4 ms·

I was wondering the same thing. If there's a central server, I presume you need an account to access it. The it seems you'd just check for having purchased th

• jiggy2011 14y ago
  That depends. If the game is fundamentally built in such a way that the gameplay requires everyone to be on one set of servers (e.g WoW) then you can prevent piracy by strictly controlling access to those servers. For example if you wanted to pirate WoW you would have to reverse engineer the game to the extent where you could implement your own WoW server from scratch which would be a huge amount of work and you would have a situation where pirates would only be able to play with other pirates. If on the other hand the server is used only to verify authenticity then you simply have to re-implement the authenticity part (easy because you only need to genereate a 'yes' response). You also have to make the client redirect some of the traffic to the fake server (easy to do). Many games with centralised authenticity servers still run on a fairly P2P system for running the multiplayer itself (i.e the game is actually hosted by one the players). This means that you already have the server software built into the client so that part doesn't need reimplementation.