First, trying to intergrate what Null Pointer has done into the current code base.
Null, do you mean to do it from scratch or to do it using what you currently have?All this should be very easy to implement if you have access to the source code.
The second is the trainer breaker.
True client/server is out of the question we decided it was too much to do when we were doing the 1.4 patch and that was with 2 employees working on it. Give me a couple years, and you'll get that patch... I thought about encrypting the key data, but how does that help? It has to be decompressed before changing and and that's when the trainer would get me. Plus it sounds like they just noop out the entire function so that seems no good. I could definately fix the text hacks, but it doesn't really hurt the game so my time is probably better spent elsewhere. Some of you guys know more about this kind of thing than I do. I'll see if I can IM you so we can discuss this. It's an interesting topic to me which is a motivator to do something...
Third, banning/limiting player joining. I'm not in the business of restricting anybody. We talked about this back in the day and decided it was a bad idea. I will not write code that snags peoples IP's for banning. That's just got trouble written all over it. Ping banning is a consideration, but seems like a bad idea to me as well.
Finally, other lobbies. Currently Giants talke to GSA through their proprietary API. It wouldn't be too difficult to hook some other lobby service up. I just need to be pointed at the desired one (contact info would be good because I'll need their API).