- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Mmmm, kay. Coming from a community site where they do require registration on the site with a key I have some input you guys should read first. If you don't like reading, just skip to the end.
Even though you limit the random teenage flammer/spammer with this system, you will always have people braking the rules. There will always be those who try to "bend" the rules, or just simply do whatever they feel right, and a system like this will not stop this.
It will make moderating harder, as the site will no longer be a "free" service and they can't just go with the "It's our place, we owe you squat, we do whatever we feel like" attitude one tend to have when you offer a free service like this. Even though the moderators will still have the same guidelines to follow as before, they will remember that they're no longer playing with a free account anyone can sign up for anywhere anytime, but an account that was "bought" and getting a new one would require buying a new game.
Your community will be smaller, as not everyone and their brother can sign up for the site. While many people will consider this a good thing, many don't. I myself prefer a smaller community then the one that is here now.
It can be used to provide cool website features though, like stats and scoreboards that can be viewed (and managed) on the website. This, regardless of what people say) will make people play more, even though it attracts cheaters.
It limits impersonating, as you can check the number a person registered under as that is impossible to change. That way you won't have two people named SIMEN and SlMEN, but two compleatly different IDs to seperate them with. The system already have something like this, my id is 7771, but it's hard (for those who doesn't know how) to find this number and very few remember other peoples numbers.
If you require the person who wants to play online to register his cd-key (that's what I'd call it) to play online, you will also limit pirating. Whereas anyone can download the game from the intrawebs, you can't use a cd-key that's already been used. The problem with this however is that some people will steal the key in the shop, without buying the game meaning someone who did buy the game will find that his cd-key is taken and will not be able register (the buyer should go get a new cd-key then, but that could also be used for people to get a new cd-key without buying another game by lieing to the shopkeeper. To contra this Bungie would need a tech-support (and one won't be enough, considering the ammount of people who buy Bungie games) where someone who has had his cd-key stolen can send a picture of his cd-key and the tech support would delete the account who used it... and more, etc etc....
And I have 1000s of pros and cons on why this system works, but now I'm too tired to write them down, so my conclusion is: It wouldn't be a good system for this site.
It's actually quite a lot of work with a system like this, and Bungie has already sold so many games without it that they can't just throw all the users who doesn't want to buy a game away from the site either.
(I know I need a spell check and a grammer course, but I'll do that another day).
[Edited on 9/22/2006]