I think more options are needed for the server side of the game and one thing this game appears to be lacking, given what can happen on Minecraft servers is video capture. I know people are generally expected to record their own gameplay using third party software
but some games do in fact come with their own video capture software built in, such as Black Ops Call of Duty and this can be used to catch people out if they are cheating or exploiting flaws or glitches in the game.
Minecraft could benefit with more server tools built into the server application, such as "surveillance mode"
where if switched on in sever properties file, would automatically capture gameplay footage in a multi spectator mode, in a video resolution of 720p at 30 frames a second in an mp4 file with a H.265 codec for compression.
But such a feature does come with its caveat, it would need a high capacity storage drive.
for a history of 6 months worth of gameplay footage the application should request 500gb per player being recorded remotely.
This means a server with 4 people including the host a minimum recommendation would be a 2 terabytes worth of additional drives separate from the one the Minecraft server application and the world save file(s) are running on. They could either bet set to record to a single drive letter, or separate physical ones for performance reasons.
Alternatively the host could choose to record for a less amount of time before old videos are auto deleted,
if they feel the file sizes are too much for them, or if they don't want an excessively bulky server.
Could this feature be abused by the host to destroy hidden bases? possibly,
but mathematically or probability speaking, there is even less chance of this happening than the opposite when only the host has access to this feature on a particular server. If the guests of the server have no access to this they won't be able to abuse this to find other players and grief them, so the idea works or is at least sound in theory. If a host of a server is being horrible to you, you can leave and join a different server, the odds are in your favour.
Worried about how powerful your computer would need to be to do this for everyone on the server?
do consider the fact that techology has come very far over the years and thanks to AMD Ryzen CPU's, this feature should not be impractical to do.
Yes it would increase the workload on your server, but that's to be expected if you want to enforce anti cheat and anti griefing rules on your server.
Anything on a server can be observed in the logs if the server operator has installed the proper addons... and video capture would require a lot of server processor, ram, and storage that would be very expensive to implement effectively... it would be easier and just as effective to simply have a server "watchdog" addon that would look for players who have certain achievements but not previous ones (ie. "Cover me with Diamonds" but not "isn't it iron pick" ) or players who have only minutes on the server but have certain items (netherite, Diamonds, portal frames etc.) in their inventory or have active resource packs or behavior packs in a server blacklist.....
Anything on a server can be observed in the logs if the server operator has installed the proper addons... and video capture would require a lot of server processor, ram, and storage that would be very expensive to implement effectively... it would be easier and just as effective to simply have a server "watchdog" addon that would look for players who have certain achievements but not previous ones (ie. "Cover me with Diamonds" but not "isn't it iron pick" ) or players who have only minutes on the server but have certain items (netherite, Diamonds, portal frames etc.) in their inventory or have active resource packs or behavior packs in a server blacklist.....
Video capture would make the job a lot easier proving who did what though in my opinion.
and automatic video capture has in fact been used in other multiplayer games before, Treyarch/Activision did this with Call of Duty zombies for the purposes of catching out people who were cheating or exploiting glitches and banning them.
The video doesn't need to be visually stunning, it just needs to be clear enough to see what players had done at what place and time or when they were accused of cheating, and it can use compression as I said before, mp4 format with H.265 codecs, with the option to enable or disable audio during the recording, if audio is disabled then that's even more space saved.
Of course text log files would use a lot less space than the above methods, it also makes the process of surveillance and moderation of servers a lot more complicated. These are quality of life changes that will make server moderation a lot more convenient for people who actually have the computer specifications needed to run these. It can be written in the help documentation that this feature will be more demanding, which should be obvious to most people. Not everyone is poor.
I think more options are needed for the server side of the game and one thing this game appears to be lacking, given what can happen on Minecraft servers is video capture. I know people are generally expected to record their own gameplay using third party software
but some games do in fact come with their own video capture software built in, such as Black Ops Call of Duty and this can be used to catch people out if they are cheating or exploiting flaws or glitches in the game.
Minecraft could benefit with more server tools built into the server application, such as "surveillance mode"
where if switched on in sever properties file, would automatically capture gameplay footage in a multi spectator mode, in a video resolution of 720p at 30 frames a second in an mp4 file with a H.265 codec for compression.
But such a feature does come with its caveat, it would need a high capacity storage drive.
for a history of 6 months worth of gameplay footage the application should request 500gb per player being recorded remotely.
This means a server with 4 people including the host a minimum recommendation would be a 2 terabytes worth of additional drives separate from the one the Minecraft server application and the world save file(s) are running on. They could either bet set to record to a single drive letter, or separate physical ones for performance reasons.
Alternatively the host could choose to record for a less amount of time before old videos are auto deleted,
if they feel the file sizes are too much for them, or if they don't want an excessively bulky server.
Could this feature be abused by the host to destroy hidden bases? possibly,
but mathematically or probability speaking, there is even less chance of this happening than the opposite when only the host has access to this feature on a particular server. If the guests of the server have no access to this they won't be able to abuse this to find other players and grief them, so the idea works or is at least sound in theory. If a host of a server is being horrible to you, you can leave and join a different server, the odds are in your favour.
Worried about how powerful your computer would need to be to do this for everyone on the server?
do consider the fact that techology has come very far over the years and thanks to AMD Ryzen CPU's, this feature should not be impractical to do.
Yes it would increase the workload on your server, but that's to be expected if you want to enforce anti cheat and anti griefing rules on your server.
Anything on a server can be observed in the logs if the server operator has installed the proper addons... and video capture would require a lot of server processor, ram, and storage that would be very expensive to implement effectively... it would be easier and just as effective to simply have a server "watchdog" addon that would look for players who have certain achievements but not previous ones (ie. "Cover me with Diamonds" but not "isn't it iron pick" ) or players who have only minutes on the server but have certain items (netherite, Diamonds, portal frames etc.) in their inventory or have active resource packs or behavior packs in a server blacklist.....
Video capture would make the job a lot easier proving who did what though in my opinion.
and automatic video capture has in fact been used in other multiplayer games before, Treyarch/Activision did this with Call of Duty zombies for the purposes of catching out people who were cheating or exploiting glitches and banning them.
The video doesn't need to be visually stunning, it just needs to be clear enough to see what players had done at what place and time or when they were accused of cheating, and it can use compression as I said before, mp4 format with H.265 codecs, with the option to enable or disable audio during the recording, if audio is disabled then that's even more space saved.
Of course text log files would use a lot less space than the above methods, it also makes the process of surveillance and moderation of servers a lot more complicated. These are quality of life changes that will make server moderation a lot more convenient for people who actually have the computer specifications needed to run these. It can be written in the help documentation that this feature will be more demanding, which should be obvious to most people. Not everyone is poor.