Mods in ranked games.

ballancemods, unitbehaviormods, uichangingmods ... we are speaking about ranked play were people expect to have the same tools and possibilities available to them as EVERY other player ...
the risk that there can be changes by a match to match basis is what concerns me the most not to mention the possibilities of abuse
... than the problem of mods one may not like being not disableable ...

i for instance just dislike the hq mod in faf to no end which killed my interest in ever playing faf competively for various reasons ..

if you dont like vanila ranked as it is then give feedback to the devs .. it is their game it is their responsibility for it to be both challenging and fun ..

messing with ranked imho overwrites the feedback ... suddenly everyone can throw in what s/he wants and people show basicly... that they distrust the devs to run their own game ... if modders and mods do anything now why should the devs care then ? ...
i may be a bit extreme here but imho you are crossing a line here ... i personaly just want a well structured game ... for everyone ... adding and changing mods no matter what they might do messes with that structure ..
we have COSTUM games for that reason were you can do that .. if you want a thing to be fixadded to that structure give feedback or present that addition and await the general greenlight ... dont force it upon people in an area that is meant to be the same to everyone ...

You don't seem to understand the limitations of client side modding, which is why I asked you for specific mods. Your concerns regarding balance mods, or HQ mods are unfounded - those are simply not possible with client-side mods, and since ranked is hosted on Uber servers, server-side mods can't be used.

^same as what was said above.

obviusly i dont know the exact limitations
but following clopses OP
were the question is "which mods shall be allowed?" my answer is simple ... none ... be it automation be ui stuff whatever ...
its asking weither or not uber to lessen those limitations ..
which as i said i am against ..
i want ranked to be untouchable by mods ..

well best of luck

There is literally nothing that can be done to stop UI modding, or modding that emulates user input. The client modding system in-place merely makes these more convenient to develop and use; if it wasn't there, a player could simply do it manually with no less effectiveness. There is no ability to cheat via client-side mods, they only have access to do the same things a human player can. The server will reject or ignore everything else, and uses it's own copy of the game to run the sim on, so you can't modify the game files or unit stats for anyone else.

so i take it one can add this stuff to himself alone, while the other doesn't have that?
i stay by what i said ...
same tools for everyone fixed into the game .. no modding .. it just shouldn't be needed ..

So you're against it without exactly knowing what it entails or not.

@cola_colin I just found a forum bug : there is no "like again" button.

must be on your side, I'd recommend you format c

Only in the same way that a player can in every other game other than PA. You may as well be asking for all players to be using the exact same computer, monitor, mouse and keyboard (and mods have about as much effect on the game as a different keyboard might, as far as the other players are concerned).

in an optimal world were everyone had access to the same ultrahighend hardware with direct brain to hardware imput etc. etc. ...
i could make the arguement "oh just because we have not same hardware i should not have a minimap but you should?" ... just because there is a sort of handicap in Hardware there should be a handicap in software as well?

i don´t know the limitations of what the Server blocks or not i.e what mods get to be realy used online ranked at the current state ..
i can well imagine what the allowance of mods could entail .. why take that risk?

i am stating a general principle ..

I'm not sure if this argument plays out the way you all want it to be.
We all agree that changing the client behavior is undetectable or at least not preventable and hardly detectable. This is a fact, you learn this basically in the first lecture of computer science. (Well, the music industry never visited this lecture, though ...) And therefore you argue that we should accept UI modding.

But here is the evil twist:
Cheating is the same. If I'm fancy and do some nasty OpenGL snooping, DLL injection or what ever crosses my mind and make a cheat bot (*), that
* auto aims, say at bombers first for air
* prevent aiming at walls for ground units
* auto whiggle and auto doge for bots
That cheat bot isn't preventable as well. Following your argument we must accept this, too. Yes, there is no API for this, but this does not stop me from doing those things.

Server side state management - if implemented right - prevents you from things like map hack, wall hacks, and magic stats hacks, but there are far more possibilities you can do, that the current discussion would count as cheating.
So this whole thing boils down to the fact that we still need some gentlemen's agreement about what is allowed and what not, regardless if there is a server side state management or not.

criz.

(*) Tbh I'm far to lazy to do this in my spare time, so there is no danger that this will happen anytime soon.

So the dox wiggle mechanic is broken and needs to be removed and target priorities need some fixes.
Though I am quite sure that walls already have low target priority, but units hit them because they are just bad at aiming. Aiming calculations happen on the server, no way to fix them clientside.

Of course, collision detection is done server side, as well as visibility and all, but if you have access to the client state, you can send explicit attack moves for every single unit. This reminds me that you can get rid of some overkill, too. When 10 shellers targeting one ant.
Auto-kiting would be another nice thing to have.

criz.

I have a hack to send explicit commands to units in world coordinates right now already. But getting the game stats information to actually do really "powerful" bots quite deep reversing of the game is required. Also the point is that if there is some mechanic in the game that a computer program would be massively better at then maybe the game needs a balance fix. No need to break the bot, put it into the game by default.

X'D

.

Nice. I haven't looked at PAs internals so far. And to be honest the last time I did something sneaky on the Windows platform is ages ago.
I would expect that the terrain/pathable information is the really hard part, because it isn't transferred explicitly and since they still try optimize the memory footprint of the game, these data structures are subject to change.

The really big question is, how far do you want to go with automation?
Granted, with a small community like PA there aren't many people that can do such things like a real good automation bot. And as you mentioned, you can eliminate some of the more pressing issues simply by game design.
But your arguments hidden assumption is that there are things (like strategy) that you cannot compute and therefore you cannot automate, just like there is an upper bound. But this is flawed. Sure, there is no hard evidence for this, but history showed us that computer are getting better and better with beating humans, even in areas we thought it wouldn't be possible. It seems that there might be no upper bound.

So to finally drift away from all practicability, what would it look like, if we go through to the end? The only thing left would be the top most strategy: "Win the game".
Imagine a PA 7 game in 30 - 50 years: All player train and coach there AI, then at a multiplayer game, the only thing a player does is say their AI: "Go, and win this game for me!". The rest would be watching AIs battle each other (*).
Well it would be a fun game - for sure I would like to train AIs to fight each other - but this wouldn't be PA anymore.

This is an arms race, too, only on an another level.

criz.

(*): The first game I came across that, emphasized this kind of game play was core wars (just google it) from 1984 and this was really fun

ender's game.