There have been many forum users who have popped up recently with godly equips, claiming to have been on the server since much earlier than their join date. On Royals, forum and game accounts are separate from one another. The only way one can know which forum account belongs to who is by looking up that IP address or having the information indicated by the forum user. It may be worthwhile merging forum and game accounts for the following reasons; 1) The most used excuse in suspicious selling threads is having joined before the creation of their forum account (which ends in a ban for real world trading in most cases); 2) Our forum marketplace is almost necessary to accumulate funds for making the godly gear we're seeing pop up out of nowhere - thus #3; 3) With this change, we, as players, would now have valid reason for suspicion after witnessing someone new selling something unreasonable for their time playing the server. Players have a right to know/protect themselves from real world trading situations. It helps players make the staff's job easier by reporting suspicious items. There will be lessened ambiguity about whether a player who buys a real world trading item knew what they were doing. Not sure if there's a mechanism already available for merging forum and game accounts, or whether it would require entirely new forum software. Either way, please share your thoughts!
My 2 cents. This is a pretty high security hazard. I'm not sure how up-to-date the current forum software is, but they're never extremely secure. There are always methods to exploit forum software. This leads to a higher chance that data can be stolen from the database. Second, this would require a plugin of some sort that needs to be programmed from ground up, this isn't something that can be easily done within a week and requires alot of time and testing, this is because again, a mistake can lead to website exploits that would jeopardize the data of thousands of game accounts / characters as well as personal e-mails. While I have absolute confidence in the programming capabilities of the programmers that MapleRoyals currently have, it is always best to play it safe (in my opinion) and not mix what doesn't necessarily need to be mixed. How this normally works for official game servers that have this method of account linking, the forum software will be connected to your game account, BUT would allow you to choose a "Display Name" so that your Account Name is not compromised and revealed. Meaning for example, if my Account Name was "Lol123xd" , Xenforo (the forum software this server uses) would give us the option to choose another name to post as which would be "MalignantBooty". This all requires extensive programming to do and again isn't 100% secure.
I'm not sure how this will work out if it is implemented as most of us have at least 3 separate accounts.
Great point here, glad you brought this up. In the last few years, there's been only a couple forum security breach instances from what I can remember. I mean, if those situations arise again, the IGN of the character is the only useful 'data' hackers will get access to, as people should already know not to use the same login information for both accounts. If your point is enough to make this suggestion non-viable then that's totally fine, however I'd like to believe there's been extra security measures taken after the last couple of incidents. Pretty sure accounts registered under the same IP would be merged automatically somehow (assuming you mean game accounts). Not too familiar with forum software myself. I didn't explicitly state this in the thread starter - but the merging of the two will make it so the join date reflected on forum accounts will now be that of the creation of their first character. This also means that you can't create a forum account before you start playing, not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing but worth mentioning.
I'd like to ask a question. Are you talking major security breaches of huge forums, or breaches in general? As far as I'm aware, forum software is never secure and every few version updates there will be at least 1-2 public exploits that users can take advantage of. With that said, it is still a security hazard. If the staff members decide to do as you ask and connect the forum account to a game-account , there's a variety of things you can take advantage of. Yes, your passwords should be different but at the same time I would daringly say that 80% of the players do not think this is necessary and do not take such precautions, does this necessarily mean they were at fault if someone were to take advantage of an exploit? No. At the same time, information gathered from forum accounts are not limited to just names, it can be e-mails (that people usually use the same of, thus effectively allowing them to reset passwords, it can be IP addresses (assuming they're logged in the database) which is a huge security hazard that i don't see MapleRoyals needing. If you're suspicious of certain sellers or buyers, the safe route is to simply trust your gut and not purchase from them.
Breaches in general each affecting 1-3 people, but I'm sure the actual figure is larger for instances that go unnoticed.
This is not true at all. I don't mean to be rude, but forum software breaches happen on a daily basis. I used to administrate various forums using vBulletin forum software and if we were to stay up to date with forum versions, exploits (though fixable through patches) would come up occasionally. This is why many forums stay at very specific versions where exploits have already been figured out and public fixes are available (for those using cracked forum software) or versions where exploits aren't a problem. Effectively, if you're 100% positive that your forum software is free of exploits and free of any kind of breaches then yes, this is a suggestion worth noting. Otherwise? I wouldn't bother with doing something like this.
