Anti-cheats

No, I've argued that player envy is one reason to complain about the fact that other players do whatever they want, and that I can't really see any other reason. Largely because no one on your side wanted to present me with any. See previous repeated mentions of "please tell me why you think cheating causes such problems for you". And again I can only argue against a "strawman" because you don't provide anything more substantial.

So... your problem with cheaters isn't that they will prevent you from doing the things you want to do, but the fact that they might give you lots of stuff for free? That seems like a very improbable situation, not to mention easily solved. You could, for instance, refuse to accept the huge stacks of stuff they offer. Or, if you still want to carry out an equitable trade, only accept a share that you find fair. Say if you trade them ten durasteel bars in return for fifty silver bars, and they give you three billion instead? You take only fifty and leave the rest. Easy, fair and uncomplicated. My six-year-old niece could do that.

Again, the fact is that what they do doesn't affect what you do beyond what you allow. If you and other players want to run an equitable barter economy with established exchange rates, you're free to do so and I laud you for doing what you enjoy. And at no point could any cheaters walk in and crash your market by dumping tons of cheated stuff into it, unless any of you decided to accept their stuff. You're absolutely, totally, completely free to run a proper economy and ask that anyone participating with you play along with your prices and rates, because the cheaters can't do anything to you. What they do, anything they do, doesn't have to affect anything you do.

But hey, let's look at the other side. What if Joe Q Cheater, a guy who's got no problem admitting that he sometimes cheat for his own enjoyment, want to build a huge, huge tower out of heavy bricks and related materials, reaching from the very depths of the planet's core to the asteroid level and right at the very top of the world? Sure, it's a crazy project, but some of our players enjoy crazy projects. Unfortunately making something like that is going to take an enormous amount of materials. Which he'd usually just cheat in, because let's face it, who'd care one whit if someone has three billion cobblestone? But no, since the game now prohibits cheating, he can't do that. If he wants to build his project, he'll have to grind for hours first. "Well forget that," Joe says, "guess I'll play CoD instead since this game won't let me play the way I want."

Or say Joe wants to craft a tier 6 armor just to see how it looks on him, but doesn't feel like going through the whole process. Or he wants to have a tier 10 assault rifle and breeze through the wildlife on a lush planet, simply because he finds it really relaxing and doesn't care about the challenge? Or, hey, what if he's just a really, really crappy player who's not getting anywhere the regular way, but since he paid for the game he expects to have fun one way or another? Welp, he can't do it in multiplayer, because you've decreed that players must follow all your rules. That kind of sucks.

Well, it's because, unlike you two/three who feel such a tremendous need to enforce and police your strict rules, everyone else here recognizes that Starbound doesn't have a single "way it was designed to be played". It's an open-ended, free-to-enjoy-however-you-want-it, open sandbox game. There are dozens and dozens of ways to play and have fun. It's not a competitive game where someone "wins" while someone else "loses". There's no score beyond "Are you having fun?" Nothing you do has to have any effect on anyone else unless they go along with it. If someone does something you don't agree with, you don't have to deal with them.

And yes, you are perfectly free to play the game the way you feel that the game should be played, following the rules as you see them, with other people who are doing the same, and you can do so openly and freely or secluded and private, whatever you want, because you decide how you play, and nobody else. The game is open for you to make your choices and decisions, and no cheater can force you to do anything you don't want to do.

And the same thing goes for everyone else: we are free to play the way we want, without anyone else to tell us how we should do it. Without you to tell us how we should do it. Without you to tell us how the game is supposed to be played, when we already have our own, different idea of how the game is supposed to be played. Because that's how we want it, and as the game works right now, that's exactly what we all can do. It works just fine as it is.

We're not playing a competitive game. We don't have to let others damage our gaming experience. And we can all decide for ourselves how the game should be played, how it's designed to be played, without letting anyone else tell us otherwise.

 

The part in bold is the part I object to, because the game was designed to be played however you like. That includes being a vanilla purist if you like, but it also includes spawning in op shit and going nuts. If you want to play with other people who don't cheat in items, the best immediate solution is to find/start a server specifically for that.

Now if you want a server side character option, that's fine. I don't see the value in it but I also don't see the value in fishing. It doesn't hurt me for that to exist, and if other people enjoy it, then hey, more power to them.

I disagree that cheating is a problem, I disagree that it needs developer attention at this time, and I disagree very strongly that harsher measures like Vlad's proposed stack limit need to be taken. I am only actively opposed to the latter.

 

No, one of my problems with cheaters is that I can't interact with them (or anyone, really), as receiving any help from a cheater, or from someone that received help from a cheater, is cheating, and there's no way to tell who that is.

This doesn't work, to find a market value for an asset, both sides of the trade need to have a supply and demand. If the supply is flooded due to cheaters, there's no true fair value that can be found for the asset (if anyone even feels the need to trade due to the inflated supply).

If Joe was a reasonable man, he would say "Oops, I should have thought about this before I joined a server that was specifically designated as a server-side anti-cheat server. Guess I'll switch to a client-side server." If Joe would rather play that way, then more power to him, I have no problem with people that want to spawn things in and make a tower to space, I just want the ability to play on a server where everything is legit.

You've apparently not read what I want. I'm not asking for all multiplayer servers to be server-side. I'm asking for the option of making a server-side server in which cheats and cheat clientside mods can't be used.

 

run \SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Starbound\win64\starbound_server.exe
your personal legit server-side server is running
you can disable mods and invite those 3 people you want to play without cheats, though if i were you i wouldn't, because you cant trust anyone but florans, you can totally trust floran ... sstabbing you!

hm.... well instead of wasting everyones time, you could contact game developer, organize kickstarter campain for serverside tools for starbound(coz noone would work for free obv.) and eventually release a 10$ dlc or subscripion based something for admins(because you will obviously want more than just server side characters)