I am designing an admin type bot for classic creative mode servers (it may function on other types but is untested there for now). The primary purpose is anti-griefing. I don't like putting rules and restrictions on players (spawn jails, registration, etc.). Instead, I am trying to find ways to allow anyone to enjoy themselves and to protect their work from the malicious types.
The bot works around the concepts of "zones" and "grief scores". When a player changes a block within a given zone, the bot can undo the change, destroy the change (for instance to keep spawns clean), and/or add to the player's "grief score". Zones can also be locked down so that only approved players can build in them, but I would ultimately like to make the bot intelligent enough to protect automatically without needing this. Each zone can be weighted so areas that are commonly targeted can add a lot to the grief score and others where an innocent may simply dig into by mistake have less effect The type of block can also be used in the scoring, since certain blocks are common to griefers and rare in large quantities from normal players. When a player's grief score exceeds a certain amount, they can be warned, kicked, banned etc.
The bot is working and has proven mostly effective . There are many rough edges, but it's coming together nicely. It's great fun to watch a griefer spend some minutes destroying a "trap zone" only to see it reappear. Often there is no need to kick, as they simple give up and log out. By planting tempting areas between the spawn and the main building areas, you can thwart many griefers while good players simply pass through. Of course, once they figure this out, some will still proceed to main areas and wreak havoc there.
I am interested in ideas of other characteristics that could be used to indicate griefing (or actions that could be considered "good" and used to reduce their score). I've thought about destroy vs. create ratios or looking at the timing of block operations. There is also building across large areas, since good builders will tend to do many operations in a small area vs griefers which do reletively few operations over a large area. If anyone has thoughts or comments I would love to hear them.
If you'd like to see the bot in action or help test him, my server is "Lod Palace" and you can often find me there. Or, if you're a griefer looking to cause trouble, I appreciate the testing assistance :smile.gif:
Once the bot is well tested and packaged nicely it will be released as open source under the GPL.
If this works as well as you say, then I would love to have this on my sever. But at the same time, I really don't think that any bot would be advanced enough to stop all griefing while not kicking a non-griefer or 2. I think the only way to completely stop all griefing on a sever is to just get enough moderators and keep a close eye on everyone.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
*salutes* I am Dave! Yognaut! (If you know what this means, then copy it into your sig)
For anyone interested in how things turned out... the bot was somewhat effective but far from perfect. We were able to protect a large area of the server (the 'surface') well enough that some pretty great building was done, but there were still incidents and I never made Tom smart enough to protect without being told who was allowed to build and who wasn't. Maybe someone smarter than me could have improved him to that point.
We switched to MCLawl as a server due to problems with the classic server. It was not able to handle the size of our level. The switch was not because Tom wasn't doing his job well enough, but since MCLawl has ways to prevent griefing built in, Tom wasn't needed anymore and I've stopped working on him.
One of these days I'll bring Tom back into the server in another role. It was fun to have him around.
I am designing an admin type bot for classic creative mode servers (it may function on other types but is untested there for now). The primary purpose is anti-griefing. I don't like putting rules and restrictions on players (spawn jails, registration, etc.). Instead, I am trying to find ways to allow anyone to enjoy themselves and to protect their work from the malicious types.
The bot works around the concepts of "zones" and "grief scores". When a player changes a block within a given zone, the bot can undo the change, destroy the change (for instance to keep spawns clean), and/or add to the player's "grief score". Zones can also be locked down so that only approved players can build in them, but I would ultimately like to make the bot intelligent enough to protect automatically without needing this. Each zone can be weighted so areas that are commonly targeted can add a lot to the grief score and others where an innocent may simply dig into by mistake have less effect The type of block can also be used in the scoring, since certain blocks are common to griefers and rare in large quantities from normal players. When a player's grief score exceeds a certain amount, they can be warned, kicked, banned etc.
The bot is working and has proven mostly effective . There are many rough edges, but it's coming together nicely. It's great fun to watch a griefer spend some minutes destroying a "trap zone" only to see it reappear. Often there is no need to kick, as they simple give up and log out. By planting tempting areas between the spawn and the main building areas, you can thwart many griefers while good players simply pass through. Of course, once they figure this out, some will still proceed to main areas and wreak havoc there.
I am interested in ideas of other characteristics that could be used to indicate griefing (or actions that could be considered "good" and used to reduce their score). I've thought about destroy vs. create ratios or looking at the timing of block operations. There is also building across large areas, since good builders will tend to do many operations in a small area vs griefers which do reletively few operations over a large area. If anyone has thoughts or comments I would love to hear them.
If you'd like to see the bot in action or help test him, my server is "Lod Palace" and you can often find me there. Or, if you're a griefer looking to cause trouble, I appreciate the testing assistance :smile.gif:
Once the bot is well tested and packaged nicely it will be released as open source under the GPL.
-LodC
For anyone interested in how things turned out... the bot was somewhat effective but far from perfect. We were able to protect a large area of the server (the 'surface') well enough that some pretty great building was done, but there were still incidents and I never made Tom smart enough to protect without being told who was allowed to build and who wasn't. Maybe someone smarter than me could have improved him to that point.
We switched to MCLawl as a server due to problems with the classic server. It was not able to handle the size of our level. The switch was not because Tom wasn't doing his job well enough, but since MCLawl has ways to prevent griefing built in, Tom wasn't needed anymore and I've stopped working on him.
One of these days I'll bring Tom back into the server in another role. It was fun to have him around.