How will WOTC prevent "group" memberships to DDI?

[Emirikol]

How will WOTC prevent "group" memberships to DDI? Will/can they prevent multiple use of login/password?

For example, your gaming group splits the cost and get's one membership.

jh

 

[MrApothecary]

They can't prevent it, it is a fact of online content.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

How will WOTC prevent "group" memberships to DDI? Will/can they prevent multiple use of login/password?

For example, your gaming group splits the cost and get's one membership.

jh

I don't think they will or can.
Which might be an interesting point to consider - the base price tag is typical for MMORPGs, but unlike with online games, you don't need to have multiple accounts to use all of the content. It is only relevant if you want to use the game table, and the "guest passes" might be a cheap way to do that, too.

So, instead of like 15 $ a month, it's actually only 3 $ (assuming a group of 5 players - including the DM!).

 

[Southern Oracle]

Pure speculation on my part, as I'm not in the "know"...

WotC worked hard for an SSO (Single-Sign-On), ostensibly to consolidate the multiple screen names of users to track CoC (Code of Conduct) violations as well as cut down on forgotten passwords/emails for little-used accounts. However, I'll bet that you can't log in from multiple computers with the same SSO now. Not something I've tested, but it would make sense.

 

[f33b]

I would be very surprised if they are unable to tie subscriptions to IP address, ranges or blocks.

I imagine it will be impossible to have multiple sessions open with the same user id, and there will probably be a limit to how many sessions can be opened with the same id within a given period of time (maybe 50 sessions in 10 minutes, something like that.)

Now, I can't see them actually tying DDI accounts to specific IPs, and disallowing the use of the account through a separate IP, but they should be able to track it, and make business decisions based on that data.

If accounts are strictly tied to a specific IP, I would hope WoTC sets up some kind of "Gamer Group" subscription rate, with a fixed number of user names and the ability to include a range of possible IPs, all at a lower rate that individual membership.

 

[Dayspire]

This could be a problem. I would want to access DDI from both my home and work computer.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

There's no way to tie it to a specific IP, or even range of IPs for anything but concurrent access. And the overhead for that would be a nice performance killer.

 

[Emirikol]

Since WotC is not known for being "computer savvy" or even having the support to take care of the products that they have, I'd be surprised if they can figure this out (or maybe it will be the ONE thing that they actually do figure out) Heh.

Jh

 

[Nikosandros]

There's no way to tie it to a specific IP, or even range of IPs for anything but concurrent access. And the overhead for that would be a nice performance killer.

The range of dynamic IPs that my home ISP uses is huge. Also, I would be very annoyed if I couldn't log on to my account from different computers.

 

[Goddess FallenAngel]

My old ISP assigned me a random IP everytime I log on.

I don't know how common this is; I'm guessing not very. However, while not huge, they weren't small, either (at least two states) - which means that if WOTC attempted to tie each logon to a single IP, they'd be cutting a large amount of potential customers out of the loop.

Not that I think that can really be done, anyway. WOTC would be ill-advised to try.

My guess is that they're going to have non-concurrent logons (only one at a time for each username), and maybe something like my bank does - everytime I log onto my bank website from a computer it doesn't "recognize", it asks me for a security identity verification. I'm not quite sure how that works, exactly, because I don't think it's cookie-based - I can clear my cache and have it not ask, yet when I use my fiance's computer it asks. *shrug*