It would be really really really nice to have a feature with the trade wars game server, that only allows one login per user.

Either by restricting only one login per user's IP address, or assigning a verified email address to each user , this would really help cheaters and people who want to get ahead by having 5 accounts to do their bidding as they see fit.

I know it would be hard to restrict via the ip address because of dynamic and static ip's , but there must be some way to discourage multiple accounts.

Let me know if you guys can think of anything ,or have suggestions!

Thanks..

This kind of feature has literally been discussed for years with no satisfactory solution that would work for every case. The TWGS does support alowing only one login per IP address, but then what do you do for the folks that share a connection? In the past I used to require folks to sign up for games using their ISP-assigned e-mail address; I even have a nice Vscript (for VADV BBS) laying around here that automates the process but increasingly folks have multiple e-mail addresses through their ISP, their own domain, their work addresses, etc. So the moment you devise a better mousetrap the mice get smarter. There's no way to guarentee at this time with internet personas that a player is who he or she says that he is. I think that most gameops that have been doing it a while can identify behavior and trends in the logs that send up the red flags.

quote:Originally posted by crushkill

It would be really really really nice to have a feature with the trade wars game server, that only allows one login per user.

Either by restricting only one login per user's IP address, or assigning a verified email address to each user , this would really help cheaters and people who want to get ahead by having 5 accounts to do their bidding as they see fit.

I know it would be hard to restrict via the ip address because of dynamic and static ip's , but there must be some way to discourage multiple accounts.

Let me know if you guys can think of anything ,or have suggestions!

Thanks..

In about 7 years of being a co-owner of a rather popular (atleast 30 people on at any given time) ROM based MUD I can say with 100% assurance that there is truly no way to stop someone who wants to do this. Well, ok, there are ways but these ways tend to push people off. The way we did it on our MUD was to have the mud auto-assign a password to a new user account and send this password to their email address they provided. Of course with the whole slew of free email services out there, thats not really doing much. What it does do is put a little flag on people who do sign up with a free email service, and those people get just a little more snooping attention than the others. I have a SBBS (synchronet bbs) front end to my TWGS for reasons of hosting LORD as well as BRE along with TWGS and for hosting internet email services for my users (ie. YourName@tribeam.net). It has the option of requiring several bits of information to garner a new account, but I am unsure of how that works as I dont care if people dupe on my server and do not ask for these bits, its just there for fun anyway. If I get complaints tho, I'll ask the "suspected" duper to only play one account since it is in my posted rules not to dupe. I've never had to enforce the rules, probably because my server sees little trafic, and the ones that do play there are willing to accept duping as a stratagy.

I suggest you set up a bbs front end of some kind, either Synchronet (which is tried and true to work well with TWGS) or some other bbs package. Then use it's security to weed down the dupers. If you need help with Synchronet just drop me a line and I will help ya out!

Hope that helps!

From what ive seen BBS frontends make a TWGS run slow.

quote:Originally posted by PHX
From what ive seen BBS frontends make a TWGS run slow.

Actually I have had my TWGS set up both ways and honestly, I did not see a diference between the two setups. I had set it up as stand-alone and then setup the SBBS front end after a few months. If there is a diference, then it must only be a few milliseconds latency, because I do not see it. Now it may be that people are saying this because they dont want to go through the login procedure of a BBS and/or navigate through the menus to get to the TWGS system. This may be where they are getting the feeling that it takes too long. *shrug* Anyway, if you are worried about a few milliseconds latency in your connection you better have a direct ethernet connection to the server your playing on (or play locally on the server). Even my 1.5Mbps DSL causes latency sometimes when playing other servers. IMHO [8D]

quote:Originally posted by Shinare

quote:Originally posted by PHX
From what ive seen BBS frontends make a TWGS run slow.

Actually I have had my TWGS set up both ways and honestly, I did not see a diference between the two setups. I had set it up as stand-alone and then setup the SBBS front end after a few months. If there is a diference, then it must only be a few milliseconds latency, because I do not see it. Now it may be that people are saying this because they dont want to go through the login procedure of a BBS and/or navigate through the menus to get to the TWGS system. This may be where they are getting the feeling that it takes too long. *shrug* Anyway, if you are worried about a few milliseconds latency in your connection you better have a direct ethernet connection to the server your playing on (or play locally on the server). Even my 1.5Mbps DSL causes latency sometimes when playing other servers. IMHO [8D]

On several bbs systems, there is a delay when playing tradewars between the first commands you send and the second. It is around 500 ms. This is BAD, as it will easily get you killed. See fament or chicken coop for examples of this. Your server does not have this problem, however, your bbs is causing something extra to be sent with an enter. This causes problems when playing with cn9 set to all keys, because when you do something like pressing enter to display a sector, all you get is this:
Command [TL=00:00:00]:[2150] (?=Help)? :
<Re-Display>

Command [TL=00:00:00]:[2150] (?=Help)? :

Also, I'm not sure what's going on with your server, but the tradewars part is EXTREMELY laggy. My ping times to your server are 260ms average (normal for my dialup) but the server is behaving as if it were 500-1000 with packet loss. I would guess it's a performance issue on the machine it's running on. You may want to look at it and see if you can free up any resources, that might make it run more smoothly.

I would like to commend you on the ease of sign-up and navigation of your bbs system, I thought it went really smoothly with everything straightforward. If you can resolve the performance issues with the tradewars itself, I'd say you have a pretty nice server running

If you have any questions/comments/rude remarks, feel free to email me at the address I signed up with.

I'm new to running TWGS although not new to the game itself. What I did to resolve this was to create a closed game and require a password. Since I have to add people, (and don't allow aliases) it creates a level of control.

Granted out of the just under 6,000 members of my site only about a dozen play Tradewars heh, so this might not be a good solution for really large TW sites.

Just adding my two pieces of ore.

Well, it been a while since my site was up (and it will be a month or 2 before it is back) but the version of TWGS I was using in january of this year did have "allow only 1 connection per IP". I doubt John would have removed this feature. Now if your talking mulptiple accounts you can usually filter these by looking for accounts with the same password, and compare login records.