Twinity's Growing Pains and Possible Solutions, Pt 1: Cheating

No social world-- no matter how much it wants to pretend it's a utopia-- is without problems. Unfortunately, that includes Twinity, which has begun facing a lot of "growing pains" as it tries to break out of beta and become established.

Because of the urgency of these problems, I wanted to do a blog post about them all. But because the post wound up becoming so large, I had to break it up into three parts. So here is part one today, which will deal with the growing phenomenon of cheating.

Cheating

Some time ago, Metaversum created a novel way to introduce newbies to Twinity: it paid them globals for performing tasks. Many people-- even visitors from other social worlds-- hailed this as a probably one of the most brilliant forms of orientation they had come across. I personally liked it, because it helped minimize the problem of newbie beggars and addressed the lack of jobs in Twinity.

Unfortunately, as always happens with a "good thing", people started taking advantage of it. Cheating by setting up duplicate accounts has always occurred, but it seemed to have gotten far worse after Twinity started paying newbies for exploring the game. Amazingly enough (from what I hear), the worst offenders weren't newbies but commercial members, who used this tactic to furnish their stores with, as well as pay the rent.

I don't have to really explain why cheating is bad. Twinity costs money to run. By cheating the system, players cheat the game out of much-needed revenue. Furthermore, the atmosphere of cheating destroys the spirit of entrepreneuring and resourcefulness necessary to creating a thriving economy and industry in Twinity. So obviously, something needs to be done to stop it. But what?

Possible Solutions

Several solutions have been suggested. I personally like the idea that someone gave, but with a slight variation-- she suggested forcing new users to wait for 24 hours before being verified. I think it's a little excessive to force all new members to do that. However, I do think it would be a good idea to use this 24 hour verification system for any new accounts made at the IP address of a computer that already has an account registered.

Of course, someone could just register a duplicate account at a different computer. So another idea is to put a cap on how much money or objects a new account can send. Just as players are prevented from gambling away their entire balance at Goldfinger, it would be a good idea to block them from being able to send a certain amount of globals and items to other users. Makes perfectly good sense to me. No newbie trying to get established in Twinity is going to want to give away hundreds of globals to another player in the first two, three weeks of joining unless it were to himself. So it's perfectly reasonable IMO to prevent new players from sending out, say, more than 25 Globals/2 objects a day for a period of 6 months. By putting a cap on gift sending, this would probably put a dent in cheating once and for all.

Your Thoughts? Comments?

These are just some ideas I am throwing around to help resolve some of the issues in Twinity. If readers want to pitch in with their own ideas or just provide feedback in general about this problem, feel free to comment below.