Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
"Current Intrepid stance - Players are allowed to own multiple accounts, but may not launch multiple game clients from the same computer. Players may not use any software to automate character actions or mimic keystrokes."
If you can't regulate the top one, can you regulate the bottom? Maybe a way to only allow one application per PC, what about software detection/anti-cheat?
If you can, then that would be half way to being ok, you'd also need to:
-remove any potential farming incentives, so the thing doesn't get flooded with gold farmers etc
-remove any potential advantages/exploits, in every aspect of gameplay (battlegrounds, arenas, node wars, guilds wars, caravan runs, open world pvp, crafting/gathering, housing, dungeons, family teleports, world bosses, groups, scouting, bounty hunting, corruption etc etc)
Then, you could realistically look at it being a thing.
If those things can't be fully done - In such a deep, sandbox game then multiboxing can and will be abused and people will run around with 10 characters and press 1 button and 1-shot people.
Half the aspects of gameplay will go to shit because of it, people will post it all over the internet and the game will severely suffer.
Besides, how does almost every other mmo or most multiplayer games not allow it to happen? It's not really a problem anywhere else that the devs don't want it.
There are ways to detect if the clients are running on different machines (MAC address, HWID, etc). This can be easily spoofed with VMs though, but it's a way to make it harder. So you're safe.
I believe multi-boxing will only be a big problem if people are able to create quality, hard-to-detect bots for AoC. I think AoC should add the following sentence on their current stance: "this decision can be changed in the future if need be".
I've never personally multi-boxed. To me it seemed like a way of making something easier that was meant to be harder, be that leveling, harvesting materials, and worse examples of people griefing in PvP. All of that contributes to the cheapening of the gaming experience I believe. But I get that people play games for their own reasons.
As long as it's not having a detrimental effect on my own experience, I can live with it in a limited fashion. I certainly don't want to run into groups of multiboxers every 15 minutes like I see in other games.
If you read this thread you'll find plenty. I'm not even sure where I stand anymore.
To me this outlines their strategy as "we'll implement some software solutions on computers running our game client to verify if software is being used to automate keystrokes or interact directly with our client".
I'm not sure how successful that'll be as I think this is the same strategies other MMOs have put in place. And hopefully that wont result in false positive for people trying to run the game in WINE under linux.
There are hardware and software solutions that can be put in place to get around these restrictions.
Regardless, raising the entry price for multiboxing is still a deterrent that may reduce the number of players doing it.
@Intrepid: Willing to test your client in wine if you'd like to get some data about that ! I'm 100% sure to get it working, nothing gets in my way
Seen it a few times throughout the thread, but there's something that can't be stated too many times in this sort of discussion, and it's also probably the main hurdle for Intrepid to treat fairly:
Simply having multiple accounts on multiple computers, in and of itself, IS NOT MULTI-BOXING.
There are, typically, two "forms" of this behavior: multi-boxing, an overarching form where one person controls multiple accounts, whether that be on a single computer, multiple computers, or utilizing software such as virtual machines; and multi-clienting, where one person controls multiple accounts specifically on a single computer. Both of these share one thing in common: a single person is controlling all of the accounts at the same time. There are also other aspects that feed onto these ideas, such as key broadcasting, macros, and botting, but strictly speaking, while they can be related, they are separate topics than multi-boxing.
Different people in the same household (or any flavor of sharing an IP) all playing their own accounts, is not, and has never been, multi-boxing. This is the primary aspect of the discussion that needs to be treated fairly for ALL players, not just those who want to run multiple accounts. While there does need to be some checks in place, they cannot be so cumbersome to the 95%+ of the population that wants to play "normally" that it turns them off from the game.
It is true that a relatively small number of users exploiting various systems within a game can destabilize things. However, it is also true that users who multi-box are a small minority in almost any game (yes, as always, there are exceptions to this, but in general it is true). Out of this small minority, those who multi-box to an extreme amount are only a fraction. Putting in place too many restrictions that normal users have to deal with, in order to deal with this small minority, is not a good idea. The people who are already going to exploit systems in negative ways WILL ALWAYS find ways around these systems.
The current stance of Intrepid, as stated in their initial post, strictly disallows multi-clienting. While they allow multi-boxing, they disallow the use of any automation or key broadcasting. These two statements essentially cover every aspect of negative multi-boxing from outside of the games' perspective. Without breaking the second statement, there is nothing inherently to be gained via multi-boxing irrespective of individual systems within the game. I know people won't, be please, reread those last two sentences, they are important.
Thus, we must now look at how multi-boxing can affect the game via the game systems themselves. This is where Intrepid will have the most work designing things such that multi-boxing gives as close to zero benefits as possible. Specifically in regards to multi-boxing, the following points should be addressed by Intrepid with as little input from the players themselves as possible. Whether that be through automated flagging, GMs, or other systems, combating negative elements in the game should always be a burden that the developer takes on, rather than the players.
In my eyes, there are four major aspects that need to be addressed: Economy, Professions, Territory and Housing/Freeholds, and PvP.
The first is the economy. If a legitimate multi-boxer (i.e. one that is not breaking the second statement of Intrepid's stance) can vastly increase the rate at which they gain materials or other items without a significant increase in their own time, then this could essentially be seen as a "pay 2 win" advantage. This will likely be one of the harder to balance and controversial topics in this issue, because it will depend almost entirely on the mechanics of the game itself. How materials are gathered, how mob drops work, etc. It will also determine what a significant increase in time entails - if you can multi-box a full 8-character party to gather crafting materials, and it only increases the time it takes you to gather said materials by twice as long as on a single character, is that sufficiently significant? Three times as long? Four? If a mob is killed by said 8-character party, does each character get a drop, or are any drops split between the entire party? If a fully multi-boxed party participates in a convoy, do each character get the same rewards? Are those rewards based on some performance metric during the convoy, such that if 7 characters are simply following a single main character, do they get lesser rewards?
The second area of professions is related to the first. Would a legitimate multi-boxer be able to gain a significant advantage in the game by essentially being able to circumvent the community aspect of the profession systems? According to quotes from Steven: "You may only ever master one parent path. But you may spend time mastering each profession within the parent artisan path." Realistically, this means that a multi-boxer might gain an advantage only in a few senses, mainly in the form of time. Depending on how the mechanics of the various artisan classes work, a multi-boxer could potentially level multiple professions at the same time, compared to say using alternate characters. This would almost entirely depend on how active the actual crafting system. If it is simply a click-then-wait system like in many games, a larger advantage will be possible; if it is a more in-depth crafting system, such as the one found in Final Fantasy 14 (barring any in-game macroing of abilities, like what is found in said example), then there would be very little advantage to be gained by multi-boxing. Either way, this would also necessarily require a higher expenditure of materials, which could end up being a significantly limiting factor towards an advantage for multi-boxing.
Depending on how transferring materials and other items between characters work, multi-boxing could provide a time advantage compared to using alts, since each multi-boxed character could be logged in at the same time. While this might be relatively negligible for each individual item transfer, it could potentially add up in the end, and is something to aware of. In regards to this specific point, as stated in a the recent AMA by Steven, there will be systems in place to check for things such as RMT; these systems could potentially be expanded upon to also be checks for multi-boxing in some manner, if needed.
The third major aspect in regards to multi-boxing advantages will be in territory control and housing. There is a quote that is often thrown around in recent times that might fully apply here: " Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." If multi-boxing enables players and/or guilds to take advantage of the node system, IT WILL BE DONE. This is 100% a fact, and there is no getting around it. If it is possible to gain an advantage, there will likely be multiple hardcore guilds that will require their members to multi-box. Thus, this is definitely a point that needs to be addressed by Intrepid in some fashion. If, for example, completing quests as an 8-man multi-boxed party can be done in essentially the same amount of time as a single character, this could be heavily exploited in some areas. Based on a livestream back in May 2017, there may be systems in place to avoid being able to "game" the node advancement system, and these systems will somehow need to factor in multi-boxing.
In a similar vein, housing and Freeholds are a big topic. Since Freeholds are currently stated to be limited to one per account, a multi-boxer would likely have a distinct advantage in this area, creating a very possible "pay 2 win" feature. One possible counter to this would be to limit Freeholds per in-game Family, as well as the standard per-account limit. For example, a Family in the game with between 2 and 4 characters could only acquire 2 Freeholds, while a full 8-character Family could own 3 or 4 Freeholds. If a multi-boxer wanted to own more Freeholds, they would then have to give up the benefits of having all of their characters in a single Family. If a player already owned a Freehold and wanted to join an existing Family that was at their Freehold limit, they would have to choose to give up their own Freehold to join that Family. This is just one idea, but it is certainly something that will need to be dealt with by Intrepid.
The fourth and final point is PvP. In many MMOs that have some sort of PvP element, multi-boxing can often have a very negative impact. Ashes of Creation, by design, slightly reduces this impact by way of its hybrid action targeting system. This design significantly limits the ability of a multi-boxer to one-shot an opponent, compared to fully tab-targeting combat systems. Also, assuming that you are dealing with a legitimate multi-boxer following the stated guidelines for said multi-boxing, this impact is reduced even further. With the prevalence of streaming/recording of video games that occurs today, a multi-boxer that blatantly has every single one of the characters casting at the same time could likely be reported and dealt with extremely efficiently.
In turn, while multi-boxing in PvP can provide advantages, people need to realize that having more characters does give you a 1:1 power increase per additional character, particularly if the multi-boxer is actually following Intrepid's guidelines. Without the use of third-party software for key broadcasting and the like, a group of 4 characters used by a multi-boxer likely only has the effective power of ~2 "normal" players. The extra attention that it takes to effectively control multiple characters drastically reduces the output that those characters can produce. Realistically speaking, without the use of third-party software, controlling more than one character in PvP (and to a lesser extent PvE) is hugely inefficient. Controlling more than one character, without third-party software - is often very inefficient in a general sense.
As long as there is a good policy in place to handle multi-boxing, and it is enforced strictly but fairly, negative situations will likely not become a huge issue for the game. However, the handling of individual cases will determine whether or not said policy becomes a boon to the game, and the community as a whole, or a huge detriment.
It sounds like one person controlling multiple characters at the same time is against ToS at this point from what I read in one post. As Aeri mentioned, any loopholes with housing plots and what not would likely be taken care of before launch, if not shortly after as a direct result from seeing exploits like the family situation. I actually feel a lot better about the situation now that we've had twenty pages of context on it. So, the topic thread was a success.
I'd be concerned about how they could interact with open world content such as pvp.
As someone who only intends to play one character (even on the same account), I don't think the advantages multiboxers have over players like me make it an equal playing field. I do understand the issues that come with trying to restrict multiboxing, but multiboxers are still pay to win.
I've never fully committed to a mmorpg - I intend to on this one. I don't want my game-play experience to be tainted by multiboxers; nor do I want them to have a leg up on me just because they'd rather spend the extra money than actually grind on one character.
Imagine the advantage they'd have in node wars. Can't wait to get popped by a mage(s) in .02 seconds.
In a sense of balance, it's not pay to win, it's pay to play way more and way harder than others to receive marginal advantages at the additional cost of sanity.
If you're worried about goldsellers, bad news, most gold sellers have clean gold and dirty gold. Clean gold being farmed through legitimate means and sold through illegitimate means. For example, one person just straight up playing the game, one account at a time. Nothing in the ToS could ban for that until the RMT is found out about. Dirty gold, however, is the bigger threat. Botting and mass exploiting/hacking/multi-clienting is very clearly against the ToS. It will result in many bans, but the gold will still get out there. The practice is called suicide botting usually and will happen regardless of Intrepid's official stance on the matter. You just need to trust their anti-cheat and anti-RMT measure are up to snuff and can cull these kinds of practices to an acceptable minimum.
By extension of the whole more accounts = pay to win mentality, you could absolutely whale out and purchase enough accounts to populate an entire metropolis. Maybe you could re-brand Ashes from an MMO to the worlds most expensive city-builder game.
Sure it's harder, but you're still getting an advantage. More drops being an obvious advantage.
I literally googled "Why do people multibox" and the second page that comes up has someone who said,
"Multiboxing in battlegrounds was insanely fun when I first started out. It's like I was a comic book character who just found out they had superpowers. I'd press lightning bolt and bam, people would just drop dead. I'd sit in the AV boss room and while the horde rushed in, they'd be met with five lava elementals, five chain lightning spam and five lava burst + elemental mastery combos. There were days I'd just sit in AV trying to farm honor kills."
Sorry but I can't be convinced to side with multiboxers. The only thing I can find agreement on is the fact that it's their money to do what they want with.
Besides, seeing 5 players with the similar names stacked on top of each other breaks my immersion.
Edit: If there are no advantages to multiboxing then why do it?
Quote citation: https://reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/c89da9/why_do_people_multibox/
Thats not what's up for debate here, using one button will not let you play all your characters at once. That is against the rules, just pure multi boxing means controlling one character at a time. Doing that is highly inefficient in pvp because it takes too much skill to play more than one character at once. The programs that let you control several at once are incredibly easy to track the use of and you cant get around it. Intrepid can get a manual report of hey there was a multiboxer keycloning here at this time. They then look at the logs and see, yup server inputs were nearly simultaneous for those accounts. Pretty easy to tell the diffrence between a human pushing a button 5 times and a computer pushing 5 at once
As for what is up for debate, it's whether or not we agree with their decision. I'll reiterate what I said before... I don't disagree with Intrepid's decision because I understand the issues that come with trying to restrict multiboxing, and I feel that they came up with a valid solution. But I clicked that I disagree because I disagree with mutliboxing being allowed (without considering the issues restricting it further would cause), and because I want to make sure they know that there are players who are against multiboxing.
As for "mass ignorance" - that's exactly why it's a forum, so everyone can voice their opinion and hopefully the ones with valid concerns get heard (no matter which side they're on).
I'm all for the idea of people multiboxing to be able to progress content themselves a bit easier without relying on other people sticking around
So if there's a way you can restrict economic impact, then great. Otherwise I'd rather not see it at all
however, people who get caught multiboxing with automated macros / bots / programs / whatsoever, should be either permanently banned, or banned for a long period of time.
And not just their account.
Account banning is, most of the time, useless, they'll make a new account right away since it only costs $15.
A better way to go is to ban all the accounts linked to the credit card, and block the credit card from paying new accounts for 3 months, that will give them time to think again about breaking the Terms-of-Service / End-User License Agreement.
There is a large difference between multi-boxing and how it has been stated to be allowed in AoC, and your example: In 99.99999% of cases, it will be against the AoC ToS because it basically requires third-party software to mimic/broadcast keystrokes to each account. The only way this can be accomplished without third-party software is to literally build a physical infrastructure that would have multiple keyboards and mice attached to one another, like this: https://sites.google.com/site/khromtor/_/rsrc/1300193073723/home/closeup2.jpg
Unless someone were to go through an extremely excessive amount of effort to make a physical setup like that, the WoW battlegrounds example will not really ever become an issue in AoC, so long as Intrepid enforces their ToS. If you see someone who appears to be multi-boxing, and all their characters are casting at the same time, report them and let them get banned.
One of the biggest reasons that WoW ended up having issues like this occur was because they never really had anything in their ToS that specifically disallowed the behavior. They might have had some standard, generic legalese against third-party software modifying their application, but a lot of software used in typical multi-boxing setups does not technically break those rules. It wasn't until game developers started putting in more specific wording that they had more power over those types of situations. Basically every online game nowadays has specific language to disallow the use of such software, and if you're caught, you can get your account banned.
As to your last question, there are a few reasons. One is a time advantage - which as I stated in my first post in this thread, IS and issue that needs to be addressed. While you may not get a 1:1 ratio of time-spent versus rewards gained, you will likely save some time overall.
Another example is challenge. Trying to do group content via multi-boxing can be a very rewarding experience. You will almost never be as efficient as a standard group of normal players - unless some of those players really, really suck - but some players like the additional challenge that controlling multiple characters brings.
A third reason is almost a direct opposite of the WoW battleground example you found: PvP discouragement. Not everyone enjoys PvP, especially of the open-world variety. Someone running around to gank people will often leave a multi-boxer alone, because having multiple characters around when you're solo-PvPing in an open world is a big deterrent. As an anecdotal example, I used to play Aion when it launched in NA. My preferred class in that game was a Spiritmaster (that games' summoner class) which, at least during that period of the game, was not really exceptional at PvP. I almost never participated in PvP in general, preferring PvE content, but I would often get ganked with little recourse. Eventually, I decided to try multi-boxing the game, and ran around with 5 Spiritmasters. Except for very rare circumstances, I almost never had anyone try to gank me afterwards. The few times people tried it, while they might be able to kill multiple of my characters, I could almost always end up killing them as well.
Fourth reason: mule characters. Depending on the limits of storage in any particular game, people often make additional accounts as mules. In my eyes, this is a flaw in game design, if it is necessary. I can understand having limited on-character storage for a variety of reasons, but when a game limits total inventory space to a point that you almost need alts to use as mules, spending a little bit of money for a second account is very worth it to a lot of people. If spending $10-15 on a second account for a game enables me to spend 1/4 of the time I'm playing purely doing inventory management, then sure. Again, however, I find this situation to be 100% either a game design flaw, or (as is unfortunately becoming increasingly common) simply a lazy attempt at a cash grab by a company offering additional storage space in their games' cash shop.
There are always going to be advantages that some people can get in a multiplayer game, regardless of whether multi-boxing is allowed or not. However, by specifically allowing mutli-boxing to be a thing, Intrepid have an opportunity to deal with at least one of those advantages on their own terms, hopefully without negatively impacting the experience of people that don't want to multi-box.
For another anecdotal example (though it's on a slightly different topic), look at Monster Hunter World. In the base game on PC, Capcom never really had a stance on modding the game - they didn't approve of it, but neither did they ban anyone from using mods during multiplayer games, even when those mods could easily break the game. However, when the Iceborne expansion launched, they changed a few things. They went in and encrypted some of the code, and added a few anti-cheat mechanisms to the game. The result? Even for people that didn't mod the game, at all, the CPU usage of the game would hover up at nearly 100%, because the game executable was constantly running checks for cheat software. How did this affect modding? Workarounds for the anti-cheat mechanisms were broken within a day, and within a week the modding community was operating almost as well as they could prior to the expansion. The modders effectively had a better game, even if the only "mod" they used was turning off the anti-cheat systems. Their decision negatively impacted every single player, so much so that within a few patches of the expansions launch, they removed the anti-cheat systems entirely because of the feedback.
Back to AoC, if Intrepid specifically disallowed multi-boxing to occur, people would still do it. The invasive measures that they would need to take to effectively try and stop people from multi-boxing would definitely have an impact on normal players.
There will be GMs in AoC.
While a detection-program may fail to detect the automatic multiboxers... For an actual person, it is ultra-easy to spot with their human eyes and brain by just watching them with GM-invisibility.
GMs will be much more effective at spotting multiboxers and taking video proof if needed, than a detection program would be.
1. players report a spotted multiboxer,
2. reports generate a GM investigation,
3. GM log into the game in invisible mode,
4. GM witnesses suspicious actions, like 3+ characters casting the same spell simultaneously,
5. GM ban them.
6. ???
7. profit
Multiboxing is pay to win at best and a disease within a game that will harm some of the most dedicated, competitive players no matter how you do it. One computer, two computers, macros, it does not matter the scale or allowance. If the rule Intrepid goes with is multiboxing via two or more computers they are basically saying 'the entry-level to multiboxing is this high' and that is a problem. People can and will multibox no matter what and condoning it within the rules in any way is harmful to the community of people that will play this game at a serious level. Not doing it will put them behind others that do.
In a competitive and player-driven game this is the worst thing I could imagine openly allowing. It should always remain a bannable offense regardless of the ability to enforce it, and as a community, we should frown upon anyone that attempts to cheat the system in this way. The integrity of this game could very well rest on the decision here, and I'm shocked the self-avowed avid MMO players at Intrepid would allow this question of multiboxing to come to the community.
Edit:
And while we're on the topic, account sharing should blanketly be a bannable offense as well. It's about the principle of it what we as a community will accept being in games we play. Obviously, there is no simple or easy solution to stopping people from doing either of these things, but that is not the point. Openly allowing it as a game developer is wrong.
From a technological standpoint, a virtual machine IS a second computer, for all intents and purposes. Making a VM that is viable for a modern game typically requires a fairly high-end machine, one that would likely end up costing almost as much as two lower-end PCs that could each run the game separately.
I don't know if Intrepid will take this view on VMs, in this regard, but nominally, their stance is more to stop people from running multiple clients on a single machine, such that you can easily alt-tab between them. It is much easier to find software to broadcast keystrokes within a single machine, than it is to do between multiple, separate computers, so this is basically one additional layer of protection against people trying to exploit having multiple accounts.
VMs are also reasonably easy to detect from a hardware perspective, so if their stance on multi-boxing also means disallowing VMs, that can be an easy thing to have a check for if they're investigating a multi-boxer.
If you put in 20 hours a week, you get a certain amount of things done. If I multibox the same amount of time, that would equate to 40 hours of character time. Taking into account inefficiencies, that come out to about 19 hours of character time used (moving your hands between hardware lowers it below half). 22 hours if you are reallly really really good.
On the other hand, if I no-life it for a week, I play 80-100 hours. Who has the advantage of play time here?
you have 2 accounts 2x15$ = 30$ per month (yes, you are paying for it)
dont cheat
you use main account for doing everything except professions
you use main account to send materials and gold to second account who is doing mostly crafting so you can sell Y items and send gold to main account
I dont see this above as pay to win. If you do, please explain to me what you think about people who are playing game 14 hours a day and people who have jobs and play 3 hours a day, next thing you gonna see is that to play this game you need to give proof of income, working hours etc... cmon.... so no, bolded above is not p2w.
That's another way to "pay to win". And one that too many are ready to take.
I'd love to see time locked server which limit your play time to around 40 hours a week.