User Registration Details & Profile

[Seven]

Hi there. I'm disorganised and I havn't planned any of this out in advance, my first game and i'm just jumping in head first so it will probably crash and burn or it may turn out to be something fun and enjoyable. What kind of information do you think should be taken in when users register?

Username
For logging in and assigning a character to
Password
For securing the login (obviously)
Email Address
For sending mail to regarding the game/character

These are the fields I absolutely require and a few options ones i'm thinking of are below

Date Registered
Would be interesting to show who is old school on the profile page

Country
Every site requires you to enter your country, is there any point in this? Should I do it?

About me
Little snippits about people that they can write for their profile so other players may view it

Any ideas about this, any other information you think I should accept during user registration or any comments on my ideas above? I think I have it all covered but I don't fancy going back to change registration and the database to accept another field because someone gives me a great idea AFTER the project is off the ground.

Thanks for your feedback

Seven

[Nox]

Hi Seven,
my opinion is - give the user no reason to be discouraged by exhausting registration. Often it's not an entertaining thing, especially filling data not related to the game.
So - have only necessary and most important inputs.

Give a player possibility to fill the rest directly in a game. He(she) won't be playing nonstop, he would have to wait for something so he might fill it in the meantime. Also for his guildmates/alliancemates/etc to know about him.

And some of game related might also be after the (first?) login.

The important thing imho is to bring the player to game, with lowest amount of obstacles possible and once in game (and/or having spend some time in game) he might be more willing to fill more data, or at least it's safer to presume it then than before.

Good luck with your game

[Scion]

exactly, i agree with Nox

See if you can get to the point where you can put a "Play Now" button on your home page that when clicked.....allows a visitor to start playing straight away.

That is what i am aiming for in my login/registration component.

Id also consider progresive disclosure, in otherwords allow the player to divulge more information at a rate they feel comfortable with and reward them when they do provide information that your interested in.

also take a look at these for some discussion around this.

http://buildingbrowsergames.com/2008/12/04/how-much-information-do-you-need/
http://buildingbrowsergames.com/2008/05/08/do-you-really-need-their-e-mail-address/
http://mobeamer.blogspot.com/2008/06/gaming-with-guest-account.html
http://freetoplay.biz/2007/07/05/top-10-ways-to-remove-barriers-to-entry-in-mmos-and-virtual-worlds/

[JGadrow]

The following are my thoughts on browser-based game registrations.

All you ever REALLY need is:
Username
Password

ALL other information can be kept in a profile section to be optionally filled out by the player. Also, thanks for the links Scion. Nothing new there for me, but nice to see I'm not the only one with these thoughts

[codestryke]

With a round based system it is very important to grab the user's email. I think it is imperative even without a round based system but that is IMHO and dependent on the game too.

The round based game play allows for and end of game. It's nice and helps to keep bringing people back to the game when the round starts. Some player's signup and don't have the time for the current round so they let there account lapse but maybe next month they will have time. We've had many players in the past enjoy the emails so they do know when things kick off.

On a popular round based game we also put emails into a queue and new player registrations were only sent out once every 10 minutes. If you have a highly interactive game allowing players to create a new player account just encourages multi's and thus possibly destroying the entertainment value to the rest of the player base.

I like mobeamers demo account idea and we are looking forward to possibly adding this into a couple of our games. When I see a registration with just username / password a flags go off in my head and the thought "they really don't care if there are multiple accounts they just want really high 'online now' numbers. 9 times out of 10 it turns out to be true.

Finally to rebut the buildingbrowsergames.com
This whole well there are so many free email services out there.. Those two take time to signup for and people are creatures of habit. Those that do like to multi either use the same service or variations on the same name so they can keep track of things. No, you are correct, you can't stop someone who really wants to cheat but in 8+ years of running online games there has only been ONE player that we could catch cheating Emails, system generated passwords will and do allow us to catch 85% of people who cheat, our own internal tracking system gets another 13%...

[JGadrow]

True, codestryke, e-mails can be helpful for the users of the site. However, you could allow them to still provide an e-mail to use for contact if they wish to receive it.

It's not about having high 'users online' it's about converting a visitor into a player. I also like mobeamer's guest account suggestion as it also helps with this.

As far as detecting multi-accounts goes, asking for an e-mail really doesn't really help much. It simply places a small (ie: easily surmountable) hurdle into the path of a would-be multi-accounter. How much do e-mails really help combat multi-accounting?

I have no fewer than 5 e-mails that I utilize on a constant basis. Thus, without even trying to create a new e-mail or using a temp e-mail system, I could sign up 5 times. Thus, this is a very weak argument for *requiring* users to supply an e-mail. As I said, I don't think it's completely useless, just not something that should be an absolute MUST have.

For example, to catch non-technical users for multi-accounting, your IP checking should already be doing a fantastic job of this. Sure, there are proxies and some geographical locations have very few IPs, but this is only step #1 in any decent system anyways. The numbers caught by this step compared to the numbers caught by e-mail signup are probably very similar I would imagine.

[codestryke]

So lets take a real world example of mine.. State of Crime had a very large number of players all coming from a school (50-80+) that shared 5 ip's. With user name, password and the IP how do you tell all these are different people? SOC is a game of heavy interaction so multiple accounts can and often do throw the offset of the game.

Do you (not you personally Makari) run a game with forums, if the forums are built in then it's no problem with asking for just username and password, but what if you integrated SMF or phpBB into your game. Well now those don't have the email so PM's don't get emailed, nor are you notified of a response. Not a big deal and yes you could tell them so, have them fill it out at a later date or have those options turned off when you create the sync'd accounts between the game and the forums. In other words it's a nuisance.

Finally if you only take user name and password how does one go about a lost password request? Now said player doesn't have a way to get there password so what do they do, well, have to create a new account and start playing that one.. Hey my other account is dead, let's attack it!

Just some more food for thought and you know how I love to play devil's advocate

 

[Scion]

all valid arguments ... (i allways like to agree first.....then)

BUT  (see i told ya)

It really depends on the game environment. My argument is if a game requires the email for game play then of course you need to ask for it, but if its not required then it could be nice to retain the option to allow a user to not provide one. If they suffer from a reduced gaming experience, because they dont get notifications, or are unable to recover a lost password, or dont have access to post on forums, then hey that will just encourage them to provide one.

Same thing with eliciting user profiling information....

Admitidly if i wasnt working on a re-usable user management module atm i would probably also just go with an simple email required approach....but i wanted to build something with the extra flexibility ( partly because i would like to offer that, and partly just to see if i can ...i am a hobby games developer after all )


..Im als

[JGadrow]

Just some more food for thought and you know how I love to play devil's advocate

lol I know.

As I said, there are arguments for obtaining an e-mail and I did admit that if you utilize IP-based multi-detection that you'll need to include more than just that because of proxies and locations with few IPs (I should have also included large networks such as colleges, businesses, etc.). And, yes, the user might lose some features by not providing you their e-mail. However, the initial page may issue them a warning to edit their profile information to add an e-mail or they could be missing some great features.

This way, the user is not forced to provide you with personal information, but have been notified of the potential ramifications of not providing it and are given the option of providing it if they wish to receive this functionality. Also, if they decide to attack their previous account because it is 'dead' that would be a matter for your admin team to decide when the multi-detection determines these two accounts might be the same individual. Does it constitute multi-accounting? I would think so because that player created both accounts and is exploiting it for their personal gain. Now, when confronted, they will probably let you know what is going on and you could choose to be lenient if this was the first time it happened. You could offer them their choice of account and then remove the other. However, this should only be allowable once. If they have a second problem because they forgot or didn't want to provide an e-mail and perform this sort of activity again, then they are knowingly multi-accounting and should be punished.

[codestryke]

Problems I've dealt with in the past...

The first game I made and put on the web only asked for user name and email. Since it was round based I wanted that email so I could notify people of when the game started a new round. Any how I never understood why forums, games etc always asked for confirm email. Well now I know why! It was an administrative nightmare dealing with player's that could not type there email address in correctly. I didn't have time to administrate the game it was to new and to fresh all I wanted to do was to code the game and the new features the player base was coming up with. Even now with email / confirm email we still get quite a few people on each game who lose there passwords and have to contact us.

Placing a news page or warning does absolutely nothing, unless you force the user to do it they won't. Case in point when I add new changes to a game I post those changes in the forums for the game and on the news page. To be clear when a person logs in the first page they are taken to is the news page. So every round what was happening was it would get about 1/2 way though and I would get support emails about how this isn't working like last round, something that was stated in the news! It tried various other methods to bring attention to the news like bold, italic, big fonts, putting the continue to game at the bottom of the page so they scrolled, only showing the newest news postings... Nothing worked. So to combat this I actually had to create a quiz that would award turns to those who read and answered all the questions correctly. This helped but once again I had to force feed the user the information. And even then some players went the entire round without getting the bonus turns because they failed to remember to take the quiz!


Also what about password retrieval? Yes you can tell them about it and hopefully they will read it. What though would be more frustrating asking for email in the beginning of the game OR getting a month or two into a game and losing your password and thus not being able to continue to play a game you enjoy? At that point you not only possibly lost a player but you lost word of mouth as well.


It just seems thus far that if you don't ask for an email in the beginning then you are going to have to add a lot of code into the game to ensure that they do fill out the email once they enter the game. Over the years it's become second nature for forums, blogs, social networks etc to ask for an email address. I would say most players don't even give it a second thought entering one so why are we taking a step backwards?

[Chris]

I'm tempted to remove asking for email in my next game. The only thing that I really use it is password retrieval. But almost only hotmail users lose their passwords (dunno why only them) and you can not email hotmail anyway due to their heavy anti spam protection, so they will not get the password reminder.

As for email confirmation, I have completely no clue why some sites still use it... They lose all hotmail, aol and probably part of yahoo users. Maybe they have some magic means of delivering emails to them? No idea

[Scion]

Any how I never understood why forums, games etc always asked for confirm email. Well now I know why! It was an administrative nightmare dealing with player's that could not type there email address in correctly.

This one still has me beat!

Im a natural copy and paste guy....I do it hundreds of times every day....its to the point where on these sorts of forms where a email address is asked for twice i use copy and paste for the second field.

still i suppose it helps ...

@chris, Im not sure about hotmail, AOL etal...Im sure youve tried making your email as little spamlike as possible? Is there a resource or reference somewhere describing their general approach for identifying spam....or more specifically a guide to how to get desirable emails into a users main inbox. I would have assumed that for activation type emails its not so bad since the user will generally want to login right after the activation email is sent so they will check their spam box.... and if theyre wanting to get updates about round starts or other intermitant notices then they should add you to their white list.

[codestryke]

Chris,

I wasn't the one who did this but my partner MystressNyx did get us off Hotmails "spammer" list. It didn't cost us any money it was just filling out a form or something.. Hopefully she'll post here to let you know.

[Serend]

For Hotmail

https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl&ct=eformts

But unless your hosting the game in your basement at home I would contact your hosting provider. Many of them have a few mail servers that 1,000's of domains send from. There are mutliple reasons that your mail may get counted as spam but most likely reason is the mail server IP is blacklisted as majority of hosting providers are.

Try it out to see if your blacklisted: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Good luck with that.