Stream sniping - da hell is that?

Edit: Although I did appreciate your explanation of IP bans and why they don't work.

i had something to contribute to this thread... you are almost as much part of the problem as anyone you are complaining about... practice what you preach or you'll lose credibility.

btw: a good example of why most bans in general don't work is bans on IRC (rest of post is just about bans on IRC and bans in general at the end):

each IRC user is identified by a string that looks like this: <nickname>!<userID>@<hostname>
where <hostname> has an ISP and a country part.

so, you can ban a user using his nickname: +b <nickname>!*@*
and a nick change will enable you to evade the ban...
or you can ban the userID: +b *!<userID>@*
and an ident change (it's a setting for your IRC client) will circumvent the ban.

banning the <hostname> is basically an IP ban... redial and you'll have a different hostname... ban evaded.
now, the <hostname> has different parts as i mentioned earlier, so how about banning the static ISP part (ISP usually has a "IP" and a "domain" part, with the domain part being static for at least part, if not all users for this ISP... if there are multiple domains for an ISP, you can usually find the IP range for those pretty easily... and THESE IPs are static)? problem: you'll be banning all users from this ISP, which is usually someting that you do not want. just like you do not want to ban all people from a certain country.

/IRC part

this is pretty much why no bans at all work on the internet: all of them all fairly easy to circumvent. those that are not (TS3 has a fairly good system that is optional and pretty much unused) are usually frowned upon by users and will most likely cost a lot of users. users dont want save systems, they want easy to use systems. nobody fucking cares about whatsapp being insecure as fuck, as in everyone being able to send messages as anyone they want to... they use whatsapp because they a) want the service and b) it's easy to use because it has little to no security. if there was another thing like whatsapp, but more secure (and therefore more of a hassle for the users), a lot less people would be using that alternative instead of whatsapp.

TS3 for example has an identity system. Every user has an identity that he can change anytime he wants. Bans are using these identities. so, usually you would just get a new identity and be fine, but the (almost) unused optional feature is the "security level" feature.each identity has a security level associated to it, that you can "manually" elevate. it just takes some time to do the necessary calculations. so, if you set the security level high enough, a newly created might have to calculate the necessary security level for a few minutes or even up to several years (!) of CPU time. a ban of this kind is pretty effective, but it will also prevent regular users from using your server, since, for example, if you want to join a TS3 server and you'd have to elevate your security level for 2 hours before you can, you'd just look for another server...

then, ofc, last but not least, there's whitelisting... as in "everybody is bad unless i say he isn't" AKA only stream with password :-)

First order of business:

Barton; I'm all for the banter and dicking around, but please have some class. Mocking someone for being petty in a moment they lost seriously is fucking low and insanely uninteresting. People are people and they will bitch and moan when they lose at something. Most competitive people are seriously bad losers and for most of them this is a good thing. You might want to think that the people you look up to are the pillars of integrity, logic and honor, but the fact is that everyone has a shitty day. On those days it's easier to blame something completely irrelevant opposed to addressing what really was the issue.

IP bans are the worst possible bans (at least as long as IPv4 lives, which will be quite a while in my expectation, and even in IPv6 they aren't too great, albeit better than in IPv4).
Imagine you are a stand up comedian at a venue, doing a daily show. Someone is interrupting you all the time etc. etc. An IP ban would equal to banning the seat the person is taking up. All the troll has to do, is get another seat (aka IP, which you do by simply redialing your connection via a router restart). Not only is your ban ineffective at keeping the troll away, but also the seat you just banned will stay empty forever (the IP is banned, if someone else gets the IP 10 secs later, he will be unable to watch your stream, however unlikely it might be that exactly that person wants to view your stream). Even MAC address bans are ineffective, since you can change MAC addresses (which are device specific, as in each NIC in the world should have a unique MAC address) with the appropriate tools (it's a bit more complicated than simply restarting your router every time).
In IPv6, each device should always get the same IP, but apart from the fact that you can simply change that IP, even if you don't... it would, again, be a device specific ban (like MAC address bans)... he might not be able to watch your stream on his smartphone, but his PC and Laptop are fine etc. etc..

Just wanted to address this as you've completely missed the point of IP bans and law enforcement/preemptive measures all together. According to your analogy, you don't ban the seat the person is sitting on, you really ban his identity(his IP is is identity, not the house he's living in). Doing so for you (as a club owner) takes about 5 seconds. The banned person on the other hand has to go out and get a false identity (a new passport/whatever), and no matter how connected he is, this surely takes more effort than it took you to ban him. If you keep banning his new identities it soon enough becomes REALLY annoying for him to keep being a dick and most people will give up which anyways solves the majority of the problem.

This is a good example of "deterrent". It's not bulletproof and it's not designed to be, but it keeps it increasingly hard to be a bad boy. With your logic, any law in the real world is pointless since they can all be circumvented (tell me of a law that 100% prevents crime and is 100% impossible to get away with breaking).

tl; dr
- You don't ban someone for ghosting or stream sniping since it's entirely up to you to stream, and in games where some kind of reward is involved, people will do much worse than that in order to win.

- Barton shouldn't be cheap-shotting Hans for being a bad loser since 99% of the people are. Can't blame Hans on the other hand for not ignoring you since your troll-baiting him hard, and sometimes it's impossible to be the bigger man (I speak from experience).

- IP bans work. Nuff said.

your analogy would be true, if getting a new passport would take 10 seconds... so yeah, ip bans don't work :-) ip bans are actually worse than email address bans, since it takes considerably more time and effort to get a new email address (to get a new account on a forum for example) than it does to change your IP. restarting the router is just the "easiest" way to do it... i could write a program that changes your IP (or what it seems to be to others) via a single mouse click.

i had something to contribute to this thread... you are almost as much part of the problem as anyone you are complaining about... practice what you preach or you'll lose credibility.

I did as well, my contribution was to state this thread is useless and that staff members throwing around personal insults looks ridiculous.

But let us drop it I suppose, I'm done.

Let me just step in here and say that I agree with you, BlackHorseCav. To all Staff, please refrain from personally insulting members. You can make your points without throwing digs at people.

So this is how this thread got so many posts

Anyways don't bag Barton, he's quite a nice troll compared to some others and his jokes are actually quite funny.

Cheseenuts

funniest thing of all in this thread is that the people who write can counter-stream-snipe just about anyone , but stream hacking is just childish , fact is that there might be nothing that can be done for coh , unless someone is willing to start and maintain a big book of grudges to brand the stream cheaters ( preferably with burning iron ) , they cant be that many