Autokick has been disabled. It clearly wasn't an ideal solution since people trying to do agreed-upon dogfighting were being affected by it.

That said, there are good reasons it was enabled that we think a lot of people may not realize. It seems like it's worth talking about them so everyone understands where we're coming from as the people trying to make sure everyone has a fun and welcoming place to enjoy DCSW.

First and foremost, Hoggit has been and always will be a place where everyone is welcome. A place they can have fun in DCS without being intimidated, required to play in a pace or manner that doesn't suit them, or have that experience ruined by someone else. This is where autokick came in.

Not counting the last two months or so, as best as I can recall we've banned a total of two people in Hoggit's 2.5ish year history. Pretty happy, healthy, welcoming community then, right? Something to be proud of, certainly.

Since then, off the top of my head, we've issued somewhere between ten and twenty temporary bans. In total that's still a small number, but compare that to our history and the very small niche that is DCS, and it is striking. We've made no policy changes either: this is entirely due to more players using our server. And that's just the count of people we've actually banned. Those of you who are IRC regulars know we get far more reports of people being disruptive.

An important aside for something you may not know: running DCS servers borders on comically awful.

This isn't Source, Unreal, Arma or anything else you might want to name. There is virtually nothing for community folk who want to run a server for DCS. Remember the recent newsletter that promised a dedicated server was coming? That doesn't exist yet. To run a DCS server you need a fairly capable windows gaming rig that idles like any other client host, you just disable the graphics for a performance boost. That is it. That's all we've got.

Think about that for a moment. Every "dedicated" you see in the server list, that's all it is. No binaries to run it on a *nix instance in a datacenter somewhere. No tools to assist server admins. No RCON or anything like it. The primary way of interacting with it is to remote desktop in and click on things as if you're gaming on that machine! (Better hope the people to whom you grant access are trustworthy.) Just client hosts as far as the eye can see.

DCS missions aren't really structured with the idea of a dedicated server in mind either. It is only through some impressively-clever lua that we even have what we do, SLMod, and that began life as a tool for mission makers, not server folk. SLMod has since been expanded to offer some basic server niceities, but it's all still volunteer work from one person in his spare time. Keep all this in mind when you're tossing out well-meaning requests for things like votekick, a tk-forgive system, mapvoting, and whatever else that would be wonderful to have. If you want these features, go help make them happen. We'll <3 you for it.

Until then, please remeber the server situation itself: Really Pretty Ungood, We Know, We've Been Struggling With It For Years.

As you might guess, dealing with griefers is a challenge in DCS. Not everyone reads the mission briefing that says attacking other players without consent is against the rules, and/or they don't care. The former is easy to solve. The latter has been a problem.

We're Hoggit and that means we want to be as welcoming as possible. Even when there is trouble we want to be fair and understanding. We investigate issues and will always try to talk it out first. It could very well have just been a big misunderstanding, after all! We just want everyone to get along and have a fun time. A ban should be the very last resort, and we do not issue them lightly. To make sure we're being fair to everyone involved, this process takes time. Lots of it. We're a small handful of volunteers with jobs, lives, families. And we have basically zero tools.

What this means is every single time someone is being disruptive on the server we get summoned to look into it. And understandably so: we don't like that stuff any more than you do. But over the past two months, instances of this have grown from virtually nothing to, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest, at its worst dozens of times per day. That we are expected to jump to action and get on the server and scold someone, and then wait around to see if they bothered to listen or we give them the boot. Any more aggressive enforcement than this would be both very much against Hoggit's style and almost certainly result in false positives. This very cautious approach is also why we can't/won't ban someone for "I saw player XYZ teamkilling yesterday" reports.

And, of course, if none of us are available... Well, that's no good. Tolerate being trolled or ragequit are your only options. Not great.

From our perspective, anything to help dial back this utterly ridiculous situation begins to look pretty good.

So what are our options?

• "Just add feature X/Y/Z." or "Just make autokick do Y instead of X." We've got jobs, lives, families, etc. This is all volunteer. Even if we had the time, some of us couldn't code our way out of a wet paper bag. If it's such a good idea you think should be added, scroll up and contribute to the SLMod git repository. Or download the TNN map from the sidebar and work on that. We would love to incorporate your additions. If you just think it's an idea we must have and haven't got a clue how to implement it, welcome to our world. We've probably been wishing for that feature for years.

• "Dogfighting is what everyone wants to do." No. No it isn't. Scroll up a bunch and read again why Hoggit was created. Dogfighting is one of the things that a portion of the players want to do. That's great! It's a ton of fun and super rewarding to learn! But it's by no means the only thing. It might be the only thing you want to do, but Hoggit is more than just you, or me, or anyone in particular. The server exists so people can have a place to learn and play, and your own personal preference does not supercede the overall good of the server. This is why the dogfight zone was created far from the rest of the map, after all. Give people a place where they can fight without disrupting everyone who wants no part of it.

• "Just add more server rules." Hoggit's general guiding principle could be phrased something like this. That's hard to put into text for a briefing most people don't read. We're also more likely to create some silly contradiction or future excuse someone can use to rules-lawyer their own unpleasantness if we add tons of server rules. Just use common sense and ask yourself if the thing you're about to do is going to make someone else upset. If it is, don't do that thing.

• "Just add all the planes to both sides." That's a brilliant idea! It is not trivial to implement to existing missions. I think we can all agree that it would be valuable though. The TNN map is linked in the sidebar, and you're welcome to update it for us. We'd be sincerely grateful if you did.

• "Just add more admins to watch the server." Hoggit's been around a long time and has a very particular and friendly style. Look at how limited the tools are, and the potential for even worse consequences if we added the wrong person. This isn't something we feel comfortable doing on a whim. Aside from all of that, spending volunteer time babysitting a server waiting for troublemakers that previously didn't even exist - and hopefully will go away when they get bored - seems like kind of a miserable thing to ask of people.

So hopefully that gives you some idea of just how incredibly limited our options are, and why we had hoped autokick would be beneficial to Hoggit as a whole. The feature has existed in SLMod for ages, but the last few months have seen such a marked shift in what was happening on the server that, yes, we felt it would be beneficial. Of course we knew there were edge-cases that would be affected, but we had hoped for a net positive.

In the short term we realize it has to be disabled until we can do something to make it more suitable to our community style.

One other note: teamspeak discussion is all well and good, but teamspeak quickly turns into an echo chamber. As has ever been the case here, the best place to talk about things is in our IRC channel. If you have issues, concerns, questions, or just want to tell us that you had fun and you actually appreciate the misery that is trying to keep a DCS server running, come talk to us. We have a lot of fun in that channel, and for many of us it is a key part of Hoggit.

tl;dr Autokick is off. We thought it would be beneficial overall, but it had some issues we couldn't ignore. Bummer. We hope one day we can have something like it that meets our needs without negatively impacting anyone who didn't earn it. We could really use something like it. If you think you can help make that happen, please do so. We would very much appreciate it.

In the meantime please be nice to each other, and if you see someone behaving in an unHoggit way, try to convince them to be more Hoggit. Please try that stuff first, as our resources and capabilities are limited. If all that fails, let us know in IRC and we'll try to help. Thanks.

<3 Hoggit staff