In light of recent activity, I have been pondering Fair Play in TradeWars.

Rule #1 NO DUPES!!! Duplicate accounts will be deleted without warning.

Some Traders have been using Proxy Servers (HTTP, SOCKS, VPN, TOR, etc...) and/or Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to mask their real IP address. There are dozens or even hundreds of services that can potentially detect known proxies, for example:

https://www.ipqualityscore.com

I said "potentially", because there are literally thousands of free and paid proxy services, and hundreds of new ones being created every day. There is no way these detection services can keep up with it.

Does anyone have any idea how to stop this?

have every player Email us there IP before each game start and we block any that dont match... Shouldnt be two hard since there are only 20 real players left anyways... lol

Ok, so I send you my daughter's IP in Wisconsin. She doesn't even know what Tradewars is, but I had her setup a computer at her house that I can remote into.

Okay each user will have to provide their SS# address and Phone # for a complete back ground check. and sign over their 1st born as collateral until they are verified. Note: of the 1st born is female between the ages of 18-34 she may not be returned.

sk

I am not a grandparent YET! ...but you can have my 25 year old first born son.

Just require the players to use the name of the character they use on ClassicTW as their login name.

H

Because it's hard to create another, or ten other, Classic logins with emails you get for free at Yahoo or gmail? Okay, sure.

Or because creating additional Classic accounts and emailing sysops is how you are currently attempting to hide your duping?

THose of us that run DSL would be screwed if the power goes out. Becuase once it loses power doesn't the IP address change? I applaud you guys for trying to get back to a legit playing but why not just broad that you're opening a game and if people want to join manually add their names to the register? Seriosuly though. Besides the builders game on Ice 9 and the tournaments how many people actually get into a game. 5-10 at best.

I have Frontier, it doesnt change. (last Thursday I had a power outage that lasted all day and no change)

H

The real answer is to open closed games and manually add people to them on request, which I think is what you're suggesting.

Helix doesn't like that because it might make it harder for him to dupe.

But, it also has the other negative effect of likely reducing interest and further limiting the number of players in games.

No, that would not get you banned. You would still appear to have a non-proxy IP address from a valid Internet Service Provider (ISP).

That is a lot of work for a Gameop to do manually. You could put a BBS in front of the TWGS and use the BBS to validate users. That still doesn't stop me from using my daughter in another state as a dupe though.

You can't stop it in my opinion.

In tournaments I don't care if the other team dupes as long as they stick to the player cap. Bring your best 5, if that's all of 5 of you I don't care. As long as the game op can stop you colluding with another corp I couldn't care less.

Most tournaments you have a fair idea who's a real person because they have been around. It's not like we are attracting new players. If I suddenly turn up with four newbies who just happen to be fast learners, well, I think you'll get suspicious.

To be honest same with casual games, as longs it's the same play numbers I don't care how you get them.

I'll also point out in most games, tournaments included, there is always a few players who are just dupes anyway. There the ones you FORCE to turn up and then just bot them all game. Spend the next 30 days annoying them to log back on when their internet knocks them off.. basically a dupe, so lets just have dupes, as long as it's EVEN team numbers.

As for proxies/VPS's.. I'm obviously a fan of the VPS, I played for years with a 3-800ms ping. It makes a difference when your dead three times over before the message has even reached your country

The problem here is identifying the players. For obvious reasons name and IP address are poor methods. The way every other place does this is through some third party verification. Someone else mentioned using your classicTW handle, which makes me think of using classicTW (or some other site known to just about everybody) as the CA, and have that entity issue a digital certificate to its members. It isn't hard to create such a certificate, but the issuing body would have to be one everyone trusted or else you miss the point.

This is all a good bit of work, but considering the commitment of time and effort that goes into a really competitive game I can see where players don't want to find it was all a waste because they were being cheated. When I hear people saying that there should be no rules because they are too hard to enforce anyway I can't help but think that is most likely a cheater talking. (Turns out be the case, apparently.) Probably this would only justified by boards hosting tournaments or frequented by better players where this sort of thing is a problem (you have to be a pretty good player already to cheat effectively). Even then, a collection of newbie games not requiring all that mess would be a good idea.

This suggests another benefit of such a program, which would be enabling of a player ranking system. This game needs a way to allow less experienced players to participate and learn at their own level. What happened on SK's server wasn't just wrong because it violated his server rules, it was bad for the game. Denying newbies a chance to learn (or relearn) the game hurts everybody when those players get disgusted and don't come back.

JP already wrote this.. It is in the unreleased 2.21 beta...

The problem is that you only need a fake email address to create a fake account on classic. Yes, we had all these discussions seven years ago, but it is fun to rehash them.

As Shadow mentioned in another thread, the only way I can confirm your identity is with a credit card. Then I can validate your real name and current billing address. You can easily change your billing address though and claim do be someone else with the same name, or just use a friends credit card number. If you have friends and family, I have no way to prove they are not real tradewars players. I could even do a voice validation, and you could coach them enough to convince me they just started playing and you are teaching them the ropes.

It is still not a bad idea though, because your Classic TW account can build a reputation in the community. Just click on the board index and you can see what your "TW Passport ID" is.