What would you do?

[SirChick]

I have a website game where i don't want 2 accounts on the same IP as this may allow money to be stacked up to ultimately make one account super rich.

 

I considered only allowing one registration per IP but then it's going to block perfectly legit people from playing.

 

What would you do in this situation to reduce people making multi accounts?

[pocobueno1388]

The only thing you really can do is keep a watch over everyone and how many accounts they have on their IP, and if the IP has too many people on it, just look through the accounts and see if there is anything suspicious going on.

 

 

[SirChick]

thats going to require alot of staff to manange all the accounts :/ theres alot lol

[lightningstrike]

Rather than making an IP based feature. Write a script to automatically flag suspicious users for a review.

 

e.g. If multiple accounts have the same email address, password, similar user names.

 

Also a possibly effective method would be to monitor transactions between accounts and flag anyone who makes many transactions to only one account. Meaning that they are transferring a lot of money to one account, then check if the IP range is very close and you can usually tell it's someone cheating.

 

Of course there is no 100% way of doing this perfectly but what I suggested is a start.

 

 

[SirChick]

well i have a "email is in use" already enforced. And the emails have to be legit.

 

So what your saying is something like:

 

if User1 sends something to User2 and they have the "same" IP set flag to suspicious.

 

What i might do is just "you cannot send over the same IP" in the first place. cos if no communication occurred in game i would never be able to know really...

 

but what about middle man ? like :

 

hey could u pass this to "this person" i cannot cos were on same ip...

 

if such a convo doesn't occur in game, then theres no evidence to ban them.

 

 

[Jessica]

HoboWars doesn't allow people to transfer money on the same IP.

If they're doing it once, they don't care. If they do it too many times, they stop it.

[chocopi]

You could just restrict how much can be sent per day from 1 user.

 

So a user is allowed to give out 10 whatever aday and when then meet that they have to wait 24 hours

 

~ Chocopi

[akitchin]

frankly it's probably better to say in the TOS that you retain the right to ban anyone for suspicious activity, wherein you don't necessarily need exact evidence.  it is your game, after all - if you see anything you consider suspicious (such as constant transactions TO a certain account from several consistent sources), contact them and warn them / give them the opportunity to explain themselves, and ban them if you aren't satisfied with the answer(s).  another good way to sniff out the false accounts is to contact all members involved in the suspicious activity, and see whether their answers are written similarly.  different writing styles are difficult to emulate, and often overlooked.

[xyn]

restrict registerations by email?

and make email activations to really irritate people

who make multiple accounts?

 

and like akitchin says with multiple accounts making

transactions to one account, warn them / ban

[ToonMariner]

Tough job but you could simply monitor tranascations where someone has just created an account and transferred all teh points/cash into another and that account lies dormant for a while you can bet you life they are trying it on.  When you identify these then you can simply remove that amount from the suspect account. All that can be automated.

[SirChick]

frankly it's probably better to say in the TOS that you retain the right to ban anyone for suspicious activity, wherein you don't necessarily need exact evidence.  it is your game, after all - if you see anything you consider suspicious (such as constant transactions TO a certain account from several consistent sources), contact them and warn them / give them the opportunity to explain themselves, and ban them if you aren't satisfied with the answer(s).  another good way to sniff out the false accounts is to contact all members involved in the suspicious activity, and see whether their answers are written similarly.  different writing styles are difficult to emulate, and often overlooked.

 

Although this is a good idea theres a few ethics involved with the fact the people donate and some times still become suspicious.

 

Although at the moment im in beta stages so its not a big deal if they are cheating for now, but i would like to find some controlling ideas for when its opened. I will deffinatly put something like that in the Terms Of Service. I think to reduce the amount of work the staff are doing is to create scripts to watch transactions between IP to IP so the staff can load a page which has a query to find all the suspicious flags and look in to it then.

 

I might also make a script to check people's money encase they bug abuse so what i might do it make a script to monitor the typical trend of level vs. avg income.

If some one goes above that average they will get highlighted. And i will probably store a 30 day log of their income and use a script to flag any days where by the money income is above a certain amount to the "normal". Though its going to take me ages no doubt

[roopurt18]

If you run a company that sells tangible products, you expect to lose a certain amount of revenue due to theft or damaged goods.  You accordingly budget this into your business strategy so that you can cope with the loss.

 

You should take the same approach with your game.  Instead of spending many resources trying to prevent it altogether, you should modify your game design such that the impact of cheating is negligible.  How you do this depends on your game though and putting the idea into practice can be difficult.  Here are some ideas:

 

Use a system of diminishing returns.  For example, when you first attack someone you earn the full amount of reward if successful.  On the second attack, you are limited to 50% of reward from the previous attack.

 

In conjunction with the above rule, the player is not able to obtain 100% reward until either:

1) They attack a certain number of different enemies, like 10

2) A certain amount of time passes, like 24 or 48 hours

 

You can limit the amount of gold, items, etc. that a player can hold at any one time.

 

It's hard to say more without knowing about your particular game.

[SirChick]

Thats actually quite a clever idea roopurt! thatll stop EXP grabbers from forcing one person to being beaten completely!

 

 

Ill have a dangle with my code see what the other staff members think. Thanks for your input everyone!