I heard this repeated many times recently, that its criminal that the hackers have better tools than the Sysops.
Unfortunately, it appears to be true, and it becomes painfully more obvious every day. I was in a live tournament the other night, in one of the tournament rooms, and kept noticing during my game, painfully slow responses, followed by a message that chat was silenced in the room, then chat was available again a few minutes later.
Come to find out, it was all due to white space flooders. I won't go into any technical details beyond saying that, once again, a script kiddy got a hold of a utility that takes advantage of one of the many flaws in the Zone's messaging system that allows it to flood a lobby to the point of impeding any conversation at all. In order to stop the painful slowdowns for everyone, chat had to be silenced in the room.
Now, just in case the light bulb hasn't gone off over your head yet, dear reader. This is not an anoyance : This is a SERVICE DENIAL ATTACK. For anyone who has played the live tournaments knows - not being able to chat in the lobby effectively prevents a tournament from proceeding. Sure, ZM's can be used, but not at the volume needed to handle a 100+ entry tournament.
AND just in case the light bulb hasn't gone off for all you Zone employees who are reading this : REMEMBER, the ONE BIG advantage that keeps zoners being zoners and not leaving altogether for another free site is the ABILITY FOR OPEN DISCOURSE VIA THE LOBBY AND GAME CHATS!
Smell smoke yet?
You should.
It's the friction from players leaving daily, never to return. Don't believe me? Compare the count of online players for a Saturday from today and a year ago..
Anyway, anywho, anyhow.....
No use going after the disruptors. If they really cared about what they were doing, then they wouldn't be doing it.
That leaves the Zone to fix their outstanding, long-standing bugs
Please don't tell us "you're working on it". That only helps you for the first six months...
Please don't tell us "it's difficult to fix". How quickly the hacks get written and distributed defies that logic
And finally, don't tell us "we weren't aware...". Why else would you be telling us for a year that you were "working on it", if you were'nt already aware?
Can you just fix it? Cause if you don't, in another year, you won't have to worry about it, because there will be nobody else here to care.
