The last Steam update which brought the new privacy settings screwed over any GMod server with a minimum hour requirement because now, the scripts can't check the playtime anymore. Did this method get rendered impossible for good or is it still possible to fetch the playtime count when a player attempts to join?
And if not, what other methods are recommended to filter out minges before they can do any harm?
Don't make them able to minge. Kicking new players just because they are new is a VERY bad practice. For example, imo a new player on a RP server doesn't need a weapon instantly.
If you still want to do that, here is a possible workaround: Check if a player's steam profile is private, if yes, kick them and tell them to make it public for the next join (after that they can set it to private again). If it's public, check the playtime and if they have the required amount hours allow the connection and save their SteamID to a database which you can check each time a player joins, so even if the profile is private they can join if they have been "verified" before.
Again, I recommend to not kick someone because they r new, kick them for not following rules.
Many, many times, people with low amount of hours played on gmod end up being people that don't even listen when you tell them to stop minging and when you kick them for it, come back to the server instantly and spam props or do whatever they can to crash it. Happens all the time. Sure, even high hours players can be minges, but it's less likely. I think it's not a bad practice, if you want to join a build server for example, you should have at least a minimum of experience with the addon that server uses, else you're just there using a slot someone competent might need.
And how should new players be able to gain experience if they can't even connect because they don't have any experience? It's just unfair and selfish. Ofc there will be new players that just join to rdm n shit but that doesn't justify to lock out normal players. Ban minges, have an active team that keeps an eye on new players. We once had this discussion on this forum with VAC banned players (banned from other games), same shit.
Also, don't be a generic and boring server with 10000 rules and new players will show interest in playing "correctly" instead of breaking the rules.
Playing GMod since early 2014 and this is exactly the experience I made over the years. Deny it all you want, it is a fact that a good 90-95% of people new to GMod joining sandbox servers are minges. Or they just randomly spawn tons of props, seats, vehicles, ragdolls and leave them lying around.
If you're running a restaurant, you also don't want people who burp on purpose, spill food on your tables, wipe their mouth on your table cloths and excuse that for "being new", right?
Singleplayer mode, perhaps? It's where I learned to make suspension chassis and other things too.
If you're running a restaurant do you want to kick people out who have never been in a restaurant before?
wow, i sure wonder whether your restaurant would succeed having banned a generation of people!
I can understand where the OP is coming from.
If you want to run a higher quality build sandbox for more experienced people, newbies are a little... Uh, undesirable.
It's an unfortunate fact that most, not all, but most newbies make a mess and don't clean up after themselves and get a bit too nosey about what other people are building, getting in their way, etc. simply by just being too new to know/understand the social standards more experienced players expect others to adhere to.
I wouldn't call them minges so much as just inexperienced to the point of detriment in some cases. It's not their fault for being new, but a lot of new players don't really think about how to act on build servers.
I was a superadmin on a mainly ACF build server for quite a number of years, and I can't tell you how many times I've had to ban newbies because they were making huge messes, spamming (either props or shitty dupes like drunk combine), prop pushing, or annoying the shit out of people building in general.
We'd always try to give them a chance and they'd almost always fuck it up.
Though, I won't lie! We did pick up a small number of newbies very willing to cooperate and learn and those moments were magical.
Unfortunately those were very very few and far in-between.
Eventually we had to code a little script that "quizzed" any new person who joined with one, singular, incredibly simple question like "What tool attaches props to other props on an axis?" with the four options being "Axis", "Weld", "Rope", and "Nail", and if they got it right (many didn't for some reason despite the answer basically being in the question), their rank was auto promoted into a basic rank where they could use tools and spawn things. If they didn't pass or simply ignored the window and closed it, they'd stay in a restricted rank that could only walk around and talk until they rejoined to retake the "quiz." It was fairly inoffensive and deterred actual mingebags who only joined to try to crash the server. It was less bothersome than restricting based on playtime, but was reasonably effective.
I've never seen it that way. At least you gave everyone a chance in the end and that's a very respectable decision in my opinion.
Pretty much the story of my admin life too. I spent a couple months turning a huge messy build&kill sandbox with 32 people cramped on gm_construct and mods only jailing them for like 20-30 seconds at most into a server that eventually was used as a main server for a number of very experienced people (one of them, Rusketh, even joined my staff team). Back then, Draugen was still online and after I played on that server for a while, I had some pretty ambitious standards for my own one too. You don't see people like mags, shadowscion or Metacore on just any ordinary sandbox server. You gotta keep certain standards if you want people like that among your regulars.
But havasu and light both are blindly ignoring what's already been mentioned twice:
And you don't need any GMod sandbox or building experience to not be like that. It all boils down to common sense. If you don't know all the controls, check your keybinds. If you wanna test a contraption someone else made, go ask em. I agree with both of you that a hour limit is a pretty intense way of keeping the server minge/noob-free and that it does keep away potential builders but considering what's undeniable reality, there are only limited options.
But I have to admit, the quiz solution with the restricted rank is an option I should have considered myself. Back then however, I was so damn annoyed by mingebags and inconsiderate noobs both that I didn't want to bother with something like a quiz.
And before anyone gets on me with the "you were a noob too once" bat: I was but instead of just messing around, I checked out options and such myself and tried to learn a few basics before getting engaged with multiplayer gameplay. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if most people these days don't know that GMod has a singleplayer mode.
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