Everyone seems to focus on the negatives that a lack of authentication brings, but rarely have people ever looked at the disadvantages of authentication.
- Registration used to require email validation, so we'd end up losing a chunk of players because they never received their email - or they were simply too impatient to wait for it. You guys lost new players because of this.
- Registration was then made instant so validation wasn't required, you can still
instantly create an account. It takes all of 30 seconds to create a new smurf account and login to it.
- Authentication was in
script. It was unreliable and insecure. When connections between the game server and authentication server were lost we'd end up having to restart game servers just to get things working again - this was unacceptable and killed games.
- We couldn't release it. If another player run their own dedicated server and you connected to it, the server admin could take your session ID and use it to take your name on another server.
- The scoreboard is yet another thing done entirely in script! So even if you had connected as an authenticated user, the server owner could alter pretty much everything anyway.
- It was a nightmare for development, every developer had to get a login for their server to use the authentication server. We were also forced to be paranoid and treated every developer as a threat who could release this info.
There was a choice between either player hosted servers, map making tools, releasing the full scripts to the game. Alternatively we could've kept everything locked up, no custom maps, no scripts, official servers only.
Which would you prefer?