MULTIPLAYER IS NOT DISABLED; FOR DETAILS READ BELOW
Hello all, so apparently us having a nice server list for people to find games has been deemed worthy of repeated attacks by some unknown. We're having masses of fake servers being added to the list, often containing racist or homophobic slurs, and were the victim of a DDoS attack the previous time the server list died (we didn't say the reason at the time since we didn't want to give oxygen and satisfaction on the attacker). As usual, the culprit seems to claim he/she is doing some benevolent 'showing us our security flaws' favour, instead of the truth which is being an offensive bigot, ruining a game for tens of thousands of people and engaging in a criminal activity.
More frustrating is the fact that our tireless and wonderful server admin, Kirrus, who ends up having to deal with all this crap, is not even a paid member of the team, moreover refuses payment, and is helping us out beyond his actual job description out of the goodness of his heart and for the benefit of the community at the same time as his full time job. And it's him that has to deal with all this nastiness when it crops up. It's not fair.
We don't have the set up, resources or development time necessary to create a more secure server browser system ourselves that could deal with these kinds of unprovoked attacks from spoofed IPs or VPNs without seriously dragging the server browser's performance down and requirements up.
Consequently, despite our resistance to doing so, we feel we have one course of action to take: we've decided we are going to explore implementing Steamworks into the game for matchmaking and server list functionality. The game will still continue to be playable on player run servers outside Steam providing an IP address is known. However any public server will require being a Steam member so you can be more strictly authenticated
In the meantime, I'm afraid the public server list system will be disabled from this point on. It's just not realistic and good sense for us to expect to be able to secure the system and it'd be a battle that would expend way too much time and still possibly leave us open to these....people.
Sadly this will to an extent, while still providing non Steam versions of the game full multiplayer functionality, potentially segregate the community as those servers that use steamworks would be inaccessible to non Steam users.
On the other side this has, yet again, provided a distraction away from getting NPCs in, since I'm the one who will need to deal with all this and it'll probably take a few weeks to get running.
This is why we can't have nice things. :(
On the plus side, hopefully:
* We can have players on public servers accountable to hacking, with banning becoming effective and at best stopping hackers, at worst at least making the asses have to purchase another copy on a new steam account to get back on a server they have been banned off.
* Improved connectivity, less configuration for servers / clients to communicate.
* Inviting people to a server you're playing on, or joining friend's games.
* Potential other stuff that comes with Steamworks.