How do you deal with multi-accounts?

[Wakish]

I think cookies are useless since just a simple cookie clearing and changing IP (proxy or dynamic) will just render the cookie futile..

How do you address the situation of duplicate accounts?

Note:
Duplicate accounts are not necessarily created for game benefits, but may be as another option to create a hard time for the game administration or other players..

[JohnMunsch]

This thread in another part of the board had some interesting discussion of that very subject:

http://community.bbgamezone.net/index.php/topic,613.0.html

I distilled it down to the following advice which I put into my design document for the game I'm working on now:

Cheating in PBBGs is very common; especially when you can get free accounts that have resources or anything else which might be helpful to a primary account. Here are some ways people are addressing cheating in other PBBGs:

    * No player-to-player trading except through an open market.
    * Record IP addresses associated with accounts (basically every time we see a new one, make a note).
    * Record errors per account (thus we can catch a preponderance of SQL or Rails errors occurring for certain users).
    * Check IP addresses against a list of known proxies.
    * Count the total number of different IP addresses per account. Large numbers of IP addresses for a single account are suspicious.
    * Note passwords and email addresses used when creating accounts. Players often reuse them.

[raestlyn]

...
    * Count the total number of different IP addresses per account. Large numbers of IP addresses for a single account are suspicious.
   ...

I use more than 4 IPs regulary basis, one for my cell phone, one for laptop, one for work and one for home. If the amount is more than 10, yeah, I agree with you.

[Kimmybwoy]

How About Finding SOftware allowing only there IP to be displayed , not ISP ,that bans some proxys , the rest , just ban all IPs From www.proxy.org , the biggest proxy list

[raestlyn]

How About Finding SOftware allowing only there IP to be displayed , not ISP ,that bans some proxys , the rest , just ban all IPs From www.proxy.org , the biggest proxy list

You do know that some internet providers do use proxies in regular basis?

[Kimmybwoy]

Erm , Nope xD unless your on about the "Use Proxy Server" then yes

[03laceys]

Proxy server's are often used by ISP's.
If you block 1 IP you could be blocking anyone using that ISP.
If you block 1 IP you can often be blocking a whole country.
If you block 1 IP (the aol one) you will be blocking most aol users.

On my game i have the following to prevent it.
Regisiter page only allows one registeration per ip.
Register page requires email validation.
Refferal's go into a special table if it find the same ip it will auto ban them both. (you can log in through your ip after creating a multi through a proxy)

And i also use a few other ways.

I hope this help's.

[Go_on]

Atm we only ban accounts that look suspicious, like 2 or more accounts whit a similar name and the same IP. Or 10+ accounts on one IP.
We have a lot of families playing the game (dad and child, brothers) and also a lot of friends that play on the school or workcomputers, so we can't just ban accounts because of same IP.
To prevent cheating we made sure that sending game-money to an account on the same IP isn't possible and also the market is protected.

[die4me]

trying to use ips won't stop them  i can sign up lots of accounts and never have the same ip

[rowbvp]

To me i really don't care care about 1 or two extra acct, as long as they let one of the admin know.its for there friends or famliy member.But they have to let us know.We already know they have more then one acct.But by making them tell us lets them know that we are watching. So trading anything whould be out of the question. best thing to do is watch them see how they play, look for signs of cheating then ban if needed.
Proxy are good, but they do ban host ip like some aol,users, or many ip's that begain with the same numbers.

Setup one ip pre email, and no attacking,trades,sell or buy between same ips.This way the only thing a members can do is just play a second acct, just like a normal player.

[mpgsoft]

For my game TERRITORIES 3069: Star Siege I wrote an automated script that took care of many duplicate and fake players automatically.  I took a look at the user registrations and found some patterns.  The first purpose of the script was to cut down on the fake players that were registering.  If a user's account failed any of these tests, it was removed:

1. Check for non-alphabetic characters in the player's name - (punctuation, symbols, etc.)
2. Check that both parts of the name have two or more characters
3. Check that the first and last name are not the same
4. Check that the first and last name both have at least one vowel
5. Check that the first and last name both have at least one consonant

In this game, small sets of players compete in separate games - so the script then looks at players in sets.  If any of the players in a particular game have the name, same IP address or same (encrypted) password their accounts are immediately suspended.  Multiplaying in the same game is forbidden.  Having multiple accounts is not, as long as they participate in separate games.

A couple of things I've learned:

1. In the many years this script has been at work, it has removed the vast majority of fake players.
2. No real player has ever been deleted inadvertently.
3. Since the script was rolled out, the number of multiplayers dropped substantially and overall player enjoyment went up.
4. I still manually delete players that are reported as multi's but I'm not swamped with it.

Obviously, it's not hard to get around the script but I've never posted the logic before so many of the fake players had no idea what gave them away.  It wouldn't be hard to get around the logic now that you've seen it but it certainly helped with the problem.

One last point of knowledge.  The reason I don't filter out the strange names during registration is that I want those players to at least come in and checkout the game.  Their account won't last more than 24 hours but who knows - maybe they'll like what they see and next time they regsiter, they're use their real information.  It has certainly helped to keep the registration list clean or at least to have the appearance of real people.