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
I do not see an economic impact for the game as a whole. From the game perspective, there is no difference whether a character is played by one or two humans. There is of course an advantage for the human player, but I can only see an indirect effect on the game economy, which is what the player can do with the advantage.
Should multiple people be able to play at the same time from the same location (IP)(not actually multi-boxing)? Yes.
Someone you otter know.
I think what needs to be monitored is if only one of the two(or more) accounts are progressing. If everything is being funneled into one account then it is obviously an alt and should be banned accordingly. If both accounts are progressing and they are their own unique existences, then it should be allowed. (Archeage Private Server done this some justice, but I doubt the Archeage monitoring systems).
Restricting 1 account per IP is a terrible idea. Room mates and couples want to play together. That IS NOT p2w. Dont let trolls ruin the game.
I have a couple of different characters in ESO but that's just to try out the different types of characters/character roles available to play. 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 DPS. That sort of thing.
1. Introduction
Hello everyone. I'm new to the community. I got really excited when I saw the features Ashes of Creation promises. I got even more excited when I heard the AMA and many of the questions made by the community showed that whoever thought it had previous experiences with MMOs and understood core/basic mechanics, but what impacted me the most is seen that the questions were understood properly showing that the designers are experienced players that understand the background or the true meaning of certain topics and really put thoughts and effort into it.
I also consider this to be an EXTREMELY ambicious project and it also give me certain doubts regarding the implementation of so many features and how well are they going to work together once the product is finished.
Regarding this topic in particular. I didn't read ALL the messages eventho I read plenty of them, so I might repeat myself forgive me if such is the case.
2. Multiboxing: Yes or No
I believe that MULTIBOXING has to be allowed. The reason for it is quite simple. Nowadays there are many games (MMOs) wich DO NOT ALLOW multiboxing as a core feature, but anyway they end up having certain/many people wich use and abuse multiboxing for several different reasons. All of the reasons were adressed in the AMA and in previous comments. But especifically Real Money Traders. Therefore because this is a real thing, and this is going to happen even if you don't allow the possibility of using MULTIBOXING, I believe that it's only fairer for the rest of the people to actually be able to do it, or to have the possibility aswell.
If you see the current Lineage2 scene (wich I play regularly), you'll see tons of individuals (including me at some point), wich use certain 3rd party softwares to override the servers defenses and exploit certain mechanics for their/our benefict. And this is only because it's difficult to compete against those people that use it without them, or to obtain monetary benefits.
Something quite similar happens in WoW Classic for example, where server hoping abuse, multiboxing-boting, regular boting, completely define the economy of the server, neglecting completely the regular player agency on deciding its future. In WoW Classic, I did RMT for around 3 months, never got detected, in any of my accounts because it's quite easy to guess the algorythms that are usually implemented to detect these kind of stuff.
3. Thoughts on stoping abuse of MULTIBOXING
The only true solution for this, is a possibly costly one (I wouldn't know if such is the case), and that is using ACTUAL people to fiscalize certain activities regularly. There's no better way to test if someone is actually multiboxing/boting/exploiting/etc than actually having people checking certain economic areas.
When it comes to WoW, there were really only couple of things you could do to obtain the best proffit when it came to RMT and noone ever used to check those spots or places (even when the only thing you had to do is check 2 dungeons or one map where certain resource spawn). When they implemented this last HUGE WAVE of BANs, wich was to a degree effective, the prices of the usual goods skyrocketed, and in some servers are making people starve to death and even pushing the prices of GOLD to really high values. This is because the economy was entirely driven by RMT playes abusing certain systems. The same happened in Lineage2 Classic.
Sorry for overextending. And again I'm really excited with the project and as long I can help you with something, you can count on me for anything.
I believe allowing multiboxing under the conductions that have been defined is the best solution for the situation. The amount of effort to restrict it further would be a gross waste of resources. If someone wants to spend 8 hours on each account individually, that is up to them and how they spend there time. As long as they can't get 8 hours of progress on both accounts at the same time. The technical difficulties and manual GM time sink to try and go after multiboxers who are manually managing both accounts will be a massive waste of time and could be better spent focusing on things that have a higher negative impact such as Botters/Gold Sellers/Hackers/helping users with real issues.
If multiboxing is allowed, are there restrictions that you would prefer to be in place?
The restrictions detailed are already good. I'd even say letting a single person have both clients open at the same time on the same machine is fine. As long as they can only interact and provide input to a single client at a time (no macro / scripts / automation). The amount of ways to trick/bypass the single machine requirement are so wide and varied, you will get so little return for your efforts trying to stop people from running VMs or VPN spoofing or one of the other 100s of tricks. Just check out https://shadow.tech/ things like this could let me manually interact with multiple gaming VMs from my single desktop.
How do you prevent false positives on enforcement for families and friends who play from the same home?
Good luck, I don't plan to multibox because I'm lazy, but I work in IT and I have a huge number of ways to hide any chance of ever being detected. Show me a detection method and I'll bypass it without much effort. Now detecting scripts / macros / 3rd party programs, there is a lot of options to correctly track those types of activities and go after them. The number of open source machine learning tools out there to parse user behavior data to detect scripted/macro behavior is pretty impressive these days.
The problem is that there is no way for Intrepid to distinguish the two scenarios.
if the ideia of the game is that the players decisions and interactions will drive the world history, so they should aim for the minimum number of boxs possible that one player can open and be bannable using any kinda of program or macro, imo.
see, if the goal is an mmo where intereactions, decisions, and everything will be drive by players, when you allow multiboxing, you allowing ppl to avoid this ideia, this core mecanic you guys are trying to create. i dont have any ideia of what you guys can do, but what i fell on my years of experience in mmo`s, is that when multiboxing is allowed, within time, you start to see more and more 'player' and less interactions, and on this point, the game start to be boring. well, thats what i think guys. (:
Just because you don't have a solution doesn't mean you shouldn't identify the problem.
Agreed, no autonomous system will be able to accurately detect someone multi-boxing, a stance against it will require real moderation and player reporting systems. overtime data tracking will likely make patterns of behavior to reveal farming locations botters and multi-boxers will use but again that will become easier over time as they get reported at certain locations and behaviors can be identified.
Many people are getting lost in the idea that if we ban multi-boxing that means multiplayer households are also banned and that is not true cause a simple IP ban won't stop multi boxers so it's not even a strategy worth implementing and/or People playing multiple accounts is multi-boxing. it's not if they are not playing both at the same time.
Account bans. and maybe you could incentivize reporting multi-boxers by giving the person who reported them a share of their loot/stash. or give it to the node progression/construction as the multi-boxer would have been stealing resources from it. this will encourage players to report bad behavior. also removing their freeholds and owned property will benefit everyone else in the node who is playing legitimately. so we need to encourage accurate reporting of behaviors that we don't want in the game.
If we allow it, we allow multi-boxers to have a bigger impact in the economy, artisan, and freehold systems as well as being able to easily pool resources to a single character/account and gain ownership of more desirable in-game items and housing locations.
Where I do agree "There is absolutely no reason for it to exist", you state a lot of issues with multiboxes, but provide 0 solutions. I'd love to hear how YOU would solve this if you were Intrepid.
I believe the choices here, by the devs, are fair. As (unlike in Archeage) it'll be extremely difficult to completely benefit from multiboxing. Following from your example: Yes, you can buy more freeholds, etc, etc. But then you have more Freeholds to (personally) protect during sieges and monster coin events.
To me, given the other variables the game introduces (such as limited resources and random/non-deterministic respawn) multiboxing has minimum (or rather very little) player advantages and therefore, doesn't pose a concern/threat.
Playing on diferent PCs is completely fine and it makes no sense to discuss it.
However, the thing that concerns me most is freeholds. They are one per account and you will have to min/max your freehold to be the most efficient at farming/breeding/processing/food buffs/ whatever else they implement. If one player had multiple accounts in order to have multiple freeholds they could maximize the resources they are outputting whether its mounts, ingredients, or other. This requires no sort of scripts or macros to accomplish and one player could produce multiples of what a solo account player could produce.
The real question is how to prevent this from being abused, which is extremely difficult to answer without knowing the depth at which freeholds will effect game play to begin with. Thinking through all the different scenarios I could, I have only come up with one solution thus far, reducing the production rates of a freehold to be a fraction of what someone would get out in the world gathering. That in itself could have negative effects elsewhere, like the economy. Due to not knowing the inner workings of a lot of systems, it's way harder to identify potential exploits and their overall effects so all we can do is speculate.
TLDR;
Multiboxing could mean min/max freeholds on multiple accounts for mass profits w/o any scripts or macros
This may also be a method of circumventing the caravan system.
As an example my friends and i have talked about planning a big LAN party for the launch of this game so we can all get together and have a good time. If you stop more than one account per household, you're essentially preventing Lan parties, college students in a large dorm, or families from playing together. Will some people who have more money and time find ways around it? sure, but if they want to go through all that effort that's on them.
I just hope we still Let Families and friends play together under the same roof.
PS: This is complete sarcasm and it's just a joke but I'm guessing some people won't read this part so let me just...face palm...
How did you figure it out? I guess I have to stop multiboxing 300 computers now...
Without automation, it will be almost impossible in Ashes to run any more than 2 characters at a time.
If you see a group of that size, just report them.
When I multibox (in the games I have done that in the past), I am in your group, tanking and healing. You won't even notice - in fact, you'll probably be having different conversations with me on each character.
It is easy to spot botting. Multiboxing happens literally right under your nose and you don't see it.
I think the most detrimental form of multi-boxing is to farm double resources or even PVPing to prevent others from getting the resources, it's also the most easily identified
it is harder to identify a multi-boxer in a dungeon with skill and macros to use the full range of abilities on both characters. so that would be a low-risk activity for you. but continuing to multi-box in the world and farm resources or navigate around the world will likely be more noticeable.
Ashes of Creation has been marketing a no pay to win model for a while now so allowing multi-boxing even with restrictions seems to be a slight turn from what they have preached.
Also, the argument of "It is really hard to catch a mutli-boxer" but that doesn't mean it can't be against the terms of service and if it stops a pay to win aspect then doesn't matter if its "hard" its what they have been promising us. Or this "You might ban people from the same household" well botting is still against ToS for MMOs even though some people get unjustly banned because some companies thought they were botting.
I'm not expecting Ashes to have a full-proof way of stopping multi-boxing just like how current MMOs can't stop all the botting.
In the end if they allow mutli-boxing I would consider them still walking their talk but their walk wouldn't be that impressive to me.
I have my own rules that I go by if I am multiboxing. The first of these is that I can not get any more than one action out of any one key press. I've played games (GW2, among others) that don't even follow this rule for one character - and I refuse to play those games.
If I am travelling in the world, you won't see me as a multiboxer at all. You may not even see both/all three of my characters, as they are all controlled individually. I only use auto-follow in games where I am controlling 4 or more characters at once - and that absolutely won't be Ashes.
If you see me out gathering resources, you will see one character harvesting one patch, while the other is running around looking for something else to harvest - basically like any other two characters that are harvesting together.
Basically, the only way you will know that I am multiboxing is if I tell you that I am.