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Is there a way to prove by any way that a special character is really owned by a player.

I explain myself:

On a website, users can add their wow character to show their statistics on the website.

How to ensure that the user on the website really owns the charcater (and is not "stealing" statistics from a really good known other player) ?

Thanks.

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There are a variety of tricks you could use, from a custom addon, to manually reviewing screenshot submissions. The easiest would probably be to request that the character log out wearing a specific, easily obtainable item ( selected randomly - think shirts, vendor weapons, etc.), and then check that the item is equipped.

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  • We though about the stuff too. But does the equipement stuff updates frequently ? Isn't it too much too booring to do that for wow-players ? – Tristan Jun 17 '11 at 12:56
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    @Tristan — The official armory updates very quickly (last I checked, less than ten minutes after logout and usually much less). As an alternative to making them seek out a particular item, you could ask them to un-equip an item (shirt or tabard to avoid stat changes) to reduce impact on the user. – Ben Blank Jun 17 '11 at 15:58
  • wowprogress uses this method - unequiping items in randomly selected slots. – Resorath Jun 17 '11 at 17:48
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On most of these sites that I have seen that allow to you to do this, there is absolutely no checking that takes place. You basically search for your character, and then can lay claim to any character that has not already been claimed. I imagine if someone claimed your character, you could dispute the fact that it is theirs, although even then it might be a painful process.

One reason for this is that the only way to truly verify an account would be to somehow verify the e-mail address tied to the battle.net account, which is information Blizzard keeps very secret for obvious hacking/scamming reasons.

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  • Ok, so is there any other options than using verify the email addressed linked to battle.net ? Ex : having a character on each server own by the website. Websites send email with a special code that the player has to send to the character in WoW on his server to prove his identity ? – Tristan Jun 17 '11 at 12:51
  • Oh Certainly! That just sounds like a lot of work for whatever project you have, plus extra work they have to do to sign up. But depending on the type of community you have, that might work. @LessPop also had a good idea about screenshot submission, but again, that requires a lot of work to review so it would depend on your user base. – kazzamalla Jun 17 '11 at 13:01

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