Originally posted by Airlift
other people may be using similar applications developed for their outfit 
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Several people have expressed concerns about "mission spying", so it is addressed here.
As you may have noticed, when you first register for OpCenter access, and subsequently log in, you will see that you have been placed into General Pool of players that currently do not belong to a specific outfit. The naming convention (as it appears under your name in the upper left when logged in) is SERVER_EMPIRE, where the empire name is abbreviated to 2 letters.
For example, a user named MeWho who registers to play on the Test server and fight for the Terran Republic will initially belong to the Test_TR outfit.
Here is the expressed concern:
What is to prevent anyone, no matter what their actual empire affiliation, from registering a dummy/spy account in which to use in checking out what the other empire is planning?
The answer has two parts.
Part 1:
OpCenter lends its power to those players who organize in the form of outfits. After one has registered for access with OpCenter, one may then either create an outfit, or join an existing outfit (provided the password is known).
Each outfit has their own private calendar. No one can spy on a particular outfit's plans unless they are a member of that outfit OR unless the mission creator has invited other outfits and/or the General Pool in which whomever has access to those calendars will see the event details.
Part 2:
The General Pool outfit, for lack of a better description, is general access. No special password is required. Because of this, spying can happen in the General Pool calendars. I have debated with some over the possibilities of protection, but in reality, this is the the best that can be expected.
For instance, if each event was protected, you'd have to make it available to people who could be spies. If the General Pool outfit was password protected, the password would still have to be known to anyone belonging to the empire... any of which could be spies.
The current implementation could be justified further by stating that any mission that a non-outfit member creates is either a task not necessarily important to a spy, or would be a general "let's do this - who's with me mission".
Realize, however, that broadcasting a general event that a spy may see can be useful in creating a distraction for an opposing empire.
2003-03-09, 07:08 AM
Linear Mode
