I'm getting ready to roll out TradeWars Passport, the new feature that will allow gameops to host games that are restricted to only members of this forum, and where the player's game accounts will be linked to their account on this forum. I'm going to go ahead and activate the TW Passport panel on this forum, but I won't be releasing a version that supports TW Passport games right away. I will install a beta on twgs.classictw.com soon so people can help me test it before making it public. I'll let you know when it's up.

Here is the test for the "about TW Passport" page:

TW Passport is an authentication system for TradeWars games. It is a service provided by EIS and managed by the community through this forum. The purpose of the system is to maintain an identity for players across all TradeWars Passport games so that each player will be held accountable for his or her behavior in these games. Though a gameop may choose to allow anonymous access to TW Passport games, a player's account in a game will always be directly tied to his or her TW Passport account.

If a player does not abide by the rules of a TW Passport game, the gameop may ban that player from his or her site. If a player is banned from 10 different sites during a 3 month period, the player will be banned from all TW Passport sites for a 6 month period. If a player is banned from all sites 3 times, the third ban will be indefinite.

Any comments or questions?

That sounds really good John.

My question is, who's in charge of keeping track of who's banned where and how many times?

Is that going to be worked into a dbase in Passport?

Already is. I was thinking originally that we'd just make it a community-driven thing, where people would bring complaints to the forum and if a particular user seemed to warrant a ban, the community would take action. But after talking to Vid Kid, I realized that I could make Passport access anonymous so that a gameop doesn't necessarily know who you are in the game. With this kind of blind game access, I don't think we have to worry about gameops picking on particular players. So a gameop would ban a player based entirely upon that player's behavior in a game. Plus, only one ban can count against your reputation from any one game site, so one single gameop can't really hurt you much. You'll end up banned from that site for as long as the gameop wants to ban you, but it won't effect your access to other games unless you put together a lot of bans at a lot of sites in a short period of time. And that's not going to be subjective, not up to the whim of any one person or group of people. I also think that a gameop has to worry about getting a reputation for being too quick to ban and players will avoid those sites to avoid getting a negative reputation mark. So it works both ways. Players should want to follow the rules in these games, and gameops should want to ban only in extreme cases, because in both cases, actions matter and have consequences beyond just one game.

The main thing is, it's easy for a gameop to ban a player from his or her site, but it's hard for a player to get banned from all sites, and very hard for a player to be banned forever.

So just as an example, let's say you start a game on your site and enable TW Passport authentication. You create a rules file, and that file gives the players clear instructions on what they can and can't do in that particular game. This rules file is shown to the player before they authenticate, so you can assume that they've seen it and understand and accept those rules if they join your game. Later, the player is clearly breaking your rules. You can go into TEDIT, TW Passport management screen and send a warning to that player. You can send any number of warnings. These warnings get sent to user mail and are clearly marked as a TW Passport warning. You provide the details of the warning. Now suppose the player continues to disregard your rules and warnings. You then ban the player. The player is immediately removed from your game, even if online, and is unable to return to that active game or create any new games on your site. On the forum, the player's reputation goes down by 1. Reputation is a score from 10 down to 0 and is decremented for every site ban in the past 3 months. So if you avoid that site and don't have any issues with any other site, after 3 months, that ban no longer impacts your reputation. But if a player has similar issues at 10 sites in a 3 month period, his reputation will reach 0 and automatically trigger a 6 month global ban from all TW Passport games. And if a player is hit with this global ban three times, that's it, the player is automatically excluded from all TW Passport games forever. Of course, all of this could be overridden by admins here on the forum in special circumstances, so it's not completely draconian.

Oh, one other point. If a gameop unbans you, that ban comes off of your record and may increase your reputation score, or even restore your access from a global ban. So if a gameop changes his or her mind, or even accidentally bans you, that can easily be fixed.

I put this up on twgs.classictw.com if anyone wants to see how it would work, the process of creating an account. Basically, you'll just go into game Y to create a game account as normal, then provide the TWPID shown on your TW Passport panel of the forum (you can change that at any time). Enter that into the game, then return to the forum to verify that you're entering that game. Then continue the login process at the game and you're in. You can also set a flag on your forum profile that says you don't want to validate new games here, in which case you'd just automatically gain access when you enter your TWPID.

The reason for validation is that someone could snoop your TWPID when you enter it at a game and maybe try to create a game as you on another site. If that happens, don't accept the new game and then generate a new TWPID. Simple.

Will this "passport" also look at preventing others from using your alias? From your description, it sounds clear and concise. What happens if, say for example, someone logs into a game using my alias name? If they get "banned", does that affect me, even though I am not playing on any server other than my own? If not, how would I be able to defend against a "ban" on sites that I supposedly played on and violated rules?

[EDIT] I may have found my answer. I assume the TW Passport ID is unique to each player, meaning my ID number is only for this account unless I generate a new one. So I also assume no one can play and assume the role of someone else.

I can withdraw my questions.

That's correct, Daala. Originally I had planned to force players to use their forum name, meaning you would always be "Daala", and ONLY you would be "Daala" in TW Passport games. But I got some strong feedback about the need to allow anonymous access to these games, so I provide the unique ID instead. You have the ability to change that ID after creating an account in every game, and the locally stored ID for a player is unique to that player and the game site, so it won't be the same from site to site, keeping gameops from sharing info about players they think are problematic.

So here's how it works. You have your ID, and you can change it at any time. Every site has a unique ID for you that will never change. That is a hidden ID, though a gameop could gain access to it if he or she tries hard enough. There would be no benefit to that, though, because no other site will use that ID. So no matter what name you use in the game, your TWPID will link it to your account, and the unique site ID will identify you in that game even if your TWPID changes. User name doesn't matter.

Now, some game sites will choose to require you to use your forum login name. Some players won't like that, but others will. I personally like the idea of having sites where you can guarantee that nobody will play a game with your alias, and also knowing who's who.

I do like the idea of knowing who is who.

Is there a limit to the number of passport games we can host? (Other than our our licensing limitations.)

Will we have the capability to set one game up to allow aliases and one that does not?

It is per-game, and there aren't any limits. You set it up in Bigbang. There's a new option, <1>, to set as a TW Passport game. Then you'll have a TW Passport Management screen in TEDIT where you can link to a rules file, set some parameters, warn users, ban and unban them.

The ban list is global, so it'll apply to all TW Passport games on your site. If you ban player X on Game A, the player will also be banned on Game B or whatever.

JP I kinda like this idea, I know I have been away for a while and will soon be getting my server back up and running and start hosting games again, I like you have been busy on a project and has kept me away for a while, before that. It was a major operation to save my life.

I have one question on the passport system. Is it going to tie up any extra sockets connections on the server engine? Or piggy back on the existing connections? I know something like this has to work independantly of the game to be able to keep track of the data being used.

From what I gather it is a software game monitor system, am I correct?

Vulcan

This is for Daala,

I have a proposition for you and Thrawn, if you guys are interested, I would have PM'd you on this but you don't have PM available on your profile. I already sent Thrawn a PM on it so you can read that if you have access to it. That is, if he isn't back yet.

Let me know if you two are in on what I proposed, and either PM me or Email me from the Email in my signature.

Thanks in advance if you do want to be on board.

Vulcan

Vulcan, TWGS will open a connection to the EIS servers to interact with the TW Passport database, but only briefly, and only at the creation of the game account.

Okay cool, then I was thinking right then that the connection will not be interferring with game play then, that is good. I like the idea of the Passport. I hope it will be a big success then on the gaming.