shapu wrote:
And they need to find a way to stop that. It shouldn't be that easy to create a new neopets account.
I hate to say it, but maybe they should make a one-time fee of, say, a dollar, to create an account. It could be sent in by money order, doesn't have to be by credit card.
Or they could start doing IP tracking of frozen accounts. If a particular IP address has a lot of accounts frozen, just ban the IP from accessing the site.
...
I agree that everyone should be limited to one account only, right from the beginning of the site, but they had other priorities that time (how to attract more people, which means almost no freezing, unlimited accounts etc). On the other hand, even 15 accounts do not add much load to the servers, if played by a single person: there will always be one online account, thus the number of concurrent users does not change (concurrency is the critical factor of servers' load).
Such a limit cannot be easily handled with current technology though,
while, as Quanda said, IP blocking is not a solution: all three people here always have the same IP, while many people access Neo behind a proxy, or from public computers, i.e. same or fake IP for all.
Qanda wrote:
I agree about multiple accounts being too easy to create, but I disagree about paying for every account made.
Micro-charges are one of the most important (and "hot") problems of Internet since 2000. It has not been fully solved yet - they're applied with workarounds (like "we charge .1 for this, but you have to spend at least 10 to be able to send you items" or... "please pre-pay 10 and spend them at your time"). You see, the cost to charge someone for 1$ is more than 1$
Just FYI, everyone would love to charge 1 cent for some services, everyone would not bother to spend 1 cent even in return of nothing, but no one knows how to do it and make a profit.
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