Does what it says on the tin. An option for administrators to stealthily connect to servers, so that it doesn't pop up in the chat or shows [VIP] MISTER ADMIN just connected, respect him / her! . As an administrator, you need to go out from solid evidence before punishing them. If offenders see your name (sometimes accompanied by the trademark Fortress of Gamers Admin tag [FoGA]), chances are they'll immediately stop doing wrong. A suggestion would be an option that allows you to turn on / off stealthy login. If you do this, both your donation tag and the chatmessage ADMIN connected won't show up. It could help a big deal, especially if the offender already knows the admins' names.
Couldn't you just make a new account for this purpose? You literally don't need to buy anything, and just use the web client, server status program to ban.
Consider someone reporting a person via the in-game !report command. You need to accept the report, quit TF2, log off steam, log onto your new account, launch TF2, hope the server is not full, see if they are offending anyone, use the status command to get their Steam3 ID, convert it to a Steamcommunity ID and THEN you can ban them (if the offense is bad enough). I'd rather have a stealth login option. EDIT: even with using the server status program, you need to do most of these things. The only thing that falls off is the conversion of the Steam3 ID.
Or you could say that you're going off the server now publicly, and if they're dumb enough, they'll start hacking/doing wrong some seconds after. This happened to me, and it worked pretty damn fine.
This only really works on the bottom percentage. There is a select group of players who are smart enough to check the scoreboard to see if you're still in a team / spectator. I had to deal with one of those on Orange just now, so that's why I'm suggesting this.
I think this is a realy good idea, It would be very useful for reports, and would help reduce freekilling on jb as people would be constantly allert
I support this idea. It's a viable effort in making it harder for mischievous people to detect us around.
Would be really effective on Ach/Idle. I've heard a lot of players has been doing that after i leave, heck i even recieve reports when i leave aswell. How about the admin doesn't appear on the scoreboard at all? And if they turn this "stealth" mode off they'll appear on the scoreboard again. Of course, n0name and Downy will have to make this plugin if there's not any creator out there who already created a plugin like this. Players probably check the scoreboard to see if there's any "Known" admin on, (And by known, i mean someone they actually know.) and if there is they will react quickly.
I'd like to hear an opinion from n0:name himself - is this possible? If so, how long would it take on an estimated thought? Or why wouldn't this work?
It is possible, but I don't really see this happening soon. Takes a lot of time to implement/modify existing plugins.
Sorry for the late reaction, but you could go into offline mode on steam, change your nick and then join the server. Yes, the VIP message will show up, but if the original nick was "[FoG] Bunnie_Lord", change it to something like "[JODC] xXPr0Sn1p3rXx" and seriously, I doubt anyone will notice. Yes, you cannot receive reports while in offline mode, but hey, at least you can use your own account.