I used to really enjoy Star Wars Galaxies, until they decided to get away from a “Star Wars Sandbox” and turn it into a “Star Wars Action Saga”. That’s fine for some people, but just not what I felt like trying, especially when they were trying to strap it onto the original game, so it turned into a “Star Wars Action Sandbox”.

After a few weeks I started to miss it, and got to looking around for an alternative. Having alot of fun with Urban Dead, I thought that surely someone has a decent web-based Star Wars MMO and found The Star Wars Combine. Did some brief reading, and it sounded just like what I was looking for. “Live in the Star Wars World”, join a faction, fly ships.. Sounded like alot of fun, so I signed up. Only to have my application rejected.

I’ve spent the last 6 weeks talking to the guys on the forums there, and have gotten nowhere. Initially they had issues with my name, but primarily they won’t let me register with my gmail or yeraze.com email addresses. Now, I don’t know what world these people have been living in, but I’ve used webmail as my primary email for years. I learned back in High School that ISP addresses only last as long as you cut them paychecks, and as fast as the technology and services change, that’s not long at all. It takes more fingers than I have on both my hands to count the number of ISP addresses I’ve seen come and go over the years. I’ld happily give them my current ISP address if I had the slightest idea what it is. The installer came by before I had my computer at the house, so he didn’t configure anything. When I phoned in to setup the line, to the “What do you want your email address to be?” question I just went “Don’t bother, don’t need it”.

What’s really going on here is that they’re trying to prevent “alts”, the scourge of MMORPG’s everywhere. Essentially, if I could create multiple characters and play them simultaneously, I could let them work together to achieve things that I shouldn’t be able to do by myself. I could have separate characters just to build ships, weapons, and armor for my “main” character, and then have all of them sell extra stuff to become independantly wealthy in a short fraction of the time any one of them would take. So they want a somewhat reliable email address, to prevent this. Essentially, the email address is used as a unique identifier for accounts, so no 2 accounts can have the same email address. So what else can I do?

Upon revisiting their forums, they give me 2 options:

  1. Call RoadRunner & request email addresses. They’re very specific that Roadrunner allows for multiple email addresses and they’re “Easy to setup”. So essentially, there goes any concept of “uniqueness” by email address from them.
  2. Or borrow a friend’s email account, and have my account information sent there. Then he can forward the message to me.

Am I the only one that finds this all a bit humorous? The first solution has a built-in workaround to their security measures (not to mention it means a long phone call with Time Warner tech support, ugh), and the 2nd solution is (in my opinion) the exact opposite of security. Not to mention, most of my friends use Gmail accounts as their mains as well.

So in reality, what is this “Security Measure” supposed to do? Or better stated, what is it really doing? If I really wanted to, I could call up TW & setup 6 email addresses right now and have 6 accounts to play, so it seems it’s not really doing anything to prevent alts. It seems nowadays that everyone is using things like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or Gmail. It seems kinda silly not to, since it’s 1 or 2Gig of offsite storage accessible from anywhere (I remember when bellsouth got upset about me using 50Meg). Seems to me all it’s doing is eliminating possible “drive-by” registrations, or spam-bot registrations from bogus domains or address.

With the interesting (hopefully unintentional) side effect of also eliminating us interested players who are smart enough to avoid AOL. Oh well, I guess I should be working or helping with the defense of Caiger Mall anyway.

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