Forge of Empires - Free to play - Can only one 1 account at a time

[DaveLembke]

So a coworker got me playing a game called Forge of Empires which is flash based. There are times in the game that your twiddling your thumbs waiting on timers for stuff to be built, army get to a destination to conquer, or wait for money and building materials to be made. So I thought why dont I start another account for this same game and this way I can switch between the two of them and not be bored with waiting on timers. The game play is kind of fun when not waiting for timers to run out. Problem is that the games detect that another instance is running on the same system even when using 2 different account logons.

So only way to play 2 of them at a time seems to be to use 2 computers or maybe a virtual machine for one of them so it doesnt see the other.

I was curious if there was a trick on how to mask the one from seeing the other without running it on 2 computers or one of them isolated in a virtual machine.

To me I was surprised that it detects other copies of this free to play game running. This means that as part of the main loop of the game, its polling the system somehow checking for other instances or memory sniffing for other instances.

Last night I just ran 2 computers and used my KVM to switch between them and alternate back and forth, but this wastes electricity having 2 computers running. I suppose I could run it in a virtual environment to run it on the same machine but figured Id check to see if there are any tricks on how to get this flash game to run 2 copies of it under 2 different accounts at the same time without one detecting the other running and ending the first instance of the game?

Note: Looking online under different search criteria, it looks like Chrome might allow 2 isolated instances of flash if I am reading this correctly. Interesting if Chrome is really able to do this while I tried running it on Firefox and IE at the same time with both browsers open thinking both browsers would add a level of isolation but they dont. Due to this I have doubts that chrome is the solution. http://superuser.com/questions/362762/how-do-i-get-flash-to-run-in-a-separate-instance-for-each-tab-chrome

[DaveLembke]

Dug a little further into this and it looks like the only options for running multiple accounts at the same time on a single computer is through virtualization. I think the issue lies in the instance name, only one instance with that flash can be running at a time and you cant just change the name of it on the fly that I know of. I have gotten other games to run multiples of by just renaming the exe so that the instance name is different in the PID. Just wanted to share this info in case anyone else out there runs into this. I think the game I want to run 2 instances of will work under Windows XP, so I am going to use Virtual PC2007 on my Windows 7 64-bit system and  run a virtual Windows XP session and see if that works and then just move within the physical and virtual systems to run both at the same time without having to have 2 computers going.

The average cooldown in the game is 5 minutes and most of everything can be completed in under 2 minutes which leaves 3 minutes of waiting on timers. With 2 games going at the same time there is usually under a minute between them that is wasted unproductive game time. They have a feature where you can pay diamonds to shorten the timer/cooldowns. I think thats why they have the 5 minute timers knowing there is 3 minutes of waiting is to try to get people to pay up.

The game is ok, but the diamonds are a penny a piece on their best deal when buying like 5000 of them, but 5000 diamonds are $50 USD. And I dont pay that kind of money for a flash game to have virtual currency. I saw one item I liked the other day and it was 850 diamonds but 850 diamonds comes to $8.50. Nope I dont need it that badly. If their money system was $5 for 5000 diamonds in which that item would cost me 85 cents then I'd pay up to have it since 85 cents is reasonable for a virtual object. Not sure if they are greedy to have it this way or if they have to be this way based on statistics of  how many people pay to play. They might make more money if they didnt jab as for I'd pay $5 to get a bunch of virtual items in which I feel that I am getting my moneys worth.

[booxm]

You might get in trouble if they find that the IP is the same... I suggest you try another similar browser game, there are sooo many of them

[DaveLembke]

You might get in trouble if they find that the IP is the same... I suggest you try another similar browser game, there are sooo many of them

.... wonders why they would track IP for duplicate connections when what if more than one family member wants to play same game. Additionally no real loss in more people playing the game, so it should be if you want to play 2 accounts at same time from same internet connection, more power to you.

I went from playing the games for an hour or 2 a day to playing it just  15 minutes. I do daily stuff on it and then leave the timers to count down to the next day and collect on the count down, and then start the counter for 24 hrs again. If I need stuff faster, I run some automated scripts to farm. 

[DaveLembke]

cool ty for info tx-23

never heard of the incognito mode for Chrome... going to check that out.

[Catfish555]

Yes... I know this is old... but the info on here is WRONG.

You can play this game on Chrome and Firefox/Internet Explorer/Edge. That is 2 games running simultaneously.

You can also have multiple accounts logged into Windows. Switch between them and its 2 games per Windows account.

You can also log out, and log back in, and run as many accounts as you want.

So virtualization is not required.