I'm of the opinion that you ruined the ranked nature of prophunt simply by giving the plugin attention.
My biggest concern with Prop Hunt is that, when I put it Prop Hunt 1.93 on one of my servers so my community could play it, it ended up having a bunch of bugs and balance issues in it.
I could have fixed it and just kept it on my own server (like certain
other people), but that's
not how I roll.
While we're on the subject, the Two Cities update seemed to change how either TF2 or SourceMod do Flamethrower crit detection... it's now based on the client's cl_cmdrate instead of the server's tickrate. This meant that players with lower cl_cmdrates took less damage, but also couldn't use the flamethrower fly mechanic. I've
already worked around this in Prop Hunt Redux. Which is one of the advantages of having a developer actively maintaining things.
Now there are other server operators running ranked prophunt servers that either still have the propmenu command exploit that allows them to select any model
OK, let me stop you right there.
1. I don't distribute the ranked version of PropHunt. This is intentional: it leaves DarkImmortal and Geit as the gatekeepers for the ranked version and they presumably trust the people they've distributed the ranked version/stats includes to.
2. The "propmenu command exploit" you're referring to comes
directly from Prop Hunt 1.93 and is code I haven't changed.
I've left that part of the propmenu code alone because it was (presumably) intentionally written that way (or else it wouldn't take an optional argument). Honestly, if we really wanted to crack down, we could make it outright that propmenu doesn't work on the stats tracked version. Then again, that'd piss off some server owners just like other changes have.
I may address this from a different direction, though, and just validate that the prop is on the propmenu if a cvar is set or if it's the ranked version. Not that this will stop any community with stats.inc and stats2.inc from being able to recompile their own custom version of the ranked version of Prop Hunt.
or they have the bug where wearables aren't being removed properly and it allows them to have demo shields as props.
Now, as for wearables, I use TF2Items to block props from getting
any items. The exception is when the Last Prop mode starts, in which case I check for that and only block wearables, canteens, and spellbooks when regenerating the last prop.
Honestly, I'm not sure how a prop would get a demoshield anyway, since props are respawned when teams are changed.
Hardly a consistent environment to have ranks when people can join a different broken server and cheat.
There's no real way of preventing ranked servers from cheating. Not as long as DarkImmortal and Geit give servers the stats include files and not just a plugin binary and not as long as Prop Hunt has prophunt_config.cfg, because
servers can customize weapons.
In fact, up until I started publishing Prop Hunt Redux, the weapon configs likely varied wildly from server to server because the last version with 1.93 was something like 3 years old and had a large number of issues.
I now publish a nice, up-to-date version as part of Prop Hunt Redux. I released a new version with PH Redux 3.0.2 that mapped all the new Festive weapons with the attributes their standard versions use. It also removed the Short Circuit due to how overpowered it is and some other miscellaneous fixes that should have been caught years ago.
or nearly 400,000 that have walked into the mod at some point
The primary place for the discussion of the PropHunt mod itself is the
GamingMasters Prop Hunt board.