The command was removed due to the increasing amount of people attempting to breach accounts of other players (sometimes successful, sometimes not).
On a daily basis we were seeing many players (primarily those from Internet cafes/905) logging on to the server and continually spamming either in public chat or via PM harassing and begging players for money much like below:
<PM> From: (NrA)KinG_905. To: [K]: bro give cash bro money 100000
They would spam repeatedly like this until the person they were spamming gave in or they would move onto the next person. From observing them they would often use the !stats command to find their next target in order to determine who has money.
The volume of this spam was increasing much more significantly over the coming weeks before the command was removed. We would mute/shun/tempban them but as they were playing from an Internet cafe this caused a number of problems:
- The shunned player would just leave the server and rejoin with a different nickname / different machine in the cafe and start the begging process again.
- Due to the environment they were playing from being a cafe it was then hard to track if the player who had just joined with a new nickname was the same player as previously or another player entirely.
- Sometimes when banning them the machine would then become banned (or in some cases the IP address of the cafe) causing problems for all other players in the cafe who were playing legit not causing any trouble.
By removing the !givecash command we aim to deal with the following problems:
- If a player's account is compromised, whoever has access cannot do as much damage as previously since they will be in a 'sandboxed' environment.
- Player's risk losing alot more now if they get banned. Before we have seen instances of players being banned, re-joining under an alias and getting a friend to send them money so that they can buy that PCJ that they just lost from their banned account etc. Players will now have to spend time on the server and progress themselves and earn cash for their posessions.
- As the beggars know the ability to share cash doesn't exist they won't even bother. We have already seen a significant decrease in begging/spamming/player harassment through PM's since it was removed.
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As anyone who reguarly plays the server will know. You can easily accumulate ALOT of money on your account after playing for awhile. So much that you do not know what to do with. This is because there isn't really alot of things to spend it on. 1 vehicle, ocassional weapons/armour and the healing at the hospital isn't very taxing after gathering a reasonable amount of money. For this reason, we really need to implement and overhaul the server with new features which players can spend the money on to purchase. I do have alot of ideas that I would love to see implemented but at the end of the day it's up to AdTec_224 to decide what he wants to add and doesn't as it's his script and his time and energy spent.
There is some suggestions like transferring money via PAC or limiting the amount to x amount per day that can be transferred. But either of these will still enable the beggars to spam players for money aslong as they are aware that the ability to send cash is allowed.
Currently at the moment AdTec doesn't have any intention of adding this back in for the foreseeable future. I'm personally fine with that aswell. Though hopefully we can look towards adding something to the server which will allow players to spend their hard earned cash.
