People rename accounts, how to avoid them?

[Dragon45]

People will always find a way to come back after being banned or ostracized; no bones about it. The key is, simply, to make it reasonably difficult for them to do so without hampering those who want to change their name for valid reasons.

A simple solution, naturally, would be the email system; it is actually reasonably effective becuase the effort requried to make an email account (a few minutes can actually be significant to some hyperactive noob, which is where most of the problems seem to lie) and the hassle may force people to behave a bit more. Its not a perfect, or even a complete solution, but no solution is foolproof.


A simple way to tie unqiue names and current account names would be to have the 'real' name revelaed on mouseover.

However, I think that most of the renaming hassles could be elimniated if certain 'tags' were allowed; the server would store them seperately from the real name; clan tags and King tags and various random titles are most of the reason people rename anyway.

[Doxs]

could someone upload the replay?

I could do that if someone can hint me at a good host.
Id prefer not to have to register with some half shady site that will only use my mail to spam and fileuniverse seems to be disabled.

I might have to add that its not really all that exciting, its my first game for a wery long time and I played like shit, lost my comm and had green run through my base on atleast two occations. Both when I attacked and got counter attacked
And did I mention it was on Castles? Even though both me and green are the only ones attacking we are pretty slow at it and the replay gets rather slow at times.

Regards

/Doxs

[Min3mat]

Id prefer not to have to register with some half shady site that will only use my mail to spam and fileuniverse seems to be disabled.

http://www.gamereplays.org
TASpring section
OMG YOU HAVE TO SPEND 5 MINS OF YOUR LIFE REGISTERING GET OVER IT >.>

e: lol missed out a e in the link

[HAARP]

bugmenot.com

[hawkki]

If a id would be signed when you register it would sort out these problems.

Someone might say "he can always register a new one with a different email address and continnue harassing." Well true, but then he'll have 0 ingame time. Just set your rank limit to lats say 2 stripes. Then the joiners must have been playing enough to get those two stripes, AND behaved good in his matches so he has only positive feedback. Then you most certainly will know he's ok.

what i typed above was the theory. It may be confusing as i cannot write what i really mean. But here is an example so everyone can understand what i mean even though my skills in english are lacking:

1.Host sets 4 stripes as rank limit in game
2.When in lobby the host can check that all the four stripe -rated players that have joined have good user feedback, othervise choose to kick them
3.The remaining players all have played x amount of time, and never got complaints about lame playing during all the matches he has played to get x amount of ingame time.
4.All the remaining players are probably going to continue to behave good, or if they dont, they atleast get a negative rating assigned to their ID and will not be let in games anymore.

Just think how much game quality would improve when the players always had to consider the consequenses before doing something stupid like leaving in the middle of a game or self-d after an initial rush failed.

swiftspread:
you are not actually saying that it would be hard to implement so that the current email based registering would be changed to ID based ?
It's not like you had to come up with a new way of doing something, of creating algoritms or something like that, it would just be plain mechanical writing of simple straight-forward code.

Sure it may require a day to get it done, but lets face it: this is something that the community would really want and really need. This would bring the game experience to a new level.

[Jack]

3.The remaining players all have played x amount of time, and never got complaints about lame playing during all the matches he has played to get x amount of ingame time.
4.All the remaining players are probably going to continue to behave good, or if they dont, they atleast get a negative rating assigned to their ID and will not be let in games anymore.

I like this idea. Could reputation be similar to the ebay system - you get to assign positive or negative reviews to a person, leave a reason, and have that reason attached to your name? It's likely that all players will pick up some negative reputation, as some people might be spiteful. But if you could read a number of short comments about a player, and see who made each one and what their reputation was, it would be possible to make quite an informed judgement about that player.

That does sound like quite a lot of work, actually...

[SwiftSpear]

swiftsprear:
you are not actually saying that it would be hard to implement so that the current email based registering would be changed to ID based ?
It's not like you had to come up with a new way of doing something, of creating algoritms or something like that, it would just be plain mechanical writing of simple straight-forward code.

Sure it may require a day to get it done, but lets face it: this is something that the community would really want and really need. This would bring the game experience to a new level.

The current ID system is fairly hardcoded in, compared to most of the changes we have to client lobby right now (visual additions, changes to the way commands work, adding/removing website links) the modification of client to the point where every user would have a unique ID rather then being registered by their user name would be a fair bit of work. A day or two's work for a paid coder who has nothing else tasked to him maby, but betalord is not paid and does alot of other things.

Lets face it, when we are relying on people donating their spare time to get things done we can't really gripe and whine about what they work on and when.

[AF]

me and iamacup could have it done on our server in 5-10 minutes, the entire process is as simple as carting the user/pass account files into a web or database based system and then showing users what their ID is, aka the primary key of the table thats auto-incremented.

The ID system would be very simple and very quick to add in, especially for someone as talented as betalord, afterall he knows quite a number of languages, php/java/delphi at least....

[Tobi]

AF you know that's bullshit, even the most simplest feature takes more time to add, test, fix, test again, etc.

Maybe if you put your development server online and change it on the fly without even testing anything you could do it, but no serious admin does that kind of thing.

[clericvash]

AF you know that's bullshit, even the most simplest feature takes more time to add, test, fix, test again, etc.

Maybe if you put your development server online and change it on the fly without even testing anything you could do it, but no serious admin does that kind of thing.

AF is actually right, i adminster and create many registration systems like it, it is simple and can be done very easily.

[Tobi]

No you are both wrong.

Adding the functionality in itself to the server may be pretty easy but you aren't gonna tell me that there's no need to test it, and also you aren't gonna tell me that you can code this AND test it in under 10 minutes.

Also you need to migrate the current accounts to the id based system.

Plus you need to modify all existing lobbies to somehow generate, store & send over the ID (If you link it to name it then the whole point of the ID is moot). Obviously that needs to be platform independent and it must not be too hard to change your ID. The other is to somehow bind ID to IP but that doesn't work for dynamic IPs. (Don't know about mac address tho, but that would prevent people with multiple network cards / PCs using same account from different computers.)

If you think it's possible server-only then explain me how to uniquely identify people in a way that can't be spoofed too easily.

If you still think you can do that all in under 10 minutes then I don't mind giving you an ssh account on my box for exactly 10 minutes, with the necessary facilities to do the changes. I'm 100% sure you will not be able to get it done in this time.

Edit: it's easier of course if you just ignore the fact that people can as well create a new account instead of renaming it, but still you wont be able to set it up in under 10 minutes.

Edit 2: End of discussion, I just don't believe it and you aren't going to convince me anyway. (Unless you got a fully working patch without a single bug in the mailing list by 11:30 london time, which gives you a full 35 minutes!)

[SwiftSpear]

If you think it's possible server-only then explain me how to uniquely identify people in a way that can't be spoofed too easily.

I've got an idea for that but I don't want to spread it around in case we actually end up using it.

[hawkki]

...Obviously that needs to be platform independent and it must not be too hard to change your ID.

The whole point is to NOT make the ID of a player changeable, ever. The ID is created when a account is created, and stays with that account forever, as a way to identify the particular account.

Also you need to migrate the current accounts to the id based system.

Is it outruled as a possibility that when this new ID system is introduced, all account information would be wiped and we could start from a clean table. I cannot imagine with the current community size that there would be any problems with nick thefts or similar things.

[SwiftSpear]

Also you need to migrate the current accounts to the id based system.

Is it outruled as a possibility that when this new ID system is introduced, all account information would be wiped and we could start from a clean table. I cannot imagine with the current community size that there would be any problems with nick thefts or similar things.

This really isn't an option. I doubt very very much it would go completely smoothly if we just reset everything.

[clericvash]

Well it may be needed, the community is going to want this option more and more.

And ignoring something the community needs isn't an option, the community needs something like this to keep track of players.

[Tobi]

...Obviously that needs to be platform independent and it must not be too hard to change your ID.

The whole point is to NOT make the ID of a player changeable, ever. The ID is created when a account is created, and stays with that account forever, as a way to identify the particular account.

Err, typo, ment:

"and it must not be too easy to change your ID. (ie. to circumvent the ID system)"

[Betalord]

About IDs etc., I've said in another thread I'll add it, but probably rather separate login/nick name than ID (and no, it's not a 10 min work, but I'll let you know how much time it took me :), and about unique accounts etc., there is no 100% way to ensure same user won't use multiple accounts, there is actually no elegant way of doing it, even hardware serial numbers etc are not a solution (first because some firewalls may actually block access to it or even fake it, and also since windows users may not have admin access to that part of registry, and also because this would be questionable since it means collecting personal data, etc.), also multiple users may use same computer (home or cyber cafe ...).

The best way of doing it (what commercial games use too) is actually to have a cdkey registered with your account - cdkey costs money, and people don't buy new cdkeys just to fake accounts (and even if they do, it's fine - if such user is banned and buys new account, that means money for you - so user pays everytime it gets banned, which is kind of a punishment for him and profit for you). But obviously, that is out of the question here.

I'm planning to add friends list too, but no public grading of players, first because it is not fair to people and second because it wouldn't work (people with bad grades would simply reregister), but I will add local marks so you will be able to mark people you don't want to play with etc.

[AF]

tobi, you dont understand the way I intended to implement it.

It would involve laoding and savign nto to an accounts.txt but rather simply callign a php script or accessing a mysql table when you want a login/logout/change name/passchange. You do not need to modify the clients to get numeric user ID's going.

Then at some point you can add an extra protocol command such as "GETID username" that returns USERID username id nick.

It's all very simple and the clients may not need editing at all it could simply be done by typing in the command in $local on TASClient (as is done with admin commands I believe).

And migrating the user accounts is easy too, afterall you at that point already have code that laods the accounts and saves them by both methods.

Testing should be easy

Register
Login
logout
login
changepass
logout
login
changenick
Logout

repeat #n number of times with varying data, it could be done very quickly considering the number of ppl and bots me and cup heve access to.

[Tobi]

I was assuming you wanted to do something with MySQL.

In any case, it still takes more time then 10 minutes.

[AF]

not if you already have a ladder system set up to tie it into. And I believe betalord has his content site he can hook onto too.