djmoody said:
OMG this is laughable.
I checked out the Master account that send me the message the other day.
It is in a bot ring of accounts stretching around the map called.... you guessed it "Master".
Seriously, I already suggested months ago that you simply ban the name Master from the game. Can he come back as something else, sure but at least that messes with his brand name and reduces his revenue and takes Plarium 5 minutes and 1 line of code to execute **
Plarium doesn;t even do simple quick and easy stuff, it's amazing.
** here it is in PHP (cause my coding experience is web based)
if ($username == "Master"){$failure = "15";}
Blow me down with a feather that was hard.
I am kind of assuming there is already checking of user names to prevent rude ones, too short, too long and ones already taken. So there must already be a check loop that returns the account creation page with an error if $failure is not empty. You just add type 15 to the array that contains the human description of the error to display - $errormessage['15']="Go Away Botter";
I like your thinking DJ. Surely it can't be that big a task to drop some code in the appropriate place. Have you shared these ideas with Support? Seems to me the Devs need a bit of a hand.
Like with most programming, you get a key developer leave the company, and they employ someone cheaper. Much of the knowledge of the programmer that left is lost in the ether, and the new devs struggle with even the simplest changes. Have seen it happen hundreds of times in my career.
They end up either unwilling to make simple changes in case they cause other unexpected problems, or just plain lazy. I.e. "it is not my job to fix this or that, the previous programmer stuffed it". The result if often layer upon layer of errors in the code.
A good example of this is the phantom reports that support has been working on as long as I've been playing the game. Hell, even the support page doesn't take some in-game profile names.