Re: Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it

From: skrenta@textport.net (Rich Skrenta)

Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 00:38:38 +0000

"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de> writes:
> I think we've got some story to tell, which might help others not fall into
> the same traps. This week, Eressea will undergo a repeat-of-turn, because
> someone sent in a turn for another player and killed of his faction with it.

It sucks that some players would cheat like this and use such poor
gamesmanship, not to mention anti-social behavior.  If you have any logs
of IP addresses for the submitters, you can sometimes get a guess about
who may have submitted the turn.

Once I noticed someone trying to brute force attack the password on the
web-posted Olympia turn reports.  I was able to figure out who they were
based on their IP address after some searching through the logs, and ban
them (forever) from the game.

> What can be learned from this?

One approach might be to have a game supported way to give access
to one's turn reports to allies, without revealing the password.
So the privilege to view a turn report is separate from the ability
to submit orders.

> 3. If you can, use public key cryptography for signed email.

The dice server PGP signs die rolls, but client software to actually
verify and sign mail is not widely used, and can be cumbersome.

> 5. Design your game so it handles catastrophes.

This is hard to do in big synchronous simulation games.  Part of
the fun is that everything mixes together in the big run and no
one is quite sure how it will all come out.

References

Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:38:04 +0000

Referenced By

Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:38:04 +0000