internet = SERIOUS BUSINESS.

ITS OK, LEARN TO PLAY!!!

Good news for us Aussies! The GameArena folks just replied to my support request and the problem of the server hanging at the end of certain maps (especially OA_RPG3DM2) should be fixed now.

It's also cool that they have already upgraded to 0.7.6.

YES! finally!!!!

It's not aimbot, it's scripts. They help you do the hardest moves with only a button or key press. In the Defrag community it seems it's not considered cheating, but rather a tool that everybody can have or even make. I don't like those practices, for me Defrag is about skills, not scripting the craziest code. That's why I don't play Defrag anymore.

Scripts are concidered cheating in defrag competitions.

Oh, it's good news :)