Hello everyone!
On behalf of all of the aloha staff, we apologize that we haven’t provided more information publicly sooner regarding our decision to ban the BetterSpades client from our arena servers. The issue ended up being way more complicated than we anticipated.
Evidence:
To get started, here’s some evidence that helps to visually highlight part of the problem with BetterSpades compared to the classic client that helped lead to the decision to ban the client:
Accuracy Evidence
These videos were recorded on the same host by @Darion and @Nuceto.
Observe the accuracy and range of shotgun at long-range (80 blocks) in BetterSpades:
Compared to shotgun in the classic client at the same distance:
BS shotgun is also “better” than rifle in the classic client at this range:
All of these shots were scoped/zoomed in but keep in mind this is only a small sample and we did more testing and discussed the ban for months prior to the ban.
More Scientific Accuracy Evidence
After we banned the client, @Danke decided to take a more scientific approach to the accuracy testing by removing some of the variables that could affect the results. He used an aimbot to make sure his sights were placed in the exact same spot for each shot he took at 100 blocks.
And here are the results:
It’s obvious that there are some differences between each of the clients.
The decision to ban did not not only concern gun damage/spread. World sync inconsistencies were also a major suspicion which resulted in “wall banging” and other movement related issues, which seemed to be worse than the other clients when it came to high ping players.
Wall Banging Evidence
So why is BetterSpades being unbanned? :
There are quite a few issues with the original evidence we used before making the decision to ban, and Danke’s evidence above proves that. OpenSpades wasn’t initially included as part of the comparison for the guns. For that reason, the evidence was incomplete because the tests needed all three clients in identical environments with less variables.
After testing the OpenSpades shotgun, it also ended up having similar issues as BetterSpades when comparing it to the classic client. This was clearly a mistake on our part, since by that logic the OpenSpades client is also unfair compared to the classic client.
Regarding the world sync inconsistencies and “wall banging”, we’ve tried hard to dig through the server packets and do thorough testing between the clients, but everything we found was still inconclusive. Due to lag being a potential factor, we can not say for certain if the ping itself is the issue or if there really is something wrong with how BetterSpades handles movement and sync’ing. We did identify some technical inconsistencies with how packets are sent from the BetterSpades client, but from what we can tell none of them would affect gameplay.
Moving forward:
This a complicated and sensitive issue for both BS and non-BS players alike. Keep in mind that a significant % of our playerbase uses OpenSpades, and from their perspective BetterSpades was unfairly advantaged. That’s why we chose to temporarily ban BS from competitive arena servers after testing and discussion.
However, as things stand right now, we cannot prove that there is an unfair advantage nor that the wall-bangs are related to anything else other than ping. Therefore, this temporary ban will be lifted for now.
We will keep monitoring this situation and will continue doing tests for the possible sync issues so we can all have a consistent and fair gaming experience.
Thank you for your patience as we worked and continue to work through this topic!
-Aloha Staff