Medieval Wars Online

[mrmajic]

Hi guys,

I started writing this game a while ago, but really havnt had alot of time to do anything recently. Just want ya feed back and work out weather its worth keep writing or not ..

http://www.medievalwarsonline.net

appreciate all feedback (admin@medievalwarsonline.net)

Mr Majic...

[Callan S.]

Nice front page! Very attractive in an iconic way.

Does it have to have e-mail entered in to register?

[mrmajic]

Thankyou! Yeah email to reg for verification purposes. Did u play at all?

[Callan S.]

Not yet, I'm leery or lazy on registering with e-mail. I'm trying to bug you into letting me bypass it :O) I think Jackolantern basically summed up somewhere on the forum that given all the free e-mail around these days, what does e-mail verification actually verify?

[mrmajic]

credit cards, home address / mobile ph numbers .. what will people actually put down to validate?? i guess if having to communicate with a user/player, atleast you know that the address actually exisits and the user must of looked at the inbox atleast once... i guess .. but u make a valid point. i guess the other way around it, which isnt fool proof since some users are still on dynamic ip addresses is attaching a user to their static ip address?? any thoughts?

[Jackolantern]

Yeah, email registration is on the way out. It doesn't provide any kind of security that you can ban people and keep them out since they can just register another email, and trying to send informative emails to your registered users is likely to get you blacklisted from every email provider in probably just one cycle (people sign up for these games without hardly thinking about it, and all it takes is just one person to not remember and to flag you as spam to get blacklisted). Pretty much no one signs up for things with their ISP email addresses anymore. So what is the purpose? It just creates a very serious barrier to entry. Most PBBGs these days are dropping email verification, and are even advertising that they don't use it. So we have to do our best to keep up with that trend.

As for the website content, the main_header.png header image on the main page is way too big. Judging by the quality on the image, it needs to be around 70kb at the largest, whereas right now it is 725kb. On my crappy DSL it took almost 2 seconds to load it, where most visitors today expect the entire website to load in under a second. While we really don't care about dial-up users anymore, the new lowest common denominator is USA users with low-end broadband, meaning that the entire front page should be at about 500kb or lower (some shoot for about 100kb). Visitors are more tolerant of other pages in your site, because they have then become engrossed in your content and will wait for it, but your front page is your first impression, and large, unoptimized banner images are not a good sign for how user-friendly the rest of the site will be.

EDIT: Why are you so worried about validation? You really can't validate who is accessing your site, and most web-based services get along just fine without it. If you aren't selling anything, don't worry about it. People have a very low threshold of tolerance for validating themselves to use a website. So it is best to just let them in.

[mrmajic]

I guess since it was just part of the tutorial, i have just gone with it, but point taken on the size of the banner

[mrmajic]

So what about instead of using email validation, and to limit people of how many accounts they have, especially for a game like mine, tracking ip addresses, and limiting the number of accounts per ip address (again, is pointless if the user has a dynamic ip address .. any thoughts?

[Jackolantern]

That won't work due to dynamic IPs, as you mentioned. All you will do is end up banning and blacklisting the wrong people, and you will create a bad name for your game very quickly.

Basically, if your game will be broken by users having multiple accounts, you will need to re-examine your game's design. In the end, there is no way to stop players from having multiple accounts, and I have always found it funny when free online games make it part of their rules that you can only have one, since it is completely unenforceable and is doing nothing more than cramping player's choice to play the way they want to.

Your best bet is to just make sure your design will not tip too much of an advantage to players who have more than one account, and don't worry about creating or enforcing a single-account rule.

The Golden Rule of PBBGs: The more roadblocks you try to set up to keep players from doing something, the more you tempt them to do it. This applies in many different aspects of the game. If you try to make all sorts of hacks to keep your game from running with Javascript turned off, players will work that much harder to get access to pages with it turned off (or just turn it off after reaching their destination). If you try to keep players from having multiple accounts, they will work that much harder to get hundreds of them (and it won't be that hard to get past anything we as web devs can do). The reason is that it seems like you are hiding some kind of advantage, exploit, or just something interesting or fun to mess around with. You will actually keep more people from doing it if you never even bring it up, have no visible restrictions against it, and simply design your game to be resistant against it.

[mrmajic]

Good points .. the simpler the more people can be bothered to play..