How strict are you?

[chesney-93]

What do you class as duping?

I've always played games and my brother has always followed me to each one, the odd few have banned us for just having an account each. Fair?

[Harkins]

When it comes to the same IP address, I no longer believe in the existence of siblings.

[chesney-93]

When it comes to the same IP address, I no longer believe in the existence of siblings.

So not even if they don't transfer or communicate the two what so ever?

I think im gonna make an auto ban system, every 15 minutes a cron will run and ban who ever has broke the rules*

Rules* being anyone who has interacted to account on the same ip

[saljutin]

when I run game I had such problems too
same IP - personal message to 1st registered to stop playing with 2+ accounts

at the end of game:
- 1 guy claimed he never had brother and he played with 2 accounts - but he played really smart so noone noticed
- some guy had like 5+ accounts, he used different proxy for every one - i found him because timing he always used same pattern

[chesney-93]

when I run game I had such problems too
same IP - personal message to 1st registered to stop playing with 2+ accounts

at the end of game:
- 1 guy claimed he never had brother and he played with 2 accounts - but he played really smart so noone noticed
- some guy had like 5+ accounts, he used different proxy for every one - i found him because timing he always used same pattern

Well this area has always been a problem and m pretty sure it will be for a long time to come.
Never thought about the time pattern, maybe an auto system could flagged this up to keep an eye on

[chrisjenkinson]

I have got slightly around this problem in Xiphos, my trading game, by placing people randomly on different islands, and making it so you do not directly interact with players on different islands. The chances that you have two accounts (either multis or siblings/housemates) on the same island will be quite slim, so there is little opportunity to exploit your way to the top.

[CygnusX]

How many islands are there?  Even if there are 100, there is a 50% chance I only need to create 50 accounts to have 2 on the same island....

My system is semi-immune to this problem.  I don't allow resource exchange between accounts : )

Another 'more valid' method, if you must have resource exchange, is this:

1) Log interactions where a resource goes from one account to another account when both share the same IP.
2) See if a player is in the top 100 rankings where such cases exist.
3) When you find an occurrence, consider if resource swap is significant, and if so, ban. 

[chrisjenkinson]

At the moment there are three, but that is mainly because it's under development and people playing two accounts isn't a problem! But they will be automatically generated, around 40 or so cities per island. It is a possibility, but you'd need to create 50 accounts to do so. There are also limits on resource transfer depending on city population. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution, but it will limit the potential.

[Freyr]

I do believe that it is possible for two(or more) account has the same IP address, but limited to the same exact time.
A developer has to be really well rounded in all aspects, even if it goes to other fields of expertise, and in this case, networking.

ISPs have blocks of IP addresses assigned to them, and giving each user a static(absolute, constant) IP will mean it will be exhausted if they do not use it wisely. And then with the issue that the last few blocks of new IPv4 addresses has been used up, more and more companies will begin to share IP addresses. That is one possible theory to keep in mind when creating auth systems.

All that is going down now, so using an system that even uses IP verification is pointless at this stage. Anyone can generate a new IP to play a game with, weather it be by proxy or a simple "dnsflush". One has to keep in mind that IP addresses can change between visits, and even though the chances are not likely, another user using the same website and ISP, will receive the same IP address.

I've found that by logging each visit of a user, like most do,that I can build up CDIRs and implement a system that do more advanced tests on users that say, use the same range of IP addresses each time. I then know that those users are on the same ISP network.

I do however, sense that this problem might be fixed by IPv6 addresses. Which also bring to mind a sad realization that not many games are capable of handling IPv6s.

[saljutin]

OK and how about this:

I have desktop PC and company laptop, on desktop I have broadband connection on laptop I have usb-mobile connection
IP's are NOT the same but person is

solutions to this?

[CygnusX]

I'm going to go back to my last post.  We should only be concerned with the top 100 players that transfer resources.  All others are not top 100 players, and the community will care little to nothing about them or their cheating.

From this, a nice log system for quantity of resources stolen/transferred, the IP associated with the account, etc, should paint a fairly clear picture of what is happening.  If you keep your ban system as a black box, it will be difficult to figure out, risky in terms of getting caught while trying to trick the system, and frankly not worth the effort by hackers.  Why spend all the time/energy on a bbg game hack when there are beers in the world that remain unconsumed. 

[Chris]

When it comes to the same IP address, I no longer believe in the existence of siblings.

And that's why all those families play my game Not to mention soldiers (they were playing from some garrison in Iraq during the war), co-workers, students playing from a library..

With some effort from human moderators you can reasonably well quess who is a real human and who is a multi (bahavioral estimate: equality of exchange, login patterns, master to slave patterns, etc).

Besides, anyone who uses the same IP is a lazy lamer, not a real cheater. No serious cheater would ever use the same IP for master and slave accounts.

[MystressNyx]

When it comes to the same IP address, I no longer believe in the existence of siblings.

hahahahaha I love this sentiment.

I'm going to go back to my last post.  We should only be concerned with the top 100 players that transfer resources.  All others are not top 100 players, and the community will care little to nothing about them or their cheating.
<snip>

I'm not sure what you're basing this on, but I can assure you that this has never been the case in any of our games. No one likes being cheated, regardless of where they stand in the ranks. Not to mention that the game doesn't cease to have meaning for anyone outside of the top. They want to do well just as much as anyone else. Acting as if a large chunk of your playerbase is not worth consideration is simply a recipe for disaster in any situation, but doubly so when discussing fair play, which should be across the board or not at all.

On the topic itself, I am very strict in my moderation of multiple accounts. However, I do not ban based solely on having the same IP. We have rules against interactions, as most do. This makes it pretty cut and dry to avoid banning the genuine family members / co-workers, etc. If they are as they claim to be, if they really are there to play a good game, they will abide those rules because they aren't trying to cheat the system.

No one will ever be able to accurately abolish all dupes for all of the reasons mentioned in this thread. However, as also stated, the human touch of monitoring actions, patterns, etc, goes a long way to ensuring the most fair playing field that we can be expected to offer. Banning based on IP alone is for the utterly lazy.

[chesney-93]

Really interesting topic thank you for your input every one

I think I'm gonna base my system around the following; players on the same ip or have logged in on the same cant transfer or interact with their dupe account, i mean family members. lol

I'm also going to log the time of the day that player logs in, when they log out and have it compare to other users with a similar time sheet.

Also, I agree, you shouldn't just look at the top x players, still not fair one cant cheat because they have put more time in getting to that state?

Thanks

[pixlepix]

Well, if they are doing any serious cheating then they end up in the top 100 anyway.

[Nexus]

I made a script which gets all the trade transactions from my database and I have it output it into a text box in my admin panel and if I see that they have been trading together I give them a warning and then if they do it again I ban them.

[Kyle]

Why not have your game log the players' ip addresses, and set up a check before they do a transaction so you can block same ip transactions altogether?

Depending on how strict you want it to be you could set a user variable containing the most recent ip they have logged in to and base it off that, or if you wanted to be more strict with it you could store all the ips every player logs into in a database table.
Then you execute a couple queries, write up a simple if statement, and you're good to go. No more same ip transactions.

[edmazur]

How many islands are there?  Even if there are 100, there is a 50% chance I only need to create 50 accounts to have 2 on the same island....

I know this post is from six months ago, but I just wanted to throw this fun, somewhat non-intuitive fact out there: if there were 100 islands, you'd actually only need to create ceil(sqrt(2*100*ln(1/(1-.5)))) = 12 accounts to have at least a 50% chance of having 2 on the same island. The math behind this comes from what's known as the birthday paradox, where it turns out in a room of 23 people, there's a 50% chance of two people having the same birthday. This has applications in cryptography and hashing.

As for the actual subject of this thread, my game dodges this problem by just allowing multiple accounts and trying to structure it in such a way that you can't use this to your advantage too much. People still do, but I think it's better than the rather difficult task of policing it.