How to catch players who use virtual machines

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ID:1889485

Jul 5 2015, 2:36 pm

(See the best response by Nadrew.)

LawnMower

Code:

Problem description:
You never know if your game will get enough players for it to matter if they connect to it from the same computer so they can farm faster. So I put in the uaual check for computer_id and my friend thinks its funny and uses his virtual machine to connect from the same computer with 2 different keys. These keys both showed a different computer_id but the same address. Is there a way to stop people from doing this?

Jul 5 2015, 5:39 pm Best response
Nadrew	There's no real method of detecting a virtual machine reliably, best you can do is ban them as you discover them. Virtual machines will rarely share any information with each other that can be read by a developer, as they usually have wildly different setups from each other.

Jul 5 2015, 5:57 pm
Super Saiyan X	a virtual machine could be a fully legitimate way to play a BYOND game.

Jul 5 2015, 6:14 pm
Pokemonred200	There's not really a good way to detect a virtual machine. But it is a legit way of connecting to a BYOND game; especially considering a VM such as VirtualBox may be the only way to use Dream Seeker (rather than the webclient) on Mac or Linux.

Jul 6 2015, 9:33 am
Lummox JR	One of SS13's users pointed me to some concepts that could be used at the software end to detect VMs. However, SSX is right: that can be a legit way to play, such as if the user is on Linux or a Mac and the webclient isn't in use. Eventually however I would like to add some info to show when a user is on a VM, so games at least have the option of making an informed decision.