To start, I have no clue how I would even detect this, but its become quite the issue in my game.
Lets say the system is that killing a player grants you a currency. Someone can easily load an alt, and spam kill their alt until they have near infinite currency.
This breaks the currency system and makes it near useless if people can just do nothing and get infinite in-game cash.
How can you detect this via code and is it even possible to prevent things like this?
Alts aren’t the issue here, the issue is how your economy is set up.
Its a simple fighting game, I just don’t want people racking fake kills. Its not really an economy.
Depending on your game setup and how you calculate currency payouts you could write sanity checks to limit the abuse.
Was the alt performing an action? If not lower payout. Was the alt killed consecutively? Lower payouts. Did the player finish off any other person in between killing the alt? If not lower payout. Many ways to adjust the inflation based on some checks.
[edit] as incapaz said, you should expect this to happen. Modifying the payout based on conditionals (carefully) would be the only mitigation tactic you can implement.
This should still be expected; players wouldn’t have to use alts. They can just get a friend to idle for them so they can get kills.
As of now I’m going to try and detect if a player is away from the keyboard, and if so, not give currency/a kill for it.
It is an economy. You have no way to prevent a user creating an alternative account to grind money.
New accounts can be prevented by eliminating accounts from your game that have an AccountAge of > N days.
The issue with the AccountAge suggestion is that you’ll miss out on a lot of players because Roblox grows so fast, and new players will try to join your game, see that they aren’t permitted, and 9/10 times, never try again.
The way your economy is set up, like @sjr04 implied, at least in my opinion is the fault here. You’re making it too easy for players to grind the cash system by allowing them to kill for cash. Players don’t even have to use alts. This works on away-from-keyboard players too.
@DreamWakeStudios suggestion is great! Sanity checks for the way the kill was executed. This limits the amount of cash earned because of alt usage, as it’d require a lot of multi-tasking just to earn a few bucks.
You could always make it so that if a player has not moved in N amount of time, they automatically become AFK until they disable it on their screen. (i.e pressing a AFK button/not-AFK button).
I’m currently making it so if the window is not focused on, you count as AFK. But I’ll add a bit of DreamWakeStudios idea’s too, to see if it’ll work well.
As @DreamWakeStudios said, use Sanity Checks, and also I dont see the point of adding sorta complex sanity checks into a ‘simple fighting game’, most games you wont have to add sanity checks for alting since the economy would be balanced and actually have a point in it, unlike what you have, I suggest when making a game you have more than 1 way to earn money or else it will get REALLY boring.