Does that make owning a smartphone a further requirement for this game? I'd have to factor that into the expense of playing.
Back in the digital transition era, I kept an analog phone because it cut through all the 'enter your number' digital malarkey, and generally got you connected to a person at support instead of endless menus designed to convince you to give up.
If you have a GMail account you can use your free Google Voice account to create a number and send/receive SMS on your PC. It's limited use, but it would work for this type of purpose. You could always create a throw away Google account, if nothing else.
Does that make owning a smartphone a further requirement for this game? I'd have to factor that into the expense of playing.
Back in the digital transition era, I kept an analog phone because it cut through all the 'enter your number' digital malarkey, and generally got you connected to a person at support instead of endless menus designed to convince you to give up.
If you have a GMail account you can use your free Google Voice account to create a number and send/receive SMS on your PC. It's limited use, but it would work for this type of purpose. You could always create a throw away Google account, if nothing else.
Honestly, I'd never give them my real number.
And that will work fine. The SMS verification is used to reduce multiple accounting and bot-scripts filling up our universe.
We might scare some players away - but I think that user verification in the future will be much stricter to reduce multi-accounting and other fraudulent activites.
Companies that use provided personal information for other purposes than it its intended use tend to not stay long in business. Our company has been in this business for nearly 15 years so far (and made both Planetarion and ManagerLeague)
Does that make owning a smartphone a further requirement for this game? I'd have to factor that into the expense of playing.
Back in the digital transition era, I kept an analog phone because it cut through all the 'enter your number' digital malarkey, and generally got you connected to a person at support instead of endless menus designed to convince you to give up.
If you have a GMail account you can use your free Google Voice account to create a number and send/receive SMS on your PC. It's limited use, but it would work for this type of purpose. You could always create a throw away Google account, if nothing else.
Honestly, I'd never give them my real number.
And that will work fine. The SMS verification is used to reduce multiple accounting and bot-scripts filling up our universe.
We might scare some players away - but I think that user verification in the future will be much stricter to reduce multi-accounting and other fraudulent activites.
Companies that use provided personal information for other purposes than it its intended use tend to not stay long in business. Our company has been in this business for nearly 15 years so far (and made both Planetarion and ManagerLeague)
You could use Evercookie or something along the line. Maybe exploit browser's HTML5 capabilities to give unique identifiers to your users. Monitor account creation per IP address, also keep track of login attempts and login IP addresses and look for matches. That's what we do in our games.
Also, we keep a user click log. It does create few gigabytes of data every few weeks, but HDD space is dirt cheap nowadays. And the automated system we have that checks the click logs for fraudalent chains.
You don't necessarily need a phone number to protect yourself. Sometimes a CAPTCHA is just as annoying.
We had one user that wrote a bot as Chrome extension and added it to the Google Store. If we werent storing click chains in the user's session, we would never have detected those guys. We let them bot 2-3 days and then automatically banned them all. It was a good day xD
If you have people with clicks that have no mouse coordinates, they are probably botting.
Your only issue really is people browsing in private mode. Login and click logs takes care of that! Then again there are ways to detect that with some javascript sorcery and logout users with private mode enabled.
There is one more check we do but due to its heavy nature we only use it when our servers are idling late at night (4-5am). Checking previous day's battle logs and look for currency transfers and user relations and flag users for human inspections.
I've had to give my phone number a few times, but never had a problem with it, it might be because i am in the UK and with BT, and afaik it costs the caller money to send me an SMS, as they have to be 'converted' to voice. I don't own a mobile phone of any description after all, i also don't possess an answering machine or fax, so whether that 'sms' is ever heard is also, very much hit and miss
If you dont submit the right number you will never be able to activate your account.
The reason why the phone number is needed is simply to be able to send you your user creditdentials.
So providing a fake number will never give you access to the site, as your password is sent by SMS.
We will never use the phone number for any other purpose or charge anything to your phone subscrition.
You could argue that this would be better by email, but we have landed on SMS in order to reduce multiple accounting (one account per phone number) and to avoid automated bot scripts filling up our universe with "bot-accounts".
The game launched on December 29 - you all are most welcome to try it out
So apart from regurgitation what in essence comes down to a pre-cooked CSR response does show some media training but is also pretty pointless. If you are infact connected to the company and at the level that your username indicates... A personal touch would be smart as t makes you look more like a person and less like a bot...
Any way speaking of bots... I can snag 30-40 really cheap pre-paid cards and burn through them to set up a bot network. Heck where i live companies from time to time hand out free pre-paid cardss to get you "hooked" on their services.
So when (not if.. no company pays that much for security) your users data is violated... The data will contain the phonenumbers of people for no real gain to you as a comany.
But i wish you the best of luck.
Ps. I do not have any personal stake in this... i live in Sweden... We are practically a open book but other do care a tad bit more. Ds
If you dont submit the right number you will never be able to activate your account.
The reason why the phone number is needed is simply to be able to send you your user creditdentials.
So providing a fake number will never give you access to the site, as your password is sent by SMS.
We will never use the phone number for any other purpose or charge anything to your phone subscrition.
You could argue that this would be better by email, but we have landed on SMS in order to reduce multiple accounting (one account per phone number) and to avoid automated bot scripts filling up our universe with "bot-accounts".
The game launched on December 29 - you all are most welcome to try it out
So apart from regurgitation what in essence comes down to a pre-cooked CSR response does show some media training but is also pretty pointless. If you are infact connected to the company and at the level that your username indicates... A personal touch would be smart as t makes you look more like a person and less like a bot...
Any way speaking of bots... I can snag 30-40 really cheap pre-paid cards and burn through them to set up a bot network. Heck where i live companies from time to time hand out free pre-paid cardss to get you "hooked" on their services.
So when (not if.. no company pays that much for security) your users data is violated... The data will contain the phonenumbers of people for no real gain to you as a comany.
But i wish you the best of luck.
Ps. I do not have any personal stake in this... i live in Sweden... We are practically a open book but other do care a tad bit more. Ds
And we are located in Norway :-).
I am sorry if my replies were impersonal, but I felt the need to answer why we have chosen SMS for user verification formally. We are certain it will reduce multiaccounting, but the future could proove us wrong.
And as this is a pay-to-play game, some 30 or 40 accounts is not the problem we are trying to avoid. It is more like someone filling up with thousands automated sign-ups and verifications within a short period of time - which has happened to other games before, and is likely to happen again in the future.
We are also fully aware that some people will never sign up due to the SMS verification and that is something that we will have to live with.
What I am trying to stress out that it is that as long as it is a serious company user data will not be abused, as that could be against the law. Personally I do also beleive that SMS will be the user verification for the future - but that is my personal opinion and also one of the reasons for our choice of user verification.
... Personally I do also beleive that SMS will be the user verification for the future - but that is my personal opinion and also one of the reasons for our choice of user verification.
SMS verification is already ineffective as a security measure. There are several ways of "working around it", many of which can be linked to automated scripts.
It works very well to regulate the actions of normal users and will deter some casual misbehaving, but I doubt that is the intention in this case. The "professional" goldsellers will sail around that authentication check without breaking a sweat.
Perhaps the apps like BurnerApp will be declared illegal at some future point, but that's largely irrelevant. Goldsellers operate illegally anyway, so that will not affect them. The apps already exist, and even if they didn't, they would be created, legally or illegally.
if this is a pay to play game like he's saying, 99 percent of all the users playing this game are most likely going to give the company their credit card information. If they had any intention of stealing your identity that is all the information they need. They have your name, address, bank information, the city, state and country you live in, what else do they need?honestly, adding a phone number is of little consequence at this point. to be fair, I'm impressed with his explanation of their system and the reasons behind it.
The reason why the phone number is needed is simply to be able to send you your user creditdentials.
So providing a fake number will never give you access to the site, as your password is sent by SMS.
We will never use the phone number for any other purpose or charge anything to your phone subscrition.
You could argue that this would be better by email, but we have landed on SMS in order to reduce multiple accounting (one account per phone number) and to avoid automated bot scripts filling up our universe with "bot-accounts".
The game launches on December 29 - you all are most welcome to try it out
Ok so if you really actually have anything to do with the game your saying you send the password through SMS... What would those with no Mobile Device do then? We are out of luck and completely unable to play your game? You DO realize not everyone has a Mobile Device so your limiting your potential Player base by only allowing those with a mobile device.
Well.. Actually the amount of people who can combine the "afford/have time to play" but "lack access to a mobile device" is so small it is not worth considering.
Heck the amount of people who are paranoid are most likley bigger then that group.
... Personally I do also beleive that SMS will be the user verification for the future - but that is my personal opinion and also one of the reasons for our choice of user verification.
SMS verification is already ineffective as a security measure. There are several ways of "working around it", many of which can be linked to automated scripts.
It works very well to regulate the actions of normal users and will deter some casual misbehaving, but I doubt that is the intention in this case. The "professional" goldsellers will sail around that authentication check without breaking a sweat.
Perhaps the apps like BurnerApp will be declared illegal at some future point, but that's largely irrelevant. Goldsellers operate illegally anyway, so that will not affect them. The apps already exist, and even if they didn't, they would be created, legally or illegally.
After trying this game, I can safely say that with the way currency and resources in the game work, it's not a very gold-seller friendly place.
There is nothing to spend money on other than your game time, and resources in the game are only traded within your guild.
Comments
If you have a GMail account you can use your free Google Voice account to create a number and send/receive SMS on your PC. It's limited use, but it would work for this type of purpose. You could always create a throw away Google account, if nothing else.
Honestly, I'd never give them my real number.
And that will work fine. The SMS verification is used to reduce multiple accounting and bot-scripts filling up our universe.
We might scare some players away - but I think that user verification in the future will be much stricter to reduce multi-accounting and other fraudulent activites.
Companies that use provided personal information for other purposes than it its intended use tend to not stay long in business. Our company has been in this business for nearly 15 years so far (and made both Planetarion and ManagerLeague)
You could use Evercookie or something along the line. Maybe exploit browser's HTML5 capabilities to give unique identifiers to your users. Monitor account creation per IP address, also keep track of login attempts and login IP addresses and look for matches. That's what we do in our games.
Also, we keep a user click log. It does create few gigabytes of data every few weeks, but HDD space is dirt cheap nowadays. And the automated system we have that checks the click logs for fraudalent chains.
You don't necessarily need a phone number to protect yourself. Sometimes a CAPTCHA is just as annoying.
We had one user that wrote a bot as Chrome extension and added it to the Google Store. If we werent storing click chains in the user's session, we would never have detected those guys. We let them bot 2-3 days and then automatically banned them all. It was a good day xD
If you have people with clicks that have no mouse coordinates, they are probably botting.
Your only issue really is people browsing in private mode. Login and click logs takes care of that! Then again there are ways to detect that with some javascript sorcery and logout users with private mode enabled.
There is one more check we do but due to its heavy nature we only use it when our servers are idling late at night (4-5am). Checking previous day's battle logs and look for currency transfers and user relations and flag users for human inspections.
So apart from regurgitation what in essence comes down to a pre-cooked CSR response does show some media training but is also pretty pointless. If you are infact connected to the company and at the level that your username indicates... A personal touch would be smart as t makes you look more like a person and less like a bot...
Any way speaking of bots... I can snag 30-40 really cheap pre-paid cards and burn through them to set up a bot network. Heck where i live companies from time to time hand out free pre-paid cardss to get you "hooked" on their services.
So when (not if.. no company pays that much for security) your users data is violated... The data will contain the phonenumbers of people for no real gain to you as a comany.
But i wish you the best of luck.
Ps. I do not have any personal stake in this... i live in Sweden... We are practically a open book but other do care a tad bit more. Ds
This have been a good conversation
And we are located in Norway :-).
I am sorry if my replies were impersonal, but I felt the need to answer why we have chosen SMS for user verification formally. We are certain it will reduce multiaccounting, but the future could proove us wrong.
And as this is a pay-to-play game, some 30 or 40 accounts is not the problem we are trying to avoid. It is more like someone filling up with thousands automated sign-ups and verifications within a short period of time - which has happened to other games before, and is likely to happen again in the future.
We are also fully aware that some people will never sign up due to the SMS verification and that is something that we will have to live with.
What I am trying to stress out that it is that as long as it is a serious company user data will not be abused, as that could be against the law. Personally I do also beleive that SMS will be the user verification for the future - but that is my personal opinion and also one of the reasons for our choice of user verification.
SMS verification is already ineffective as a security measure. There are several ways of "working around it", many of which can be linked to automated scripts.
It works very well to regulate the actions of normal users and will deter some casual misbehaving, but I doubt that is the intention in this case. The "professional" goldsellers will sail around that authentication check without breaking a sweat.
Perhaps the apps like BurnerApp will be declared illegal at some future point, but that's largely irrelevant. Goldsellers operate illegally anyway, so that will not affect them. The apps already exist, and even if they didn't, they would be created, legally or illegally.
Ok so if you really actually have anything to do with the game your saying you send the password through SMS... What would those with no Mobile Device do then? We are out of luck and completely unable to play your game? You DO realize not everyone has a Mobile Device so your limiting your potential Player base by only allowing those with a mobile device.
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
Well.. Actually the amount of people who can combine the "afford/have time to play" but "lack access to a mobile device" is so small it is not worth considering.
Heck the amount of people who are paranoid are most likley bigger then that group.
This have been a good conversation
After trying this game, I can safely say that with the way currency and resources in the game work, it's not a very gold-seller friendly place.
There is nothing to spend money on other than your game time, and resources in the game are only traded within your guild.