ping, :p Options

[fido77]

when i open a lobby to play some l4d only americans join and then they complain like little bitches about the ping. then they do the damn vote to return to lobby(which pisses me off). then we start another game and this repeats. i have never had a problem with ping effecting any amount of lag in the game. i usually get little to no lag throughout the whole game and my ping is usually 170 or higher. as far as i know, if everyone has the same ping of around 170, the game is the same as if everyone had a ping of 50. this voting to return to lobby usually ends up with me kicking about 4 - 5 people from lobby and waiting for others to join(which makes it take a while to get a game going). is there a way to turn off vote to return to lobby? or a way to make it to where only people from uk and friends list can join my lobby?

[MonkeyFiend]

A tricky one... I've seen a lot of russians mooching access to the servers, providing we're not trying to use them at the time, it's not a problem. Restricting server access by IP is quite complex, although a couple of mod forums say it's not possible, it definitely is as I've had it working in the past. However it's certainly not foolproof so there always going to be false positives and negatives. We would only be able to make exceptions by IP e.g. if we restricted america* you'd not be able to join. If you were added as an exception then you would, but if your IP address changes you'd be locked out again, so back to square 1 (same applies to people on the friends list)

There's no way to restrict it in the lobby either, so if a restriction e.g. no usa IP's was in place and 5 people join a lobby from the US, they'd only know about it when they get bounded from the server. The net result is the people who do get on would be wondering where the 5 or 6 other plays have gone

As for turning off the return to lobby vote, we can do this however it is useful to us to have on. I might see if there's a way for an =SM= member to veto any public votes e.g. someone starts a vote and a member could do something like !stopvote (would have to be in place with a vote manager to stop them spamming return votes though)

Any suggestions on working this out are apprecitated as ever


*coincidentally american AOL can use the same IP ranges as UK AOL. Although blocking all AOL customers may not in itself be a bad thing