I’m creating a game currently and I want to limit one account per person. I have a lot of families that want to play and I can’t think of a way to decipher families from cheaters.
The way I’m planning on doing it currently is checking cookies and sessions to see if any are set on that computer if they are then I know someone has already played from that account. Than I will check their IP against the IP’s I have stored in my database (I am storing the registration IP for each account as well as the last IP they logged in from). If they don’t match any of those I than check the Email they have signed up with and checked to make sure that email isn’t already used.
My problem is that while this may stop cheaters it is also stopping families who have a single computer.
Does anyone have any suggestions or from experience what you have done?
Thanks in advance,
Jeff
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Answer
Some thoughts
There is no guarantee that an IP address corresponds to one person. Somtimes an entire village is seen from a single IP address. Also a usual internet connection has a dynamic IP address that can change any time.
Conclusion: Diffrentiating users by IP addresses is useless.
You may try to filter the multi-account players by checking for suspicious activities, but that may also not be of much help, since it would be hard to distinguish friends just playing together from real cheaters.
All in all, this is a problem to which no effective solution exists.
By the way, some games (for example EVE Online) encourage people having multiple accounts. Maybe you shouldn’t worry about it either.