Hi,

I was wondering what ways are there to deter people for making multiple accounts in an online game?

To be clear, I am not against people having multiple accounts per say, its when they try to cheat with it is the problem.

The game I had in mind basically begs people to cheat… and I have no idea how to deter it.

I mean how do I stop people farming their alts to gain advantage?

or giving resources to their mains via lopsided trades?

I think the problem in my idea lies in that it takes 0 effort to accumulate stuff on a 2nd+ account.

The system just “stores” turns / time. then you can spend it all almost immediately and give the advantage to your main. circumventing the entire time system.

I know there is no 100% preventive measure but would like to deter it…

note I don't even have the game idea fleshed out yet, but already found this an issue in the design.

Simple answer: You can't!

In detail: The only way you can really know who owns the account and if the person already has one is to perform a real-life check and identity approvement. Different countries have different standards about how to do this and you'ld need to provide a facility to handle with all of those standards. A simple subscription is not enougth because I can do another one for my wife, kids, even pets as long as they share an address I have access to.

There is a way to detect multiple instances of th same game on the same mashine but that won't help much because I can simply have another mashine running the game. I only need a NAS Sotrage and some virtual clients to each run an instance of the game.

Tracking via IP is not reliable. Playing together in the same houshold or even the same provider let it seem as if there is the same person trying to connect to the server. As there are few less IPs as necessary, some companies do IP vectoring and so the same IP but different ports may connect to the same server over hundrets of times.

Why spending so much effort into preventing people from cheating? If they want to have a farming account, let them do so and instead change the resources they need by level.

Taking Elder Scrolls Online as example, a character that isn't good enougth in the level of certain profession won't be able to find resources of higher levels.

On the other hand, nobody prevents me from writing a shitty script that clicks certain regions on the screen periodically and you'll never now if there is a real person wasting their time or a bot farming stuff

Shaarigan said:
If they want to have a farming account, let them do so and instead change the resources they need by level.

Taking Elder Scrolls Online as example, a character that isn't good enougth in the level of certain profession won't be able to find resources of higher levels.

That's the kind of stuff I am looking for, ie make it less incentives to cheat, but this doesn't work on my idea because a 2nd+ account can always be useful being able to “store turns” is the equivalent of storing resources, the profession level will just level up easily every time you use turns to perform the profession. If it at least took some kind of effort on the player to do stuff on the alts I might have let it go because then their at least burning real time they can use leveling the main.

Anyone else have ideas that incentivize playing only 1 account ?

Or a way to make player stored turns have some kind of effort to spend their turns… I could in theory make mini games for each action u spend but then unless all those games run on the server its equally easy to cheat…. although if i do that route I can get rid of the save turn system altogether, the new problem now becomes how to code server authoritative games….and presumably higher server costs…. and its unfair to people that don't play as often.

Only allow (mostly) fair trades between accounts? Limiting to truly fair trade is one way, you can also give a bit of leverage, where you can trade non-fair up to some amount.

Mercutio604x said:
unfair to people that don't play as often

Every game is unfair to casual players vs those spending multiple hours every day!