Tracking Alts on Dynamic IPs
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@mushered said in Tracking Alts on Dynamic IPs:
I meant it like 'mushered' as in mushered out. The question was with regards to cheating. On our game, you are not allowed to share items, there are credit restrictions, in game money and other things. There is also the issue of people being turds as many pointed out. After years of mushered-ing and staffing, you would be surprised the strange things you catch people doing. Being able to link ip addresses to charbits has been an thing as long as I can remember. Of course, I don't think dynamic stuff was even around when I started.
This sounds a lot like the challenges Cybersphere faced at one point or another and its one of the longer running games out there in general.
Often ferreting out these issues are like playing wack-a-mole and its a huge resource burn in terms of staff time, patience, and sanity. It also often doesn't do wonders for staff/player relations.
While I'm not a huge fan of alts in games (which I realize is a bit of a contradiction), if its going to exist @Chime 's self-reporting information I think is important and hugely sanity saving.
My questions/suggestions are:
COIs/Cheating around IG Money: CS had a problem with this in the past and still may but I haven't staffed there in quite some time. Instead of rooting out constant cheating, we just restricted offending player's access to the financial systems. It didn't lock them out of the game but did make it much more difficult to launder money through alts. If they still insisted on doing it, we took away their financial resources to their PCs. Harsh but they still had IC ways of getting by and the time out from being able to transact was not forever-ever. It just basically put their credstick in a corner for x days. If they still didn't get the message, then we parted ways with them as a player. Why not consider coded ways to respond to financial fuckery in the game, when you have evidence of it happen?
Graduated PC concepts: Most people who want to cheat via alt don't generally put a lot of developmental time into making these alts. They have a specific use for the alt and all other details are a barrier to getting IG to do the thing, faster. Accepting that some people are just going to make thrash alts to cheats, we put emphasis on better rewards for fully fleshed out concepts that would require time and dedication to play. A high tier character concept would start with more money, better starting equipment, a job, etc. on the understanding that they'd be putting a minimum amount of daily or weekly effort into the role. If they ghosted, then we put the PC into cold storage so they were off grid and had no access to game resources until they returned. A lower tier character would start with little to nothing, so even if they were 'cheating' in an alt scenario there wasn't much damage that could be done to the game economy, etc.
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@GangOfDolls LaX till I die flashes signs
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@tangent said:
@GangOfDolls LaX till I die flashes signs
Your icon. I understand so many things now.
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I think this is mostly 'theory' at this point and not likely to ever happen. Though with all things considered, I wonder what would happen if someone got clever enough to use a proxy that has IPV6, and therefore disseminates their single address into a litany of legitimate addresses. With a handful of those, it seems like we again enter the area of 'theoretically impossible' to track, unless you're uncle sam.
I agree entirely with what you are saying, and have always lobbied for more logical solutions rather than brute force 'whack a mole'. Albeit nobody seems to want to hear that. Resource delegation alone, I think, would solve everybody's problems.
