Fresh off the back of posting that last bit about the ever-present possibility of being unjustly banned from a server, it actually happened.
No, seriously. Not even 48 hours after posting, me and my totally awesome in-game alias of S P A M F E S T found ourselves perma-banned from a CoD4 server I’d been playing on fairly solidly for a couple weeks.
Of course, the reasoning behind this ban was slightly different than I’d imagined. There I was, going something like 80 and 25 on some Winter Crash TDM and suddenly I’m greeted with that lovely black screen saying, “Congratulations! You’ve been perma-banned!” The brief explanation of the ban said nothing of being suspecting of cheating but — get this — that the spaces in my name were illegal. Following that was a note saying I should go to the clan website and see an admin.
My reaction? Simply this: “Wat.”
Like a good little sheep I found my way to the clan website. Fittingly, it was quite slow-loading and every action had about 30 seconds of annoyed wait tacked on. I took to the forum and posted a thread entitled HI. YOU JUST BANNED ME FOR NO REASON. to get people’s attention on this matter of serious business. I then set about putting forth evidence proving this to be true.
I mentioned that PunkBuster already disallows all extended ASCII characters in your alias (ø, for instance), so the ban was completely pointless. Spaces, then, are perfectly legit in CoD4 because they’re clearly regular ASCII characters. The issue here was one of a misunderstanding about the regular vs. extended character sets.
Naturally, I’d assumed the people with control of the server were knowledgeable in these things already, but I was mistaken. The first reply I got said that their server was specifically configured to disallow all ASCII characters and that my ban came from my circumvention of such settings. If this were somehow true then every single motherfucker who had ever played on their server should have been banned for even having a name.
I tried to reason with them, stating that ASCII isn’t all bad. There are regular characters and extended ones. You type on your keyboard and you get regular ASCII characters. My name, no matter how many spaces, was perfectly legit. No circumvention required. PunkBuster proved this by never kicking me; my ban was done manually at the behest of some random guy with the power to do so. Alternatively, you can fiddle around with Alt codes and get extended ASCII characters and invoke PunkBuster’s wrath, but I hadn’t done so.
Even facing this evidence they remained steadfast and stated that they’re very strict on their servers — they allowed what they allowed and that’s it. Either I could change my name by removing the “illegal” spaces or the ban would remain in place.
Facing the prospect of looking for yet another decent normal-mode server with a lack of overcrowding, no mods, and a heavy clan/admin presence to limit the asshattery, I decided it was in my best interest to go spaceless. Of course, my name looks much less cool now, but such is life, I guess.
Even other members of the clan agree that my name just isn’t the same without the spaces. It’s disappointing, to be honest.
2 Comments
“If this were somehow true then every single motherfucker who had ever played on their server should have been banned for even having a name.”
lawl
How do the spaces in your name make it look cool?????
It’s perfectly readable without spaces.
Do you honestly think people think: OH look at the spaces in this guys name – he must be SO cool.
Deal with it spamfest.