Is Alt-Spamming even a bad thing?
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If people are complaining about multiple accounts running on multiple computers from the same household, how is it going to be handled for multiple players playing at the same location? I was playing UO Outlands, a free server, and they blocked multiple accounts from the same household. The problem was my son and myself were both playing. What about LAN parties? These do still exist where several players are playing from the same location. I've seen where some games ban you if your account pops up at another location as well. It falls under account sharing. However, some people play at different locations. Some of my friends have popped over and logged on one of our other computers to play together.
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@Farlander I do not think that people will get banned because they play from the same location. It is quite common that friends and family plays together. I bet that honest people just plays regardless of shared IP and those who runs several accounts at the same time uses VPN.
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I have a game called haven and hearth.
Character progression there is progress thought "study objects" what take time to study~ because of that the game is geared to pumping out as many study objects as possible and having as many alts since an alt can only study a few "study objects" at a time.In general it leaves a real bad taste in my month~ I use about 80-100 alts in that game.
-Alts for watching monster spawns (about 30 alts are used for just this)
-Alts for crafting (tailoring, mining, fighting, farming, butcher, cooking, ect)
-Alts for transporting (about 2 alts are used for this~ since its faster to teleport stuff back to home using an alt)Just to sort the alts I have to have account for each job (mazefarmer, mazewatcher1, mazewatcher2....)
It's become such a chore but to stay competitive you need to do it...the people resort to botting to keep track of stuff and have bots do small task...then more alts/bots are made....My point is alts will be used for small to great task regardless. the best you can do is reduce the need for them as much as possible.
rare monsters are camped by alt/bots in a lot of games.
I found the best way to protect rare mobs was place them in areas were people can't log out in. or get kicked out of the area.
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@maze said in Is Alt-Spamming even a bad thing?:
I have a game called haven and hearth.
Character progression there is progress thought "study objects" what take time to study~ because of that the game is geared to pumping out as many study objects as possible and having as many alts since an alt can only study a few "study objects" at a time.In general it leaves a real bad taste in my month~ I use about 80-100 alts in that game.
-Alts for watching monster spawns (about 30 alts are used for just this)
-Alts for crafting (tailoring, mining, fighting, farming, butcher, cooking, ect)
-Alts for transporting (about 2 alts are used for this~ since its faster to teleport stuff back to home using an alt)Just to sort the alts I have to have account for each job (mazefarmer, mazewatcher1, mazewatcher2....)
It's become such a chore but to stay competitive you need to do it...the people resort to botting to keep track of stuff and have bots do small task...then more alts/bots are made....My point is alts will be used for small to great task regardless. the best you can do is reduce the need for them as much as possible.
rare monsters are camped by alt/bots in a lot of games.
I found the best way to protect rare mobs was place them in areas were people can't log out in. or get kicked out of the area.Wow, that's an extreme example! And here I thought my 20 or so alts in Wurm Online was overboard.
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@Farlander I should have commented on this yesterday.
A lot~ and I mean alot of people in TSE are married and playing the game together.It would be unthickable to disallow groups of people from playing from the same place in this day in age~
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Limiting household in this day isnt an option, not only because of family play, but also because its so easy to fake where you are playing from. Abusers would simply pretend each their avatar is playing from different location.
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As far as multiboxing goes, In my experience IP based measures do lower how common it is. Thigns dont need to be stamped out entirely, just decreased to a point that it does not disrupt the normal game experience. That said IP based measures are not the best solution, both because it does disrupt people who want to play from the same location and because if the game is still encouraging it through its mechanics its just going to give you a huge work load to police any attempts at circumvention - and if you dont at least make a show of doing that players will simply circumvent it, rules that arent enforced dont exist.
Games that tend to have multiboxing are games full of simplistic tasks. You can taken an extreme like dofus and wakfu which are turn based and thus people can easily multibox an entire party. In these games where it is easy to multibox almost everyone does it (and the fact that dofus' IP restricted anti multiboxing servers are so popular should show that there are a lot of mmo players who do not want to deal with muiltiboxing being a thing as it negatively effects the games community by decreasing viable player interactions through automating various elements of group play).
But there are many other games that do not have such a huge multiboxing trend that do not have to block IPs. These are games where playing multiple characters simultaneously is simply not worth the effort for most players. Simply actively paying attention to the game and its play trends and targeting things that do end up getting multiboxed by adding things that make them less amiable to multiboxing should suffice. Ultimately what causes a multiboxing explosion is when people feel they have to multibox to be competitive. When that happens everyone who refuses to do so just quits, leaving a smaller population of nothing but multiboxers.
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Multiboxing (and I am against it with all my heart), is best fought by player reports when you see it. It's obvious to notice multiboxer.
The thing that is a problem in most MMOs, is that game company ignores this issue because of greediness (in sub based games, these players are paying for several subscriptions) so GMs either completely ignore it, or issue only temporary bans, or warnings.
However if game company would be against multiboxing, and permanently (and irrevocably) banned multiboxers, then this problem would quickly be evaporated. It would not be worth to players to buy several copies of the game repeatedly, to try to multibox again and again, just to be banned again and again on their new acounts.
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I barely have an opinion in this.
But in this game, making many characters or accounts is GOING to be pretty pointless because of how the game is planned. You should be able to have 1 character and be able to respec it however you want. Plus there should be enough Knowledge Points to spend on everything and still have some left over.
It could be a problem with scouts though. You just make a fresh character just to go and scout for yourself not caring for your character because it's empty either way.
As i am playing Albion right now, which is free. People use alt accounts and bots in order to farm and keep themselves safe. As soon as they see someone on their scout account they just escape, making the game kinda boring and uneventful.
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@MaxFlex I agree that in Albion scouts are a problem in every way.
@MaxFlex said in Is Alt-Spamming even a bad thing?:
But in this game, making many characters or accounts is GOING to be pretty pointless because of how the game is planned. You should be able to have 1 character and be able to respec it however you want. Plus there should be enough Knowledge Points to spend on everything and still have some left over.
Actually you cannot respec however you want because e.g. attributes cannot be changed from the fly like gear or abilities. Therefore, you are kind of locked to play a certain playstyle. On top of that there is three main races and all their sub-race options, therefore, I would say it is not pointless to create several characters.
