I'm a sad panda today...

I just had my first real instance of a player causing quite a bit of strife for one particular alliance, stealing all their cash and booting out all of their players. Kind of ironic this happened right on Thanksgiving weekend!

In order to kick a player out of an alliance, you need to get 10 votes from existing members. But to join, you only need three votes. What this guy did was create two extra legitimate sounding empires, then ask to join the target alliance. Once he had three puppet accounts in, he created 7 more and used his puppets to vote those in as well.

Then he proceeded kick out all existing members, withdraw all of the cash from the alliance's bank and make everything a living hell for everybody.

So I quickly added a "ban" feature to the backend, which allows me to keep the empire in the database, but mark it as banned (which means he can't even sign up again using the same email address). I've also just posted an update to the app in the app store which will display a useful error message when you've been banned (if you keep using the old version of the app, all you'll see is you keep getting authentication errors but you won't know why).

So far, I've been quite lucky in that the game has been small enough that everybody got along pretty well. But I guess such things are inevitable when you get a big enough player base.