blatantly spectator cheating

so there's this guy: arspidoraspidoras

his nickname can be broken down to "ars pidoras pidoras". not only his name contains homophobic slur twice, he is also spectator cheating

1 level, 1 played, 50 spectated. hmm. you can accuse any player who would want to do that. or you can get all games he spectated (which i failed to find an easy way to do) and see who were in those games consistently. afterwards you can cross check by suspected players' first game of that day and this arspidoraspidoras' first spectating game of that day. for further control, with same logic, the last game aswell. all these steps can be performed by regular players by publicly avaliable information. admins can do further controls


i got a dumb question. what is the punishment for this? in code of conduct, it's clearly stated that;
>Don't reveal information while spectating, explicitly or implicitly.

will the responsible users be warned or be banned for some time?


edit: he already got banned. what about the players who he gave information to? will this be also inspected or only this burner spectating account will be banned?

Do we know for who he was cheating?

i have a mod that removes spec cheating..

under 'unitdefs' theres a key pair in 'customparams' with speccheat = "true",

by simply changing it to "banish" players go afk when they try to spec cheat.

quote: DOTA2 has interesting spec cheating protection called delay. Every spectator sees the match a little behind as it going, maybe 20-30 seconds, but it's more than enough.

almost all online games that has spectating feature has this delay feature. in counter-strike, you can just make the game delayed by one round and it'll be perfectly fine. but as @Chungoose stated, it won't work for games like this. for example, if you put a delay 2 minutes delay to spectators in zero-k. if i'm rushing a unit or building that takes more than 2 minutes to build, i am still vulnerable to this cheat

quote: Do we know for who he was cheating?

as i said earlier, we can only look at publicly avaliable information and take a rough guess. it might be highly accurate but still not 100% correct. detecting actual accounts and punishing them is up to administrators. but this is not possible all the time. for example, you can rent a vps with minimum gpu to run this game and connect it with rdp and put it in your second monitor. or if you have another device, you can just connect to a different network or use residental proxy, which i guess will make it harder to connect the spectating account and actual cheating account

quote: quote: i have a mod that removes spec cheating.. You do not.

schizo posting at its best

Spectator delay is a feature that would need to be added to the engine. The ZK developers have previously indicated to the engine developers that it would be a desirable feature. There is not much more to be done than that from the ZK side, as far as the technical solution is concerned.

--

In this specific case I was not online when any of this got actioned, but I am under the impression that:
* There do seem to have been some other modactions handed out related to this incident, but I am not sure of the details.
* The arspidoraspidoras account has received no reports. Do remember that the admins don't have the wherewithal to permanently monitor the teams room(s), let alone the rest of the server, and send us reports when there is a (potential) problem.

My impression is that a lot of the spectator cheating that happens in Zero-K is not deliberate and malicious collaboration as this instance seems to be. Instead it is just random spectators running their mouths in allchat or in voice chat without thought for the consequences. Spectator delay would mitigate that aspect of the problem.