Many years ago, I overheard someone at GDC say "Online games are big database transaction systems. Big banks." Last night I logged into Rift for the first time and saw the Coin Lock symbol. Your account becomes coin locked any time you log in from a new place, or haven't logged in for some time, or when they reset all the locks in the game. If your account is coin locked, nothing in it can be destroyed or transferred. You are unable to conduct any economic transaction. To unlock the account, press a button and an authorization code is sent to your email address. It's just like a bank security code system, in other words.
Rift's Coin Locks are a tidy way to enhance account security and increase the business costs of hackers, pirates, and gold farmers. Well done!
Shoot, you can even use your smart phone to further lock down your game data. If you do that, you get an in-game title: THE IRONCLAD. I'm totally going for it.
Posted by: ecastronova | Mar 31, 2011 at 12:06
Now that's clever. I'm looking forward to trying Rift out come summer break.
Posted by: Isaac Knowles | Mar 31, 2011 at 19:45
Rift's Executive Producer, Scott Hartsman, spent a lot of his time at SOE working on anti-RMT defences. It didn't surprise me when I saw that Rift was doing something as elegant as this to stop accounts from being ripped off. It's very well put together.
Richard
Posted by: Richard | Apr 01, 2011 at 03:50
As people seem to be saying Rift is the game developed by everyone else i.e. ex Blizzard, SOE etc. It certainly seems to show in many elements of the design where they have taken good ideas and then just added a nice little touch. Tho, given my general not-so-broadband issues here in rural Kent, I keep getting coin locked as my IP shifts around a bit, but it's not that annoying. What's really nice about it seems to be the semi-ban i.e. it's not that you can't place, you just can't to certain transactions.
I find I'm playing more Rift than WoW now, but that's probably because it's new and ..oh shiney
Posted by: Ren Reynolds | Apr 01, 2011 at 06:29
I'm playing Rift too, but will stop when I reach level 50 (level 44 at the moment). It's not that I have anything against the game (which is kinda WoW for people who have grown sick of WoW), indeed I quite like it; there's a lovely attention to detail, of which coin locking is but one example. Rather, it's that I only started to play so I could see how the end-game differed from WoW's, but it looks as if it's going to be much the same except with rifts folded in.
I think I picked an underpopulated server, too: there only seems to be about three non-trivial guilds, and I keep getting "shard first" for things like alchemy recipes you can just buy from the trader...
Richard
Posted by: Richard | Apr 01, 2011 at 12:31