   Guest accounts?
Not so much a "Game" design question but more about registering and player login. Nowadays I see a lot of games implement a guest login. If you are new (no data on your device about the game) it asks if you want to login or play and sometimes register. If you choose to just play, a guest account is made for you and you can play immediately and I can imagine this improves the amount of players of the game. A player can register there guest account later with a real name, email, facebook, etc. But if a player does not he can lose all progress if he loses the game information on his device. It's neither possible to login from another device unless the player is able retrieves his guest credentials from the device. I would like to use a guest account as well and within the game I will sparingly remind the player to register. Are there any other things I need to look out for? And is this a good and proven system overall? I like the idea of players being able to jump right into the action but I hate the idea of losing all progress since in my game the player will get mentally attached to his account. Remind players to register occasionally and make them aware of the benefits.Players should not be able to use the guest account to login from anywhere, I want them to register if they like the game. So I have to hide the password for the guest account fairly good.Delete unused guest accounts after X days? Not sure if this is a good idea but imagine someone already registered clicks "Play Now" on a new device, it will create a new guest account and after that the player logs into his primary account. Or a player is not happy with how things go and start a new guest account. Since the guest account information is lost on the device there is no way that account will be played again. I could delete unused account after say 90 days and inform players with guest accounts about this.
I'm put off by having to register for an offline game, but don't expect my data to be preserved or synched across devices. For an online game, registration feels normal and I do assume my progress is being preserved online. If it's just username/email/password, I think it's reasonable to demand that after 10 hours of play or something. You want to eliminate any initial barriers to entry, but at a certain point I'm enjoying your game and if "choose a user name and password" pops up I'll do so.;Rather than guest accounts having a username and password have them identified by a hash including imei number. That way they can't carry game progress to another device without firstly registering an account identified by email address instead. For accounts identified by imei a password should be autogenerated on first use by the device as a random string and not made visible to the user. Thoughts?;Players should not be able to use the guest account to login from anywhere, I want them to register if they like the game. So I have to hide the password for the guest account fairly good. A password-protected account seems a bit much if you can't log-in from anywhere.