The best way to stop an individual from creating multiple accounts

Question

Now I am creating a game, and I want to limit one account per person. I have many families who want to play, and I can’t think of a way to decrypt families from scammers.

The way I plan to do this is to check cookies and sessions to see if any files are installed on this computer, if there are any, then I know that someone has already played with this account. Then I will check my IP address for the IP address that I saved in my database (I save the registration IP address for each account, as well as the last IP address from which they entered). If they do not match any of them, I check the email with which they subscribed and checked to make sure that the letter is not yet in use.

My problem is that although this can stop cheaters, it also stops families who have one computer.

Does anyone have any suggestions or experience what you did?

Thanks in advance,

Jeff

Answer 1

Some thoughts

There is no guarantee that the IP address corresponds to one person. Sometimes the whole village is viewed from a single IP address. A regular Internet connection also has a dynamic IP address, which can change at any time.

Conclusion: Differentiating users by IP addresses is futile.

You can try to filter out players with multiple accounts by checking for suspicious activity, but this may not help much either, as it would be difficult to distinguish friends who simply played along with real cheaters.

In general, this is a problem for which there is no effective solution.

By the way, some games (like EVE Online) reward people with multiple accounts. You may not need to worry about this either.

Answer 2

Honestly, my advice is simply not to worry about it. Design your application so that this type of behavior does not completely damage the system.

I have an iPhone game that could potentially suffer from a problem with multiple accounts. In the end, I had to come to understand that people would use the software as they wanted. If you want to hack CS4, you will do it. Instead of focusing on limiting this behavior, design your application in a way that doesn't matter.

Good luck

Answer 3

You can verify two-way authentication / one-time password. For example, sending sms to the phone to confirm the code. One phone number per person.

Answer 4

There is no fully automatic solution that can distinguish between two people who use the same computer (and, possibly, the same user account on this computer), and one person who uses two accounts.

Instead, I suggest registering as much as you can *, such as username, IP addresses and actions for each user, and then running scripts to detect suspicious behavior. You can also have moderators who report suspicious behavior. If you find suspicious behavior, then take appropriate measures.

For example, let's say that two accounts from the same IP address (or even from different IP addresses) play against each other for 16 hours every day, and one player always allows the other to win with the highest possible score. You can search for magazines for users with particularly extreme statistics, then you can study specific magazines for these players in more detail and try to work using some common sense, be it a hoax or there can be a genuine game between a strong and a weak player who is in one family. If you see an obvious fraud, send them an email and warn about the rules of the site. If the warning is not enough, you can, for example, cancel the winnings of players in games where they cheated, which means that they simply wasted their time.

* A warning. In many countries, registration of personal data is limited.