Miscellaneous Knowledge

I run several Left 4 Dead servers which I play on regularly, these are all public servers with unrestricted access. Unlike previous Valve games, Left 4 Dead includes a built in vote kick system, which is sensible since due to the server sizes, it’s unlikely you will have an admin player playing, hence the voting system is used for removing any troublemakers.

However, it is frequently abused, players will randomly votekick another player without warning because they want a friend to come on, without even asking. In many cases, they’ve even votekicked me, the owner and admin.

While they soon realise this is a huge mistake on their behalf (as they become permanently banned from all my servers), it is somewhat annoying to have your gameplay interruped by a votekick.

Thankfully, due to the power of SourceMod, someone has written a plugin that obeys the admin immunity system built into sourcemod – normally used to prevent lower-level admins from abusing higher-level admins. By default, all players have an immunity of 0, as a “Full Admin” I have given myself an immunity of 100. Hence, when anyone tries to votekick me, the vote instantly fails. Not only this, it shows me who it is, for all votes.

By default, the plugin only grants full admins veto ability and displays who is votekicking who. I recommend you edit the /left4dead/cfg/sourcemod/sm_plugin_votemanager2.cfg file as follows; (if it does not exist, create it)

l4d_vote_kick_immunity 1
l4d_vote_log 1

This will turn on the admin immunity system and also log all votekick attempts to the SourceMod log.

Players beware, never kick the admin.

Today, I received the following email from Google regarding their checkout service, which allows businesses like my own to receive credit card payments into our bank accounts:

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that on 5 May 2009, Google Checkout’s transaction processing fees will be changing. We will be transitioning from our 1.5% plus £0.15 per transaction rate to a new tiered fee structure, where the rates will vary depending on the amount of your monthly sales processed through Checkout. The rate you will be charged beginning on 5 May 2009 will be based on your sales processed through Checkout during the month of April 2009. Each month thereafter, we’ll continue to use the prior month’s sales volume to determine your transaction processing rate. For more details about the new rates, please visit https://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html?hl=en&gl=GB

We will also be discontinuing the AdWords free transaction processing promotion on 5 May 2009. Any AdWords transaction processing credits accrued during April 2009 will be applied towards transactions that occur on 1-4 May 2009.

Fees are the same for all payment types (Visa, MasterCard, UK Visa Electron, UK Maestro, Solo) and there are still no monthly, setup, or gateway fees. For cross-border transactions, there will be an additional 1% fee assessed per transaction. To learn more about Google Checkout fees, please visit https://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html?hl=en&gl=GB

So in short, the fees that Google are charging small sellers like myself who don’t process more than £1,500 in sales with them per month have gone from 1.5% + 15p to 3.4% + 20p, which is exactly the same as PayPal charges. To add insult to injury, they are also withdrawing the AdWords free credit (for every £1 you spent on adwords, £10 worth of transactions where processed free) and they are adding an extra 1% for any cross-border transactions. As we do a lot of sales outside the UK, this makes Google Checkout even more expensive.

Many users are in outrage at the change, and this will most likely cost them dearly. The only winners here are the large companies processing over £55,000 a month with Google Checkout. I am voting with my wallet, and will now no longer suggest Google Checkout as our preferred payment option.

So if you’re looking for a payment solution now, I highly reccomend PayPal, lower fees, telephone support and much better brand recognition.