The free open source multiplayer turn based one server many clients not peer to peer strategy game Freeciv deliberately reveals the IP addresses of all the players to all the players.

I cannot think of any massively multiplayer games, other than possibly some (default) setups of IRC if you consider IRC a game of some kind, that so freely reveal such information.

Even email often tries to conceal that information, although email too, like IRC does sometimes maybe reveal it depending on configuration and what kind of relationship the poster has with the mailserver machine.

As I am thinking of deploying Freeciv servers, I find myself wondering whether it would be a good idea to hack the code to force it not to reveal the IP addresses of the players.

Obviously of course the "correct" way to implement that would be to hack in a configuration option permitting server administrators to enable or disable this "feature" as an "option", and, also "of course", to submit the hack as a patch to the developers.

But all of that is pointless if in "reality" preventing players from knowing one another's IP addresses at a glance is actually not a good idea.

So it kind of comes down to whether the Freeciv developers already "got it right" by not making it easy for admins to hide player IP addresses from the players.

So... "pro"s and "con"s of doing so / not doing so... ???

(Back in the old days, one could do "talk" and other such potentially spammy things given an IP address. But nowadays???)

[Edited by - markm on December 15, 2010 6:42:34 PM]

Quote: Original post by markm
I find myself wondering whether it would be a good idea to hack the code to force it not to reveal the IP addresses of the players.

I don't know why you're wondering. Seems to me you'd definitely want to do that, so as to shield yourself from possible legal action.

Quote: But all of that is pointless if in "reality" preventing players from knowing one another's IP addresses at a glance is actually not a good idea.

Any game where peers communicate directly must reveal the IP addresses due to the very nature of the Internet. The program might not blast it out directly on the screen, but the information is trivially publicly available. It is required for operation and isn't protected. It would be like complaining about the existence of phone directories and the requirement to give the phone numbers to the telecom company when you place a call.

Ultimately the information is available to everyone within the game so anybody who wants it can get it.

You might want to just ask within that community if they prefer the addresses not shown. You might be right that a significant portion of that community prefers to not have the IP address quite so easily viewable. Adding an option would probably be just fine. It is a matter of preference.

Thank you for indirectly pointing out that in my first post I neglected to indicate that Freeciv is not a peer to peer game but rather a one server to many clients game not peer to peer.

As to whether existing players would prefer not to have their IP addresses revealed, too bad for them if the way I end up doing it does not match their preferences. Presumably if anyone particularly wanted it concealed they would have mentioned that fact over the years; it seems the developers did not consider it worth implementing so they probably prefer it as it is.

Existing Freeciv players are probably not my market anyway, because their concept of "long turn" is one day per turn, and the community that plays with turns that "long" uses different rules entirely such as tripling the movement points of all units. I on the other hand am targeting people who crawl around in dungeons at five minutes real time to one hour game time, which works out to about a month per Freeciv turn in the best case, which is the case where the civilisation is sufficiently advanced for each turn to represent only a single year instead of multiple years.

Part of the objective is to make turns so ridiculously long that even a few weeks away from the game need not mean missing a turn. But also part of the objective is to provide a backdrop for five minute hours speed of play at much smaller unit scales including individual character scale of play.

For the individual character level of play I am currently using the Crossfire RPG engine, the configuration file of which permits the admin to pick what info is shown by the "who" command, so for that I already trivially eliminated divulging of player IP addresses by editing the config file. Not that Crossfire's developers necessarily considered the case of an admin who would want to hide that info; it is simply that everything that appears in the "who" output is specified by a format string so possibly the ability to hide the IP is simply a side effect of the use of such a format-string system. All the Crossfire servers I have played on showed the IP addresses.

(Crossfire too is not peer to peer.)