[MUD-Dev] The Best Guy on the Mud Thing

[Wes Connell]

On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:

> > Well, why not just create two player accounts then to run 
> > your players at
> > the same time? Any system that tries to prevent people from 
> > using multiple
> > characters is going to fail unless there is fairly good human 
> > oversight
> > (which seems basically impossible to do in a game the size of UO).
> > -matt
> 
> In UO's case, the answer is "because you're paying us more money, we're
> willing to put up with it!" :)
> 
> -Raph

For non-paying muds this could pose a problem. Account authentication
could quite easily spawn a whole new thread. A couple of simple things
that would make creating mule accounts too bothersome. Email account
authentication may work, but the free mailers (hotmail,yahoo,etc) get by
this. IP authentication wont work for most people because they will
usually have dynamic IP. Ebay doesnt allow accounts to be created using an 
email address from a free mailer. That cuts down on some of the mules.
Next throw in a system that periodically sends mail to the email address
of the account. If the mail bounces or isn't responded to then deactivate
the account after so many failures. This cuts down on a few more mules. IP
authentication is a bigger problem. IP authing to work would have to be
cut down to some sort of domain authentication. Not to exactly sure how to
do that one. 

You could even refuse bad reverse lookup connections and stuff. Kinda like
setting the PARANOID flag in inetd.

If you log who comes from where into what account then it would not be
hard at all to write some Perl to pull out the info you need. Then
depending on your game policy you can take measures. It may even help you
find other ways to stop excessive muling.

Of course all this can be bypassed, but there are always exceptions.

Wes!
wconnell at adhesive.com
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
		-- Henry Spencer




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