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What P***es Me Off: MMOs That Don't Let You CTRL-V Paste Login Info
ersingible
Member Posts: 70
In this day and age we are forced to have dozens of passwords to dozens of our online accounts.
Things gotten to the point where I ended up using a password database and no longer remember ANY of my passwords, which is not surprising, since most of them are randomly generated and "secure" gibberish, anywhere between 12 to 32 characters long, consisting a mixture of different character classes.
Now EVERY TIME I want to log into a poorly designed UI MMO (for example, MechWarrior Online), I have to CTRL-V paste my password into Notepad and copy it letter-by-letter into the login edit box. There are many other MMOs that don't let me CTRL-V into their login UI and they all waste our time and put me in the wrong mood right at the start.
Why can't they implement this very simple feature??
I believe it is just a simple flag on an edit box when you create it that you have to turn on.
Comments
Why not try a mnemonic based system?
For example, a password for World of Warcraft might be:
EQClone2008March
Remember, to a computer (that's attempting to crack your password) there is little difference between PIE and P13
:-D
As a side not look up some articles on making, using, and remembering passwords, it's not as hard as you would think, I myself manage a good dozen in my head on a 6month rotation.
over 20 years of mmorpg's and counting...
These are all good suggestions, but they all have the "have to remember" part, which I am hopeless with.
I tried passwords generated with dice, where you rolld 5x5 dice to generate easy-to-remember password phrases, but in the end I always had (failed) to remember these.
Some MMOs I don't log into for days or sometimes weeks, and I always have to look up the passwords to these.
It could all be solved with just a ctrl-v pasta.
You're partially right and partially wrong. On the broader point, you're right that players ought not be discouraged from having strong passwords. If you've got a 20 character password with each character chosen independently and uniformly at random from among all typable ASCII characters, then you're pretty much immune to brute force password attacks. If you use a different such password for every purpose for which you need a password, then you're also immune to getting one account stolen because the provider of a different account got hacked and had poor security procedures. That's good, it's what passwords are for, and companies ought to make it as easy as possible for players to do that.
But allowing you to copy and paste your password isn't always as easy as you might think. Doing text in high-performance 3D graphics is actually rather tricky, which is why so many games don't go out of their way to let you copy and paste things into or out of the game. While the login screen likely won't involve any fancy 3D graphics, depending on how it's implemented and what tools are used, it might not be as simple as flipping a single option to allow copy/paste into the password box. Or it might be, but you can't really tell if you aren't familiar with the tools and don't have access to the source code. While it is still the sort of feature that is clearly desirable for the reasons you state, there might be hundreds of other little things in a game that are also clearly desirable, and doing them all can take a lot of time.
I'm with OP. There is simply no reason for mmo's to disallow pasting the password.
If fancy 3D font or some other junk like that is the issue, then they can just have a little box you can checkmark next to the password box that says "Do you wish to paste the password in?" and when you click it the box turns into a normal font box. The fancy stuff isn't necessary, and an option to turn it off for purposes of pasting is simple and obvious. Examples like that are just ridiculous because they all have very simple solutions.
How will the keyloggers survive?
I agree with you, OP
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
It is the best ever of all time.
Edit: I should add that my frustration is having so many logins at all. I am going to return to college this fall, with that I receive no less than 5 new logins and passwords. Many are simply an attempt to market something to me. For example instead of just sending me a refund check for any aid money not going to tuition, I have to go to a 3rd party website, where I must set up a username and password, and request that I get the money deposited into my bank account. During this process they offer to transfer my refund to a debit card faster, of course I opted for a bank transfer, since my bank doesn't charge me per purchase. Damn, everywhere I turn I see the F2P model that wants to nickel and dime me at every turn.
/end rant
But it's not necessarily trivial to do that, depending on what tools they're using. I'm not saying that it's impossible to do, or even outlandishly difficult, but in some cases, it will be a lot more than a two minute fix. Certainly, being able to paste a password is a desirable feature, but so are hundreds of other little things and you have to prioritize.
And it's not like most game developers put massive amounts of effort into the login credentials. How many even salt the password and then hash it with a slow, secure hash function of the sort that you're supposed to use for passwords? Some probably do, but many don't, and if the company's password processing system makes your password a million times less secure than it ought to be (or, for that matter, a trillion--and some programs are worse than that, even), there are more important things to fix.
In the old days you could enter your username/password once, have it stored client side, and then never have to do it again. But I myself have heard many stories along the lines of "my no good brother logged on, destroyed my character, and now no one will help me restore it". So I'd suppose there's an element of developers covering their asses from liability claims here too.