Quote:Original post by janoside
That does not seem like a reasonable solution to me. I understand the intent, but a lot of people use such an account as their primary account and such people should not be banned. Especially because such services often provide better features (more storage, searching, etc) than many local ISP and university accounts.

The same can be said for requiring a credit card ( even for just validation ). Not all people have a credit card. Even if something like yahoo is their primary that infers that they have a secondary which would be accepted. Again, like I said, it's one possible method that I know some games have used ( mostly web based ones ). Again it's not a method that we use but it could be a solution if you notice that a lot of cheaters are using a particular email provider. Even a temporary restriction on those emails might be enough to make a greifer/hacker/cheater loose interest.

One addition i've recently made to secure account registration is to implement a CAPTCHA system. This will hopefully make it a little bit trickier for anyone who wants to write a bot to register half of the dictionary as accounts. I don't expect it to be infallible though as nothing really is when dealing with Internet games - as the Wikipedia entry says a sweatshop could circumvent this protection - but the more protection I add the better I feel about the security of my system.

EDIT: Fixed URL.

The hoarding of resources can easily be avoided through proper game mechanics, such as having an alternate NPC resource vendor or some other game mechanic which takes away the incentive to hoard in the first place. For the cheating or bad language, the suggestions given so far are good ones.

Quote:
still use credit cards for verification.

I assume that your game is free because you want players. IMO - I would never give my credit card out for verification purposes ever. I would assume you would have a hard time getting a player base with that strategy.

There's an elegant game design way to solve this: removes NPC buyers. People will need to get inventive to grab some money, because if everyone mines says, charcoal, the charcoal price will suddenly drop, and mining charcoal will not be viable anymore.

Well, I would use a serial key that comes with the game. Allow X amount of account or characters with that serial key and if they cheat or abuse the system block that key. Have the player create a log-in that is tied to that key so they can use it from any computer. There are a lot of ways to get the job done, it just depends on how protected you want it to become.

correct me if Im mistaken, but wouldnt a player with an existing connection to a game server be disconnected if they change IP mid-game. if thats the case just allow for a certain # of socket connections you need to play your game(connection to lobby server, game server, etc) and dissalow any extra connections from the address.

Its a matter of making it sufficiently hard to cheat (you wont ever eliminate all).

Have the usual server based confirmation to thwart the usual modified client cheats. And have some kind of frequent client patching to make security hacks harder (protecting the MAC/IP check stuff).

Make the game mechanics not reward 'Mules' any more than the same hours played with one Char (dont give each char excessive froo starter resources/rewards).
Have some kind of taxation system make it prohibitive/unworkable for a player to have too many extra Characters/Accounts (ie- on UO people got extra accounts to beat house ownership limits to facilitate their Housing speculation businesses).

Possibly make real identification required for account registration. Credit card
number with no charge or only a nominal charge ????


A well spelled out EULA that clearly states what behavior wont be tolerated and defines specifics about banning and multiple accounts, etc... (this actually does disuades some people). Have the EULA visible/check off every time the user logs on.