Let's Explore the Concepts of "Pushing" and Multi-accounting and Family-play

[Fkyx]

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!

[Draxxon]

Possibly a way around the "one log in per IP" would be to limit it to one login per MAC address, but it still won't stop someone with multiple PCs or multiple Virtual Machines to access at the same time. Also, one login per IP is easily circumvented by proxying (something I DON'T recommend, but most advanced gamers already know about it), so it's a VERY hard problem for programmers to try to resolve.

[Fkyx]

A lot of things can be circumvented through proxying. The type of person who will use a proxy is the type of person who will find ways to get around anything that is put in place to prevent them from cheating. There's little anyone can do to stop them, so there's no real need to address them in finding a solution.

It's like when you have a vote between five objects, and while two of those objects get 90% of the votes between them, there's two others that get the remaining 10%. Generally, you're safe in ignoring those votes. It's safe to ignore extremist cheaters in this case.

The point you made is good, though. Proxying is always an issue in any game. And there's really no way to stop it. From a cheater's standpoint, however, once you start using a proxy server, you risk other people also using that server, potentially for the same thing you use it for. In some cases, unless you're a security whizz, and can prevent people from sniffing the IP out and spoofing your MAC address, then it's not really a great idea to use a proxy server.

[Jigsaw]

9 out of 10 people who "claim" to have a family member playing are creating accounts for their "family member" who aren't even playing they just use it as an excuse to get around the rules of multi accounting. It exists on all browser games sadly. The only sure fire way is to limit 1 account per IP. Say sorry charlie to the few cases where twins might actually want to play the same game and just set a rule foundation. It would stink for the people who legitimately might want to have 2 accounts by 2 people in the same house, but really there has to be a limit set or multi accounting will always exist. Cut it off at the head.

No matter what if you make even one exception or possibility that someone can use two pcs in the same house, all the multi accounters will just lie and say "its my brother/sister/father/mother". Even limiting to one isn't sure fire because the more savvy computer users know about spoofing, VMware and or proxying and stuff and could still figure out a way to bypass it. But you can at least heavily restrict it and reduce the probability of it happening by 1 Account 1 IP.

If it must exist the ability to allow multiple machines per IP then restrict the two accounts so they absolutely cannot interact with each other through trade. Again it stinks but this is how other games handle it. If one account on one IP cannot help another account on the same IP then once again, only the above "super users" would have any idea how to get around it.

In the end all they can do is make it so hard it's almost not worth trying, but they can "never" stop it.

[Silvanoshei]

This has to be near on the 10th post you've made since you said your peace, I'm confused.

[Thunder]

You're all still talking about IPs...if they see 10 accounts giving resources and buffs to one guy and this one guy is leveling faster than everyone else, they will get banned.

[Cenzton]

because I think it's funny at this point. They ban my game account but not my forum account? why because we did nothing wrong.

Or maybe because your game and forum account aren't one in the same >.>

[Tapewormz]

you understand that if I wanted to play this game with 6 accounts I could very easily do so right? ip spoofing isn't rocket science. Instead we played legit, straight up are banned b/c the admins apparently think that there can only be one PC per "household" in the US, and there's no way that you could ever have 20 dudes living in one house using a linux box to share 1 ip address.

Comedy.

Except that I'm under the impression that they banned you guys for pushing. You seem to be trying to shift the focus from that and just focus on multiple accounts from the same ip. There's a log of all of the actions of the banned accounts. These actions raised suspicions so much so that they banned you guys. If support isn't willing to work with you guys on this then my feeling is that there's no doubt in their mind that there were some shady dealings going on. Otherwise if there was a shred of doubt, they'd have probably reinstated your accounts.

[Sigmar]

under the game's eula/tos/ect.. as well as their published rules of account use, they clearly state do not multi-account. pushing be it 8 single people or 1 person with 2+ accounts will always ALWAYS raise red flags for multi-accounting. it has since the time of 28.8 modems. bare inmind there is no legal means for a game company to prove you are 2 people when they detect trading via the same dynamic ip so the natural automatic responce is to view is as multi use. as they do not allow that, BAM rules are enforced.

unless you willing give a 24/7 live video feed from your house of you and the 9000 other people on your dynamic ip, playing the game they will only ever have your word its 2+ people using that network.
while it sounds harsh to limit people playing from collage or their home networks, you do have to take in to account. if i at lv 1 started 9 accounts and put resources from 7 of them on to 1 i would out level everyone in a matter of minutes, on top of that i would not have any reason to buy gems as i would have more then enough building tickets to not need any thing.
so mutli-account use becomes a balance/fair play issue more then anything else. its best to talk to ubisoft & bluebyte about ways they can improve their monitoring of account usage instead of yelling at them over it.

remember you do not own your account no matter how much money you pump in to it. you are effectively "renting" the account from them, if for any reason they feel you violated your account agreement with them. they can and will terminate the account no questions asked.

welcome to the wonderful world of dynamic ips >>" where annoying things like this happen alot.

a quick little suggestion i ran in to from playing SHKo was for shared ip's to disallow any trading or sharing of items.
the way they had it worked out, you could not vassal a person you shared an ip with, you could not trade resources or put troops in their town for defense, or attack them. they basically had to stand on their own, but you got around multi-account usage and abuse that way. lots of people complained mind you, but ultimately it did/does work fairly well i think

[Omega21]

for all this talk its pretty pointless...it says right in their tos anything they deem "not in the spirit of the game" is a bannable offense...the TOS is setup not as a game trying to increase gameplay value for the gamers...its a game setup to produce as much profit as possible...lets get honest and real here people...ubisoft is a company...they get mod's to volunteer their time so they don't have to pay employer costs for them, not to mention that having more then 1 account does nothing to stop pushing...guilds w/100 ppl can push someone without even trying if they ask for swords and get 4,000 for 1 fish each stack...its called helping, they are basically saying you can't help 1 person too much because thats against the spirit of the game

however spending real life cash for digital code resembling "gems" is totally in the spirit of the game because it makes them money...and having multilpe accounts lessens the number of people they have buying gems, ergo its against the rules...see it for what it is...while it is an enjoyable game you might as well call Ubisoft Regan Mercantile (Evony Owners) because reading their TOS it's basically the same TOS just reworded and reordered...the only part of "customer happiness" that matters to the people who are actually getting a paycheck from UBIsoft, is when it affects their bottom line