Quasi MMO and cheating

Butabee · 2012-02-28T05:18:57

I'm in the process of designing a game where players host their own worlds but players can take their stuff gained from any certain world with them to other servers. Players will be able to literally take pieces of worlds into their inventory. The environments are voxelized so players can pick up a chunk of voxels of dirt or any other material and keep it in their inventory. Player data will be kept on a central server. I'm trying to think of a way to do this that will minimize cheating. I don't want to keep player created data on my own servers. How could I validate gathered materials without actually hosting the maps? I think I can host things like monster and treasure spawns but not player created content.

Networking and Multiplayer Programming

Started by Butabee February 24, 2012 11:34 PM

14 comments, last by Butabee 12 years, 1 month ago

Butabee

274

Author

February 26, 2012 10:28 AM

Well, I plan on selling the game/accounts and only allowing each account to run one server. I don't want to charge players to actually run their own server, although a guess I could since it will also take up resources on the central server. Like maybe subscribed accounts can run their own server, but free accounts can only play on other players servers. I'd like to prevent every player that buys the game from running their own server since the central server will only have so much power for every player server.

Not sure exactly how I'm gonna do it yet, maybe I'll charge per day or something for a player ran server.

How much do you think I should charge for it?

MMO player simulation.

Florian22222

618

February 26, 2012 09:27 PM

You said the player data is stored on a central master server. How would it be to make a report-system like tickets in wow for hackers etc. and then check those people, if it´s possible to have this amount of money/equip etc in this time. Its not the best approach but if you want to allow private servers you cannot control everything.

hplus0603

11,916

February 27, 2012 04:04 AM

If you charge for accounts, and one account can run only one server, and players have to go through your central server to find other servers, then that's sufficient. No need to charge for running a server specifically.

enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };

Butabee

274

Author

February 27, 2012 09:47 PM

I thought of a new way to mine valuable materials today... instead of generating them randomly per ore hit, I would instead generate gold spawn chunks randomly for a player ran server, but the locations would only be kept on the central server. So if a player was mining at the same location as one of these gold spheres, then they'd get some gold, until there was no more in the spawn.

Since the locations are kept on the central server, and neither the client or the player server knows anything about them, players can't use any sort of cheat to track them either.

MMO player simulation.

hplus0603

11,916

February 28, 2012 01:57 AM

Sounds like a good way of enforcing rules on the server!

enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };

Butabee

274

Author

February 28, 2012 05:18 AM