10 Sep, 2012, Barrons wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
Between #3 & #4, I suggested skill incentives tied to an account system. I also suggested tying accounts to real life information/e-mail addresses (an idea you maintain is 'worthless') tho one certainly wouldn't have to gather that info to implement accounts & skill incentives. You keep reciting bits of my posts back to me without having any apparent understanding of the text, leading me to believe that while your Copy/paste works fine, reading comprehension is somewhere below the bar.. unless you're being daft on purpose to mislead me, we're back to your post being neither accurate nor helpful.

Cheers.

Edit: An account system is a form of alt-tracking, tho not a foolproof one, as people will falsify accounts, etc. Runter's 'solution' does not bypass any obstacles and frankly, your many contradictory statements & total lack of insight (in your posts & in reading mine) has me wondering what objective you aimed for joining this thread.
10 Sep, 2012, Idealiad wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
This all does make me wonder, has anysuccessful strategy/PvP game ever worked without banning multiplay?
10 Sep, 2012, Runter wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
Not really interested in arguing about pedantry and semantics, but I'll just say that I suggested a voluntary account system with incentives as a solution because I don't think you can track alts using IPs, behaviors, or email addresses, or sworn oath. The core of the problem is how you determine if a character is an alt or actual. The best solution that anyone is going to find in my opinion is limiting the exploitive nature of multiplay through game design decisions, and incentivizing voluntary reporting of alts in such a way that it takes the edge off multiplaying. Kavir probably chimed in on this thread because he believes the same thing, and for what it's worth, he has been solving PVP related obstacles for a long time. I think his insights are indeed helpful.
10 Sep, 2012, Hades_Kane wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
I would suspect his objective for joining this thread, and particularly in response to Barrons, is to point out how ridiculous adding multiple hoops to jump through to "verify" identities would be, same thing behind my first response to this thread. Particularly considering how unbelievably trivial it would be to falsify or get around this measure, it's hardly even worth considering, really. The only people who would probably abide by such a system of hoops are the people who would respect your rules enough not to multiplay in the first place. All you are doing is making it just slightly more inconvenient for the cheaters to cheat, and adding in annoyances for the legitimate players.

All around a bad idea.

And yes, an account system is a form of alt-tracking, and of course isn't foolproof… The case isn't being made that somehow setting up an account system would make this all go away.

The idea behind tying benefits to account systems is if you do something amazing with one character, and all of your characters on the account benefit from it, then there is far more incentive to collecting your characters into one account rather than spreading them across multiple accounts. Especially if multiple characters on a single account can all pool some sort of benefit or bonus, it may be that the benefit of having all of your characters on a single account would outweigh the benefit of multiplaying, since presumably there are just other characters you could group with anyway.

Discourage the behavior by encouraging behavior that would be incompatible with what you are trying to eliminate.

Of course, this doesn't discourage a barrage of dummy alts/accounts that are just there to support the main one that may be getting a benefit from the other characters on the account, but this is a much more likely solution to the issue, and much less likely to run off or annoy new and/or legitimate players.
10 Sep, 2012, KaVir wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
I joined the thread because this subject is something I'm personally interested in. I've developed and run several different muds over the last 17+ years, but three things they've all had in common are:

1) A strong emphasis on PK,

2) No rules against multiplaying, and

3) Various solutions for reducing the impact of multiplaying.

In regard to the latter I've experimented with a number of different design ideas, ranging from the completely useless (email registration - in Last City) to the highly effective but also restrictive (private duels - in Gladiator Pits). My latest experiment attempts to identify alts by monitoring and cross-referencing their connection history, although this does also require a small amount of administrative work to deal with false positives.
13 Sep, 2012, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
I implemented something about pk that kinda mitigate one of the problems of gang that forms out of nowhere: no starting of a pk action for 5 minutes after you logged (you can retaliate, but not engage, and that is logged; so if a friend of yours engage you just to reset the timer, it is noticed).
Not solving the gang problem, but at least player knows that they wont get engaged by people that were not even logged when a fight already started.

I think the tied bonus to account is probably the best solution. Have the bonus huge enough that multiplaying multiple account leaves you behind. And have this bonus hard or impossible to get by bot, like hand made quest when you are on, not automatized stuff.
14 Sep, 2012, Ssolvarain wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
Already mentioned by Runter, but an account system with incentives seems to have worked very well for Project Bob. If I can get some nice bonuses for simply tying my alts to an account, I'm all for it.
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