Today the 'restrict account' feature I made hit production. Restricted an account and got an angry email with broken english.
Funniest shit that happened today. Made me proud.

To top it off we might get free loadtesting lol

Is that a thing anymore in enterprise ?
Hammering your own service to see if it breaks ?

@AvatarOfKaine It's absolutely a thing. If you don't do it, it'll happen at the worst possible time.

I made a lovely “Toast” feature in a game. The NPC responsible for it was a shiny toaster, and it would let out smoke for a short while when used by an admin, or when triggered.

When “toasting” a player, the Toaster would ban them and add their account to its internal banned list. It would also modify an otherwise innocuous (but long since unused) game file on their computer. Any player that logged in with this particular modification would also get banned by the toaster, have their account added to the list, and the toaster would emit smoke again. If an account logged in who was on the banned list but wasn’t banned for whatever reason, it would place the modification and ban their account again. Cue more smoke.

They could change their account, use proxies or VPNs to change their IP, change their “computer id,” etc. all they wanted. Any login resulted in banning both their account and computer, any computer that account logs in from, and any account logging in from any of those computers afterwards. The creeping toasty.

It burned so many problem players’ alt accounts, and there were so many angry posts on the forums by these people as both themselves and pretending to be others. It was glorious.

Players kept asking me why there was a random toaster in the game, and why it kept emitting smoke randomly. I just said that’s what toasters did. :) (I also added the ability for them to interact with it (via grab) to trigger its smoke emitter; it was fun, and helped conceal its purpose.)

Turned out most of our problems were caused by the same small percentage of players. And once they were gone… :)

@Root I have mixed feeling about this. Of course it’s good to be able to ban all those players who deserve it. But what if two persons share a computer? Or a banned player logs in on his friend’s computer who also plays the game? Collateral damage?

@Root that's cool

@Lensflare I wrote an “untoast” command, too.

There was only one case of two brothers sharing a computer, and we resolved that, though I don’t remember how.

@Root how does untoasting look like? Is the smoke being pulled in and absorbed by the toaster? 😄

@Root Love it, I did pretty much the same thing except with cookies and 3 new accounts are already restricted 🤣

@Root my head’s exploding trying to figure out the two brothers issue lol

@Root based. what game is it? it sounds like I would want to play it

@TheAwesome98 I literally said nothing about the gameplay other than a) it’s multiplayer, b) you can grab things, and c) some of the players really suck.

Also, it’s an MMO that isn’t around anymore.

@Root it tells us something about the things that the players want from a game nowadays.

"Does it have multiplayer? Can i grab things? Can I have customizable hats? Yes? Seems sufficiently dumbed down for me. I’m in!"

No offense, @TheAwesome98 😄

@Lensflare It did indeed have customizable hats… 🤔

At least some of the servers.

@Root was it the realm?

@lungdart No, not Minecraft. Though I worked with someone who managed the realms. He was professional and cool, and a great stoic troll — though he would never admit it.

Wasn’t WoW, either. I really wanted to work for Blizzard; never got the opportunity. Looking at them now, though… well, I’m glad I don’t work for them.

@Root But i thought Bobby Kotick was your hero! Lol