Let's Explore the Concepts of "Pushing" and Multi-accounting and Family-play
Okay, so some recent events and their consequences have brought up plenty of questions in the Global chat, and in my head. Multi-accounting is a problem in just about every game of this type and plenty others, and there's no easy way to distinguish that from legitimate pushing, aside from IP addresses.
Here's the thing. "Pushing" can be a very strong, legitimate strategy to increase the strength of another person or even an entire guild. For those who are uninformed, "Pushing" is basically pooling resources to a single player to help them progress faster. I think "Pushing" is a very important part of team-based gameplay, and we need to explore ways of allowing this sort of thing, while still cracking down on people exploiting multiple accounts.
I think where we need to direct our thinking is not at the actual "pushing" issue, but more at the problem with multiple account exploits. I've read in chat that BB encourages people playing from the same IP to submit a ticket notifying support of this, but that does not address the problem entirely.
When you really think about it, there's absolutely no way to be sure that two accounts playing on the same IP are that same person, or conversely, two different people. So what can be done?
Here's some food for thought. Allow trades to only be carried out between players who are online. I don't know if that's how they work now, or not, but that's the first step. Next, allow only one account to be logged in from an IP address at one time. Now, suddenly, you no longer need to worry about people abusing trade between their multiple accounts. The unfortunate side-effect of this is how it limits the amount of assistance family members can provide each other. Not only that, but family members cannot play at the same time. We can address the latter issue by refining the above idea: prohibit trading between two accounts that are online from the same IP address. Alas, this doesn't address the issue of being able to help your family members.
Let's think about ways we can allow family members to help one another, while not allowing people to abuse that through multi-accounting. One idea that comes to mind is to have a debt, or trade balance meter. This will keep track of the balance of the trades between two players. If we apply a cap to it, suddenly, there would be limited benefit in setting up a new account just to funnel resources to a main account, and families can assist each other... right? Right - if there's a capped balance meter for each resource. Otherwise, a player could just trade back resources he doesn't need to reset the balance. The issue that arises here is that this prevents players from building specialized economies to help their team, and teamplay is what is making me write this post. So why not make this balance meter only exist between accounts that are access from the same IP address?
What do you guys think BB can do to address this issue? I'd like to leave this thread here for the people of the community to discuss just that. I'm sure some of us here are well-learned problem solvers and can offer some good ideas, and I'm sure there are those of you who are creative enough to offer the same. Just try to keep it civil. Ideas are ideas, and none of them are bad. Some are better than others, but don't let that stop you from posting!