My reply may be a tad bit over the top and I may repeat stuff, but here goes...
If this to be used a sort of Server/Game List, we already have one of these planned to start soon once we have separated the Ship Database Table into 3 separate tables.
Once this has been completed we will be hosting the account information for all servers where an admin can sign up their game which will then show up in our list of games.
Hosting the accounts on our server will allow for a single account login to play on any game in the list.
I won't go into detail on how this will work but thekabal and myself have had a long chat about this in IRC recently.
But this will also add the feature of Global Bans, so if a player was found cheating on say one of our games, we can then global ban them to X time and that ban will be affective on all games on our list.
Also server that have ban admins on them like admins that play and cheat on their game etc, we can deactivate their Server Key and their server is then removed and is no longer able to use our services.
Oh and did I mention this service is all free.
The way it works is where we will be separating the ships table into 3 separate tables, 1: to store account information like email, username, password etc, 2: Character Information like Character Name, Score etc, and 3: Ship Information like Ship Name, Devices and levels etc.
We will be hosting just the Account information and games can request for an ID for that account information and that ID is stored on their server and is used there after until that game gets reset.
So only the one password to remember and no longer needing to create a new account on each server when it gets reset and have to wait for the email with your password in.
So the user just has to create an account with us just the once and once activated and logged in will see a list of all the games we using us.
Each of the server listed will also display if you have a character on that server along with basic limited information.
The player can click on any of the servers in the list and if they have a character on that server they can join that server and just play, and if they haven't yet created a character on that server then they are presented with steps to create one, all without needing to enter an email address and wait for it to arrive for the password.
Now each server that is listed on our service will require a Server Key which are unique and is linked to a game account (not a user account) and every time a server needs some info like requesting an account ID from a session ID it needs to provide their Server Key, this communication between the server and our network is encrypted using RSA Key Exchange.
Server Status Updates are like pings that say hello I am still up and running and need to happen at least every 5 minutes and greater than 1 minute or else the game gets removed from the list until it has received at least 5 pings so a delay of 5 to 25 minutes until you will see a server come back up or new servers appear on the list.
And these pings also require their Server Key to be present in the message.
Now like I said above, a server can have their Server Key revoked i.e. disabled for reasons that I wont go into.
Now User Accounts, we will be storing all the account information on our Server here that would only require an ID, Email Address, Password, Username and maybe some other information not yet decided on.
The ID will be a unique Hash and the hash that the game server stores is a unique hash created using the server key, so each account ID will be different on each server.
Now like said above, we can issue a ban which will be a ban on all games on our list which is called a global ban, we can also issue a ban that is only for our games on the list which is called a local ban these will all have a expiration time which will auto expire at that time, we also will have a server ban where we can ban users on individual servers/games which "may" also have an expiration time.
There is nothing stopping people creation multiple accounts on here allowing for mutli-accounting in the games, the reason for this was to allow for other games on our list that does support multi accounts as well as multi-characters on their games.
There is loads more I can talk about this but like always features etc change in development so no point
*** Update ***
Oh yeah, I forgot to say that Admins don't have to use us as an account service, they can store the account information their end, but will have to handle the sending of emails and players will have to remember their passwords etc.
The downside would be games that don't use us as the Account Service won't get listed, and the good side of using us as the Account Service would be that they don't need to send any emails with the users passwords in them, the user only needs to create just the one account and only have to remember the one password and the user will be presented with a list of trusted servers at that time.