Let me tell you a quick story.
Back in 2007, RuneScape—a game millions of us loved—faced a crisis. The in-game economy was crumbling because of rampant gold farming and botting. Entire swaths of the game world were overrun by bots mining resources 24/7. The economy inflated so badly that player-crafted items lost their value, and the experience of honest players was destroyed.
The developers were desperate to fix it. They implemented sweeping measures: trade limits, real-world item sales bans, and more. But those changes weren’t popular. The soul of the game changed forever. They solved one problem, but the price was losing player trust. Some of us never really went back.
Now imagine that happening to a game where the stakes aren’t just pixels—but real-world money.
The Stakes of Fraud in Blockchain Games
Games like those on the Hive blockchain aren’t just games. They’re microeconomies. Your time and effort can create assets that are tradable for real-world currency. That makes them exciting but also uniquely vulnerable.
When fraud enters this kind of ecosystem, the stakes get real:
- Currency Devaluation: If cheaters use bots or multiple accounts to generate excess tokens, the market floods, and suddenly your in-game earnings are worth pennies.
- Economic Instability: Manipulative behavior like market cornering or resource hoarding can throw the entire system into chaos.
- Unfair Competition: Why grind honestly when someone with ten fake accounts is scooping all the rewards?
Fraud isn’t just bad for the economy—it’s bad for the community. Players lose faith in the system. Honest people leave. The game withers.
That’s why combatting fraud is so important.
The Temptation of IP Tracking: Why It’s the Wrong Answer
Here’s the thing: when fraud is this big a threat, it’s easy to panic and reach for the nearest “quick fix.” IP tracking is one of those tempting tools. It sounds simple: monitor where accounts are logging in from, block suspicious overlaps, and you’ll catch all the cheaters, right?
Wrong. IP tracking doesn’t work the way you think it does, and it comes with a host of serious problems:
- It Violates Privacy: Many players use VPNs to protect their identity, access the game in restricted regions, or secure their connection. Penalizing them for wanting privacy is absurd—and exclusionary.
- It’s Ineffective: Cheaters aren’t clueless. IP tracking is trivially easy to bypass with proxies, dynamic IPs, or VPNs. You won’t catch the real fraudsters; you’ll just frustrate honest players.
- It’s Discriminatory: Players who rely on VPNs—for security, censorship circumvention, or anonymity—are punished. It’s an arbitrary, invasive solution to a problem that has better fixes.
Ethical, Effective Solutions to Prevent Fraud
We can—and must—do better. Fraud prevention doesn’t require invading players’ privacy or locking out those who rely on tools like VPNs. It just requires smarter game design and better use of blockchain tools.
Here’s how we can fight fraud without crossing ethical lines:
1. Reward Progression, Not Multis
Make the game reward players more for long-term investment in a single account. For example:
- Scaling Rewards: Increase rewards significantly as players level up or hit milestones.
- Unique Bonuses: Introduce features like rare items or leaderboard positions that only high-level accounts can achieve.
Why it works: Running ten low-level accounts won’t compare to building one strong account with exponential benefits. Players will have no reason to split their resources.
2. Use Synergistic Mechanics
Encourage players to pool their resources into a single account:
- Crafting Systems: Require players to combine assets into stronger items that take significant time and effort to create.
- Guild Contributions: Introduce team mechanics where each player’s unique, active contributions matter.
Why it works: Players trying to manage multiple accounts lose access to these synergies, making multi-accounting inefficient.
3. Leverage Blockchain Tools
Hive already has tools that can discourage fraud:
- Resource Credits (RCs): Tie game actions to RC usage. Multis with low Hive Power will struggle to perform frequent actions.
- Staking Requirements: Require players to stake tokens for certain privileges, making it costly to run multiple accounts.
Why it works: Blockchain-based solutions align with the decentralized ethos of Hive and don’t compromise user privacy.
4. Detect Behavior, Not IPs
Analyze what accounts do, not where they log in from:
- Action Analysis: Flag suspiciously synchronized behavior, like accounts completing identical actions at the same time.
- Anomaly Detection: Use tools to find statistical outliers in gameplay (e.g., impossibly fast resource generation).
Why it works: This targets cheaters based on their actions, not innocent players who just want to stay private.
5. Offer Optional Verification
Give players the choice to verify their uniqueness for rewards:
- Decentralized Identity Proofs: Use blockchain-based identity systems that don’t compromise privacy.
- Voluntary KYC: Provide additional rewards for players who opt into non-invasive verification.
Why it works: This respects privacy while incentivizing fair play.
The Bottom Line
Fraud is a serious problem for games like on Hive and elsewhere across Web3. It threatens their economies, their communities, and their future. But the solution cannot come at the cost of the very principles that make blockchain gaming special: privacy, fairness, and inclusivity.
IP tracking is a shortcut—and a bad one. It’s ineffective against real cheaters, violates user privacy, and excludes players who rely on tools like VPNs. With smarter design and ethical use of technology, we can protect these games and their players without compromising what makes them great.
If you love these games as much as I do, you know they’re worth fighting for. Let’s demand solutions that respect both the economy and the community.
