Banning new Steam IDs on banned IPs seems too strict to me. Some ISP use CG-NAT or rotate IPs, meaning a single bad actor could harm many innocent players.
They actually cover these concerns, acknowledge it was a problem with examples of siblings or students behind a shared IP, and then developed a parallel cookie based tracking system, using the "server welcome message" which is served as a web page in the in-game browser.
It's also worth noting this is a 3rd party dedicated server provider, who manages and leases community run game servers. Getting a ban here would prevent you from playing on that provider's servers, but not any of the official matchmaking ones or servers from another hosting provider.
They added the third identifier to detect ban evasion by changing the Steam ID and the IP address.
They implemented some specific exceptions but generally recommended to not play on untrusted networks to avoid getting banned along cheaters in the same network.
Yeah that sounded like a very bad idea. It was already a bad idea years ago when there were enough IPv4 addresses, because still people were using NAT behind routers. So, it could happen that you just ban a whole family or people that are living together in the same flat, although only one of them cheated. But now, with this whole carrier grade NATting, it seems like not only a bad, but a dysfunctional idea.
NAT is a problem, but in this case I think it's a valid consideration regardless. Banning innocent players behind shitty ISPs sucks, but cheaters suck more.
Yeah. IPs are NOT identifiers. At best they are a session ID. Using IPs to ban players on the basis that they've been used by a cheater before seems extremely unfair and probably even an opportunity for denial-of-service.
I'd agree if it was being used to ban players across many servers, but a single community server is not that big a deal to be banned from. And they seem to have had an appeals process.
I see a lot of people here justifying the occupation of bank-owned homes as if that is okay. I hope you never have to experience living next to squatters, as among other things, you might end up paying for their exaggeratedly high utilities.
I've lived next to squatters (having them above me, below and sharing a wall), what exactly am I suppose to have hated about it? They were never troublesome, but of course I can understand in some other cases they were, but we have laws for those things already.
If they were being loud, you can call the police and complain. If they're ruining stuff on your side, you can also call the police. I'm not sure in what way they could bother me, and I wouldn't have the law on my side if I chose to act on it.
Occupation of bank-owned homes also causes a lot of trouble. I hope you never have to experience living next to squatters, as among other things, you might end up paying for their exaggeratedly high utilities.
I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts. Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them.
For that reason I decided to go with what's cheap and works today, which is Zigbee.
> I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts.
When you compare apples-to-apples, there's no price penalty — for example, a Leviton Decora smart dimmer is $56 for Zigbee or $50 for Matter. Kasa's Matter dimmer switch is $27, and I see $3 Matter devices on AliExpress. Matter and Thread don't currently match Zigbee in terms of device diversity, but that's just a matter of time.
> Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them.
Even hundreds of Matter devices using Wi-Fi would collectively use an insignificant portion of your Wi-Fi network's throughput.
Try having more that 40-50 devices connected to your home router and you will see devices disconnecting randomly because your router can't keep up with them.
I have more than that on my ordinary consumer router and have never seen a problem. Worst case, it'd be straightforward to dedicate a Wi-Fi router to your smart devices in the same way that you have a hub (and possibly repeaters) for your Zigbee devices.
I'm running Zigbee2Mqtt on my Homeassistant and so far it's been a very pleasant experience buying devices from different brands without having to use each vendors app. The compatibility list is gigantic https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/
I've seen a lot of references to Zigbee2MQTT. If I'm going to be using it through Home Assistant anyway, why should one choose Zigbee2MQTT over say ZHA?
I used to run ZHA on my Home Assistant setup, and switched to Z2M a couple years ago.
At the time it had a longer list of supported devices, and the UI for configuring them was better. It felt kind of “dirty” to layer in yet another protocol (MQTT) between the Zigbee side and the HA side, but it’s worked great.
It could very well be that ZHA today is the same or even better than Z2M, but at the time I made the switchover, there was some device that I couldn’t use with ZHA that Z2M supported.
I haven't really run across any devices that haven't worked in ZHA.
I did recently buy the latest generation of Philips Hue Festavia string lights and Home Assistant (via ZHA) had no clue how to set any of the scenes on it. I was able to use the official app to set scenes via Bluetooth though, while still being able to use ZHA to control power and brightness.
I believe the product was released very near the Christmas period though, so I'm sure it'll have full support in ZHA by next year, might just bring em out early and do it myself if nobody else has done it by then.
And how do they work in HA? Is there lots of setup with each entity because I have to talk to it over MQTT?
I noticed that Z2M seems to say it supports effects on my string lights, do you know if that also means it'll automatically show UI for setting effects in HA?
It's sounding like I made a mistake choosing ZHA thinking it was the "HA native" solution...
Everything just shows up, I don't know about string lights but everything else shows the proper UI, and some of my bulbs show RGB controls, so I assume string lights will too.
Ah, talking about effects (scenes, blinking lights, etc.) that run on the string lights processor, custom Zigbee commands, RGB controls is fairly standardised.
But from all the praise Z2M is getting here I guess I'll have to try it!
One last question if you end up seeing this, can you still group things when using Z2M?
I like home assistant. There's tons of reasons to use it. You get a lot of good enough moving parts out of the box.
MQTT is something you should set up ASAP. There are plenty of reasons to set it up: ESPresnse is a big one (can't say enough about this offering) AWTRIX is another, even if you aren't going to integrate zigbee.
MQTT becomes a cheap and easy way to add data to, and interact with home assistant. And, any device that communicates over MQTT can be controlled by you (custom code, dead easy) outside HA.
Another minor reason is that AFAIK ZHA has to run on the same machine as Home Assistant, while Z2M can run on a different machine, and is less resource intensive than all of HA. So you can plug the zigbee coordinator usb dongle into a centrally located OpenWRT router and run Z2M on it, while your Home Assistant machine can be located anywhere that is convenient.
I can second the sibling comment. I naively started out with ZHA for less moving parts in December. Switched to mosquitto and z2m a week ago because of one completely and one partially unsupported device. It's more involved and if something doesn't work you have to check two (three) different places now, but it seems worth it.
I prefer DeCONZ instead. It's got a really nice UI both the web interface for the pairing and a great live network view over VNC.
ZHA is much more bare bones. I didn't try the mqtt one but I'm not so interested in something that uses mqtt in the middle. Another thing that can break..
I was on deconz, but eventually migrated to Z2M due to compatibility issues with some devices. It’s a far better experience to be honest. Haven’t looked back!
I've used it a lot whenever I've needed to integrate with a third party through a REST api. Postman for me is the playground where I build the queries and play with iteratively as I develop the integration.
My experience is similar to yours. Prepping takes the longest time for me. I feel that cooking is all about prepping as the actual cooking on the stove takes a lot less time. Many recipes just mention the actual cooking time and some very vague prep time.
