hardware-id'ing is something I personally don't believe in, there has been many talk about it already in these forums too. I believe more in a system that would require a $5 cd-key. Anyway, someone has to code a working auth-server for this and a working back-end to create the accounts etc.

BattlEye is dead by the way.

There's already a auth-server mechanism in q3, for the cd-keys. Afaik, just before you connect to a gameserver, the client first contacts auth-server, sends cd-key to it. The auth-server checks key and sends back an error if cd-key is invalid ('invalid/mistyped cd-key'). The authserver keeps a temp (like 5 minutes) database of IP + cdkey of everyone who authed succesfuly. On connect, the gameserver querys the auth-server and asks if the IP of the client is succesfuly authed or not. If so, it lets you in, if not, you get 'client unknown to auth'.

You could slighty adapt/extend this to use accounts and everyone account would have its own secret unique key. To get it do hardware-id-reading and base the key on that is a lot harder and since it's open source, very easy to spoof. You'd need a closed source library which gets loaded and does it, which again makes it much harder to do and which again can be hacked.

That's why I believe more in selling these keys. The community could very well start such a system. 5 dollar per key. All you need is a 'master' server that handles accountcreation/payments/key-database/authing. It would be nice though if the auth-server would also send a public unique number of clients to the server, so that with a /playerlist, this number would be shown and you would be able to look up who someone is, without getting to know their secret key. (same as PB does with guid)