I've been a long time member of the MOHAA community. Thousands still play this game. There are a ton of clans still around that maintain servers with lots of active members. There is a group of players that continuously and relentlessly crash the servers, flood the servers with some program that repeatedly joins the game until the server is full, break into/flood/crash teamspeak servers.

For the most part we know who these people are, they are the same group of troublemakers that have been around forever. But there's nothing any of us can do about it. They basically come around and leave a trail of destruction that we constantly have to deal with, literally daily.

As far as I know, this stuff is illegal, is it not? Is there anything that can be realistically done about this?

Technically they can be nailed because of the Terms of Use or EULA for either the game itself or the online service, but short of IP bans or Punkbuster I never really hear of a real way of getting rid of them.

I've discovered that the best way to avoid such nonsense is to play on private servers w/ a private community of players. If it wasn't for the ability to host private IP games in JK & MotS I would've never bothered playing for all of those years because of how easy it was to cheat.

But it's not about the cheating. These people can crash our servers without being in the server at all, whether or not it has a password.

Contact their ISP who will ban them from the internet.

I can see how that could be problematic if the servers that you associate w/ are on some sort of master server list. I personally try to avoid things like that but I can understand not wanting to go to that level of anonymity because it certainly decreases the amount of players that you'll come in to contact w/.

WOULD IT REALLY BE SO DIFFICULT TO WRITE 'WITH'? :ARGH:

WHERE IS MY ARCG SMILE :ARGH:

**** them in the ***

oh there it is

That's some really, incredibly, ****ty code.

You think that's bad? Millions of MMO game accounts are being hijacked every week to be looted for their items to sell to players through real life gold sales. The majority of the IPs that are doing this originate out of China and South eastern Asian nations (Thailand, phillipeans, taiwan, etc). We know exactly what companies/countries are doing this to our players, but we can't do anything about it since the internet has basically no accountability for malicious activity. It's not like we can say, "hey china stop making billions of dollars off of lazy video game players k thx."

Did you report this issue to the server hosting company? Perhaps they can block the IPs. Unfortunately if the attacks are coming from a country that doesn't care, or rather has more importantly things to deal with, you might be just out of luck getting rid or them permanent for the foreseeable future.

NO DRUNK POSTING RULE.

Uh, I never drunkpost.

find them and break their fingers.

I fully condone this behavior.

Punkbuster is too busy kicking legitimate users out of games than stopping actual cheaters.

No software on the server can save it from a DOS attack.

PUG's, or tell the server admins to get off their butts.

I've got a buddy in an old MOHAA clan (something like =65th=), they have a server. I don't think they allow access to it unless one of them (all are admins) are playing in it. I'd suggest that.

I wouldn't say that it's "so difficult" but it certainly takes a fraction of a second longer. I think that "w/" & "w/o" are fairly easy for people to comprehend & I don't see a point in typing extra letters (especially in the case of "w/o") on a mobile device if I don't need to. If I thought for a moment that it was irritating people enough that it would prevent them from reading my posts then I would probably refrain but no one else has mentioned it besides you on this forum or any other. I also use "&" instead of "and" but I don't see anyone complaining about that either. I won't (lol) even go in to contractions.

Edit: Apparently there is at least 1 other person that finds it annoying. It's strange how this would suddenly come up. I suppose that it's possible that I've reached the threshold of human tolerance for "w/o". This is becoming more fascinating by the moment.

I'm guessing NO. I don't think there is any legal recourse here unless someone sue's for harrassment or damages associated with bandwidth/denial of service costs. The 'hackers' ISP certainly wont care about complaints until legal action is brought.