In light of the other thread about the guy who was shot after a SWATting incident, and other events, what is the best way to reduce the chance of being SWATted? My son plays some of those online/first-person shooter games and I’d like to know how best to prevent it. Are there console/game setting or hardware that would help?
I hope we can keep this as a separate thread and not glom it into the shooting thread, that way we can steer clear of the specific issue of that shoot and focus on the technical issue.
There’s no way I’m aware of to pull someone’s IP address via console hosted gaming. Unless he gives out your phone number, address etc you should be fine.
I saw (well listened to the conversation) where a kid actually gave out his IP address thinking the very grown man on the other end was bluffing. A few minutes later the guy had his home address and phone number. That was as far as it went thankfully, but the point was made.
In my old school Rainbow Six days (early 2000s) I dabbled in nascent voice chat and it was great with folks I knew until randos were in then it was people cussing and threatening so I just disabled it.
I dont do Multiplayer these days as I am too old and slow but people get soooooo passionate over a game. If I did, no chat, no voice and when I’m tired of getting wasted; I quit and live my sorry life
I play Call of Duty WWII multiplayer online more than occasionally (PC, not console). Voice and data chat is routine, but can be muted. I give everyone the benefit of a doubt but mute them for any reason. Things get heated occasionally but I can’t say I’ve ever seen a meltdown where bodily harm is threatened. Generally, things are relatively congenial in my experience over decades of online multiplayer gaming, dating back even to the days of dial-up.
I can’t imagine how someone could get any of my personal data unless I gave it to them, or unless they could hack the Steam online servers.
There’s a good chance we played one another if you were on Xbox. I played entirely too much Rainbow 6 before I could drive.
I got death threats on a daily basis playing online, even on racing games. Being completely anonymous seems to embolden those who would otherwise run from confrontation.
If you’re hosting a server, can’t you get the IP address of players? I remember when we would ban players from our servers, it was based on IP addresses and we could see who was on the ban list.
Serious? I just don’t get it. The only video game anger I saw growing up was when a buddy of mine hogged the Galaga game at the pizza hut for like two hours and the manager got mad and threw us out. Different generation, though.
Well that might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but it happened a lot. Especially in Call of Duty. Usually those making threats were about ten years old so I didn’t take them seriously.
Don’t know about other games, but the days of hosting your own server for COD are long gone. Now they’re all hosted through a third party main server. But yeah…IP addresses were readily obtainable in those days.
I have to chuckle a bit…I recall a thread where your “approximate” age was revealed (like when you were in college) and I find it kinda funny that you are delving into things even us 50-somethings usually don’t! More power to ya man! Seriously.
I have a group of guys that I’ve been playing with since Quake 3 Arena days. We run our own Teamspeak server while playing and have a blast. We’ve been great friends for 15 years…I’ve never met any of them face to face.
About six friends would go to Da’ Hut and order two personal pan pizzas each. If they weren’t ready in 10 minutes, they were free. They couldn’t cook them that fast, but the owner wouldn’t give us free pizzas because we were at the same table, so we would just show up and sit at separate tables. Then off to the Ponderosa for their $0.49 all you can eat sundae bar. I think we put both out of business.
Outside of giving personal info, there is no way to hack my IP to get a physical address? The boy mostly FaceTimes with his buddy while they play, but I think he might have chat enabled. That was Rainbow Six. He plays mostly Star Wars now, and his name is a random generated one.
So these people being swatted have just horrible PERSEC?
Your guys old school is from when I was long gone out of school. Old school to me is an Atari 2600 and a Ti994A and typing basic games, orhex code from the Commodore 64 magazine.