Discussion: Limit the number of accounts to 1 per player and add an ID (Passport e.g.) to each

Hello,

the reason why I am posting here is because of the FAQ video of Steven Sharif on youtube. He impressed me and he gave me serious hope that Ashes of Creation might be the game that I will nolife for the next decade or more. He states that he wants to get the best product, and I got the impression that he (unlike other developers) cares about the longevity and health of his game more than he does about shortterm profit maximization. As far as I understand it he is not under financial preasure like other studios. So this is the first time that I dare to share my thoughts on a game forum, and I hope that I don't get torn appart by the community for it.

For the longest time Developers have stated that they try to fight cheating, botting, goldselling and whatever else. But the reality is that botters and multiboxers (I assume that is the majority of the sold gold comes from botters) rule the servers of many (all?) mmos. The reason why developers / Game Studios usually don't react to such problems are
a) botters sometimes run hundreds or in extreme cases thousands of accounts on lots of computers (using virtual machines / vpns to hide their identity) -> they have to either buy the game or subscribe (more income)
b) the developer has to either buy or develop software to detect behavior of the bots, as well as hire moderators / programmers to keep it in check or in my experience to show the community of their game that they work hard to fight cheating a.k.a. public relations (that the botters have to rebuy banned accounts in some cases like in Diablo3 for example, helps too) -> higher costs for the developer / game studio

There are two major problems (that I see) with having multiple accounts, and because of the small server size of 10000 players the impact of the issue might be devastating:

I. Influence on the Economy

1. To many Characters with mastered professions

I have played quite a bit of Albion Online, and I can tell you that it is indeed a huge problem for the economy. As soon as a player has a second account, he can basically get as many maxed out mastery trees as he can create alts. That means that every dedicated hardcore (later semi hardcore too) player will have every single profession maxed out, if he choses to put in the effort. First it will be limited to crafting as that takes almost no time at all to level. You simply put your crafter near the crafting station or whatever you need to craft, and deliver the materials with your second account. A little while after release people will start to have enough gold to straight up buy the supply and focus on crafting / refining, if they want to. The entire idea behind the limited ability to max out your profession mastery / skilltree, from what I understand, is to ensure that rare goods / materials stay valuable, even long after launch. And that is simply not going to happen if the mastery of many professions is common for many players. One way to prevent that from happening would be to limit the mastery of a profession to one character per player.

2. Effect on supply and demand

With the increasing acquisition rate of resources per player and the diminishing demand because of decreasing server population, the economy will suffer from the imbalance. Because of the fixed server population of 10000 players, the damage to the economy will be even bigger than it is the case in other mmos. While in other games the X ammount of extra accounts per player just add to the ammount of accounts on the server (no influence, just X accounts more...), in this game it reduces the ammount of players at the same time by the same ammount X. Meaning that every single account that is added to a single player reduces the server population by one. That means the effect of multiboxing (or worse: botting) on the economy will be elevated depending on the number of additional accounts per player on average.

II. Influence on the server population or lifeliness (is that the right word?) of the game

The entire playerdriven world suffers from having fake population, as there are less players to do real activities like pvp or dungeons. Remember, the servers are going to be very small, with only up to 10000 players. Reduce the already small number by the ammount of people that only play a couple of hours per week, and you have an empty server. Is that really the vision you had in mind Mr Developer?

III. Fairplay

I want the work that I put into the game to matter. I want to see a result if I work harder / more than somebody else. What I do not want is for somebody else to cheat his way to victory and make my effort meaningless.

The reason why I believe that adding a real ID to every single account is the only realistic option to have a fair and awesome game with an active server and a working economy is because there is no workaround. A botter cannot suddenly come up with 1000 passports for each of his accounts, he cannot use virtual machines and vpns to work around the hurdles that the developer tries to implement. Goldsellers would have a hard time to do their illegal business as well. Besides that, the debate about Family members playing with one ip would find an end as well. Everybody would win, well every player that is interested in having a fair and awesome game. The cheaters goldsellers and botters would be the losers, I wouldn't shed a tear...

These are just my thoughts on the topic, if you happen to think otherwise I won't blame you. Please be polite if you discuss the topic, thank you.

Best regards

Sam

Edit:

Using several computers as sugested in the poll about multiboxing does NOT solve the issue, as people simply use a virtual machine (software to emulate a compter system), I am pretty sure that many people that voted for that are simply not aware of the fact that several computers will have zero effect.

Edit2:

Apparently the maximum ammount of registered accounts is supposed to be 50000, that makes things a little less dramatic. It does not change the fact that it is a problem tho.

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Comments

Vhaeyne

I too am worried about many of the issues you bring up. I like the idea of 1 character per server per account. To try and mitigate abuse and promote fair play.

I can't support any form of Real ID system. I wont play any game that require the use of such personal information on principle alone.

I can also say that you are just creating a black market. Before TERA made it to the US, one of my friends was very excited about the game and bought the use of two Korean social security numbers to play the game. I was surprised to learn that this is even a service, but thanks to it I got to experience on my friends alt account Korean TERA long before Blue hole brought it over to NA.

I am not saying everyone would be dealing with the black market, and that your ideas would not help solve the problems you want to address. I just feel like requiring such personal information is very extreme.

Having to pay a extra sub for each character on the server though. That is a barrier to entry I reasonably support.

deakbo

1 character per person. Nothing more only way to keep the game non pay to win. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Atiqa

That would be off-putting to a lot of players to give out such information. I certainly wouldn't do it if that means giving it out to my.com

Also while I don't know much about linking accounts to passport ID, I'd assume it's not very easy to make that work, if it's even legal in all countries.

Vhaeyne

kuddah wrote: »

1 character per person. Nothing more only way to keep the game non pay to win. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The problem is proving that without violating privacy. It would be a disaster if intrepid got hacked while storing all of the personal information required to enforce such a system

Kohl

There's nothing they can do client or server side that will prevent multiboxing. So just drop this topic once and for all.

And ID is plain stupid.
Why the fuck wiuld I even be willing to give sensitive information for a game? And if I were, I'd just use my parents and grandparents IDs. 6 new accounts, easy.

Also, multiboxing is not cheating, running third party tools IS.

So let them focus on that.

Noaani

@Samtrump
A few misconceptions you have.

First of all, multiboxers and botters as terms can not and should not be used interchangebly, nor should gold sellers.

Most gold sellers do not bot to make the gold they sell - they buy it off of players. The botting groups you see are usually people that are misinformed in to thinking that is where gold sellers get their product from.

Botting is easy to detect.

Second, botters do not run hundreds of accounts. The most egregous run a few dozen. These things are very easy to detect, and games that actually care about their players do not have an issue in dealing with this kind of thing.

As an aside, Blizzard do not care about this kind of thing, and so any system they have in place (buying back accounts in Diablo 3, as an example) is completely ineffective at actually dealing with bots. Blizzards decisions are made with only the bottom line in consideration - this is why they will leave people botting with 40 paid accounts in WoW, and why people can re-buy accounts in Diablo 3, both put more money in Blizzards pockets, even if they have a net zero effect on the number of botters in the game.

Next, the server population is 10,000 players - but that is concurrent players. Most other MMO's only have 4,000 - 5,000. So, server population in Ashes will be quite high.

Lastly, not everyone that plays the game will have a passport, nor should it be a requirement. Even if passports were a requirement, they are quite easy to get hold of in some countries, making this system almost worthless if implemented.

All of the above is - of course - without getting in to the level of data security that Intrepid would need to prove they have in order to be able to hold passport data, nor is it going in to the implications that would arise if there was a data breech - both for Intrepid and for players.

Ulquiorra

I'd have LOVED the idea of 1 character per player if at least primary classes weren't restricted. It's already a huge commitment to work on four different gear sets for STR AGI INT VIT. I just want equalized PvP without needing to level up 64 characters -_-

Edit: By "at least" I meant with restriction on artisan classes so processing/crafting alts won't be META.

Rhorden

@Kohl That's the rub isn't it? AoC wants to do multiboxing, so that wouldn't be cheating but how do they catch the people that are cheating by running the programs and using the software and hardware. Multiboxing is pandoras box and once you open it a little people will abuse it. Making it against the rules would stop most people from trying just because they wouldn't want to gamble losing their accounts. It would be far better to take hard stance against it from the get go than to let it creep in until it's too big of a problem to stop.
The bigger question though is since Steven stated there will be no pay to win in AoC how can multiboxing even be considered to be allowed into the game?

CaptnChuck

I can't believe that this post even exists. Linking your passport to your account? Are you stupid?

People seem to believe that banning multiboxing is easy to do. If it was, several companies would have already done it.

Almost every single MMO you've played, has allowed multiboxing and it hasn't ruined any of them. Not even WoW. WoW allows key broadcasting and also allows multiple clients on the same PC, resulting in 40-man multiboxers.

If even WoW has not been ruined by multiboxing, then it shows that its not that big of an issue. So stop complaining about it.

Also @Samtrump @noaani , the server size is 50k. 10k is the limit for the no. of active players on a server.

Vhaeyne

Rhorden wrote: »

The bigger question though is since Steven stated there will be no pay to win in AoC how can multiboxing even be considered to be allowed into the game?

It exists because there is no reasonable way to prevent it. Linking accounts to real world identity does not even work.

I don't think AoC is inviting multi-boxing into the game to get more revenue like blizzard does. I am betting they are allowing it because it is the only reasonable action they can take. To ask for such extreme personal information is risky for both intrepid and the player base.

A sizable leak of personal information could potentially end the company, and thus the game. Nobody wants that.

Noaani

CaptnChuck wrote: »

10k is the limit for the no. of active players on a server.

That is what I said, the concurrent number of players per server.

Grievousness

CaptnChuck wrote: »

People seem to believe that banning multiboxing is easy to do. If it was, several companies would have already done it.

What is hard about adding the option to report someone for multiboxing?
It is fairly obvious when someone is key broadcasting and runs around with multiple player characters.
Just because you have no 100% perfect automated solution that does not mean you cannot prevent any multiboxing at all.

CaptnChuck wrote: »

If even WoW has not been ruined by multiboxing, then it shows that its not that big of an issue. So stop complaining about it.

Even if the impact of it isn't big enough to ruin an entire game, it sure can be annoying.
Put simply it contradicts the concept of a level playing field.
WOW is kind of a bad example since there isn't that much stuff a multiboxer can do that actually affects other players.

Even if you cannot fully prevent the issue, the devs could still declare that they don't want it to be a big thing and keep an eye on it.

Kohl

Rhorden wrote: »

@Kohl That's the rub isn't it? AoC wants to do multiboxing, so that wouldn't be cheating but how do they catch the people that are cheating by running the programs and using the software and hardware. Multiboxing is pandoras box and once you open it a little people will abuse it. Making it against the rules would stop most people from trying just because they wouldn't want to gamble losing their accounts. It would be far better to take hard stance against it from the get go than to let it creep in until it's too big of a problem to stop.
The bigger question though is since Steven stated there will be no pay to win in AoC how can multiboxing even be considered to be allowed into the game?

ID and passport, yeah nobody is going to do that.
That being said. Have you considered what will happen to net cafe businesses if multiboxing wasn't allowed? Or people living in the same household? How do you screen them?

When you say multiboxing. All I'm hearing is the ability for a client to run simultaneously from the same IP.
Whether it's from different computers or the same computer is besides the point. IS stated they'll allow it as long as is 1 computer per person. So people in your household can also play the game with you.

"Making it against the rules."
It is against the rules for people to abuse this by running botting scripts and whatever else there exists. What you mean to probably say is "They should find a way to block it preventing people to ever be able to use it in first place" but that's just not possible.

Multiboxing isn't pay2win. If a single person has the ability to control 2 character simultaneously without using 3th party scripts and whatever else there is, its not p2w. It's skills. He's leaving 1 character to control another. He's not controlling both 'at the same time'. Unless helped with illegal 3th party tools.

People keep misinterpreting "multiboxing."
No. Multiboxing isn't p2w. People using it to run 3th party tools for cheating is cheating. Multiboxing in on itself is not p2w.

IS can just screen the processes for those tools, and ban people respectively. They can detect those programs with ease, and issue bans. What they must not under any circumstance do is allow free-trials. That's where those who use multiboxing to cheat shine.

HiddenDaggerInn

this post seems less to do with multiple accounts to me and more to do with I don't want to have or can't have another account and I'm worried it won't be fair.

If it is a legit 2nd account , they still have to PLAY it to level it up.

Not only will people need another computer, you have to have 2 subs, that alone will deter many people. You may see some, but taking over AoC I highly doubt.

Samtrump

noaani wrote: »

@Samtrump
A few misconceptions you have.

First of all, multiboxers and botters as terms can not and should not be used interchangebly, nor should gold sellers.

First of all, I am pretty aware of the fact what all of these are, I am pretty damn sure that (almost?) everyone knows what the difference is between them. I am not sure what that comment is supposed to accomplish.

noaani wrote: »

Most gold sellers do not bot to make the gold they sell - they buy it off of players. The botting groups you see are usually people that are misinformed in to thinking that is where gold sellers get their product from.

"Most gold sellers do not", that is simply a different way of saying "sometimes" they do, or some do.

noaani wrote: »

Botting is easy to detect.

I believe you, I once read a statement from a bot developer that the developer could easily detect their bot if they chose to. The reason why nobody in the business does anything against it are economic, I hoped that the two examples I gave would be enough for you to understand what the problem is. Apparently it was not enough, or you did not try to understand it. I will gladly try to explain it to you again:
The reasons why there is nothing (close to nothing) done about it are economical. There are three main components to the decisionmaking in that case:
a) Costs of taking actions against botting - you need to hire people to develop a system and maintain it, to monitor it. I am sure there is a lot of work to do, even if detecting bots is "easy". All of that costs money, and those costs are fix, for as long as you want that system to be in place. Only the manhours for the development of the system will go down as soon as the system is set up.
b)Expected change in turnover due to the investment - So the developer sets up a system to detect and punish botting, they pay money for it, they hire staff, they develop. That is an investment, and the expected immediate outcome of the investment is negative (as long as the botter e.g. has to pay for subscriptions if he has to buy accounts from the developer). And if you went to business school you know that this directly contradicts the highest goal of any business, profit maximization.
c)Expected change in brand value, longterm change in turnover - If the investment is not directly leading to an increase in profit, does it affect future sales / subscriptions and so on?

If the overall expectation of negative outcome cannot be justified by midterm increase in brand value / turnover there will be a clear economic decision against the investment. Even if the expected longterm value would be positive, there is a huge risk for stock companies to decide for the investment because of the possible course crashes. That is the reason why I even mentioned the sole shareholder of the company, as he does not have that risk. As he said in his interview, he can take risks that other companies cannot.

noaani wrote: »

Second, botters do not run hundreds of accounts. The most egregous run a few dozen. These things are very easy to detect, and games that actually care about their players do not have an issue in dealing with this kind of thing.

I do in fact personaly know one person that built the capital for his business exactly like I described. He programmed a bot for WoW, started botting on many accounts and added more and more computers, more and more accounts as he earned more money selling gold on his websites. He did indeed not only bot, you got that part right. He had at some point close to 5000 D3 accounts wich he leveled and geared via botting. Those accounts got sold when they had a reasonable gearlevel. You may or may not believe me, that is up to you, I sounds unreal because it is. Saying that it does not exist is ignorant tho. I said that "botters sometimes run hundreds or in extreme cases thousands of accounts", the key words to read here are "sometimes" and "extreme", that is pretty accurate I would say. The majority of botters have 1-10 bots running I would assume, and just to keep guessing I would think that the majority of botters don't build a business on botting.
I do not blame you for not believing that , as I would not have believed it myself before I got to know that person.

noaani wrote: »

As an aside, Blizzard do not care about this kind of thing, and so any system they have in place (buying back accounts in Diablo 3, as an example) is completely ineffective at actually dealing with bots. Blizzards decisions are made with only the bottom line in consideration - this is why they will leave people botting with 40 paid accounts in WoW, and why people can re-buy accounts in Diablo 3, both put more money in Blizzards pockets, even if they have a net zero effect on the number of botters in the game.

Again, "do not care about this kind of thing" is not part of the decicionmaking in a company. I explained it already, economic reasons....

noaani wrote: »

Next, the server population is 10,000 players - but that is concurrent players. Most other MMO's only have 4,000 - 5,000. So, server population in Ashes will be quite high.

All I repeatedly heard is that the server cap is going to be 10000 accounts. If that is incorrect I would ask you to link a source of information that states otherwise. The game does attract a lot of minmaxers, a lot of hardcore players, even if many of them wont be able to play 40+hours per week, they got the hardcore mindset I would assume. So I see a lot of people multiboxing in this game. If the percentage of people having several accounts on the server is high, what it could be if the advantage of having several accounts is significant enough, the negative influence on the game would be huge. If for example 1000 players had a second account, that would be 1000 less actual players, and that is already 10% of the maximum allowed players on one server. And in my experience (I've done it myself) people got more than just one extra account, in other games i had 5-10 accounts at once. That is a huge problem.

By the way, only people that want to multibox are upset about it and voice their concern in such manner. Why else would somebody be so unreasonable?

About the real ID:

In Korea for example it is standard to have real IDs linked to game accounts, from my knowledge. It was just a sugestion, and I do understand that people feel uncomfortable with it. I don't mind, if it makes the game better. You have to link your real ID to every single poker or casino account, you send your ID via email for
many things e.g. requesting a document from the government if you cannot be there in person, and so on. So I do not see the problem there.

Taten

Enforcing something like this just isnt logistical.

1 character per server? No. Alts have been a large thing in the MMO community since its inception. Having 1 character is pretty high on the fantasy scale of things. Intrepid have already said 5 characters will be the max I believe? I think this is a solid number instead of 10 like WoW also having it be a large time investment to be able to level and increase crafting skills discourages large amounts of alts being played already.

ID's saved to accounts so u can only have one? What happens if Intrepid get hacked? then all the personal information of (potentially) millions is compromised.

The issue with this comes to people with multiple gamers in the house-hold and dealing with a large number of false flags in their system they'd have to manually sort out...

While multi-boxing and the like is troublesome and can be difficult the best thing to do is break the program pathing that allows tthe multi-box program to function but its difficult because the people who make those programs find ways around the fixes for them constantly.

IMHO no serious player of MMO's will multi-box. The people who do that are the one's who want to find some type of power over other people or just DONT want to play with other and the way that this seems to be setting up right now will make it very difficult for them to actually form parties and solo dungeons like they do in Warcraft.

Samtrump

Taten wrote: »

Enforcing something like this just isnt logistical.

1 character per server? No. Alts have been a large thing in the MMO community since its inception. Having 1 character is pretty high on the fantasy scale of things. Intrepid have already said 5 characters will be the max I believe? I think this is a solid number instead of 10 like WoW also having it be a large time investment to be able to level and increase crafting skills discourages large amounts of alts being played already.

ID's saved to accounts so u can only have one? What happens if Intrepid get hacked? then all the personal information of (potentially) millions is compromised.

The issue with this comes to people with multiple gamers in the house-hold and dealing with a large number of false flags in their system they'd have to manually sort out...

While multi-boxing and the like is troublesome and can be difficult the best thing to do is break the program pathing that allows tthe multi-box program to function but its difficult because the people who make those programs find ways around the fixes for them constantly.

IMHO no serious player of MMO's will multi-box. The people who do that are the one's who want to find some type of power over other people or just DONT want to play with other and the way that this seems to be setting up right now will make it very difficult for them to actually form parties and solo dungeons like they do in Warcraft.

I am not sure why you write one character per server? One account per player is what I am asking for. For alts, I only mention alts because the developer said in his FAQ that he wants the mastery of professions to be a unique thing, to keep the rarest of goods valuable. Please read the opening post again, and my last post, maybe that claryfies things for you. Thank you.

Lena

Server population
Population limits will be enforced on each server.[358]

Around 8-10k concurrent users per server is projected.[354][359][360] This represents around 50,000 registered accounts per server.[361]
The developers intend to carefully manage server populations to avoid the need to merge servers.[53] There may be queues to get into high population servers, but the aim is to avoid excessively long queues.[361]

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Ashes_of_Creation#Server_population

sternzy

The only way fix this issue is a real ID system, it has always ever been the only answer. Even this isn't 100% fool proof but it is by far as close as you will ever come with the added benefit of becoming more effective over time. Combine this with a cellphone requirement and you would likely have if not perfect the most secure and fair game in history. Cheating/exploiting has become so rampant these days I rarely if ever even play FPS any more.

The issue has historically rarely if ever been addressed. Logically speaking most people would be inclined to assume it is because the more accounts someone is playing from the more money that brings in subscriptions.

As Steven has spoken of recently, the only reason I play MMOs if for the challenge, to be competitive and to push myself to be the best I can possibly be. Stuff like multiple accounts/multiboxing is a blatant exploit of the most basic mechanics to try and get a leg up on everyone else who plays by the norm/rules and good sportsmanship in good faith. This is a huge turn off for me knowing that I am playing at a disadvantage in any aspect of the game and it isn't being addressed by developers.

Noaani

Samtrump wrote: »

First of all, I am pretty aware of the fact what all of these are, I am pretty damn sure that (almost?) everyone knows what the difference is between them. I am not sure what that comment is supposed to accomplish.

The point of that comment was to demonstrate to you that you are complaining about an issue with botters, yet are suggesting a way to remove multiboxers from the game.

If you are indeed aware that these are different things, then the premise of your entire OP is flawed.

The way to remove botters from a game is to detect botters and ban those accounts - which even you have said a developer could do if they wanted to.

This then leaves the question, if a developer wanted to get rid of bots, they would do that. If they didn't want to get rid of bots, they wouldn't use an I.D. system like you are suggesting - so again, false premise.

I do in fact personaly know one person that built the capital for his business exactly like I described. He programmed a bot for WoW, started botting on many accounts and added more and more computers, more and more accounts as he earned more money selling gold on his websites. He did indeed not only bot, you got that part right. He had at some point close to 5000 D3 accounts wich he leveled and geared via botting. Those accounts got sold when they had a reasonable gearlevel. You may or may not believe me, that is up to you, I sounds unreal because it is. Saying that it does not exist is ignorant tho. I said that "botters sometimes run hundreds or in extreme cases thousands of accounts", the key words to read here are "sometimes" and "extreme", that is pretty accurate I would say. The majority of botters have 1-10 bots running I would assume, and just to keep guessing I would think that the majority of botters don't build a business on botting.
I do not blame you for not believing that , as I would not have believed it myself before I got to know that person.

Note you are talking about two Blizzard games - a company that is well known to not actually care about their games as long as they are making money.

Also, Diablo is not an MMO, and so basically no comments made in general on these forums apply to it.

All I repeatedly heard is that the server cap is going to be 10000 accounts. If that is incorrect I would ask you to link a source of information that states otherwise.

Nope, you can look it up yourself.

As a hint, every single time you see reference to the server dount being 10,000, if you actually look up the source for that, you will see the word "concurrent" in there.

About the real ID:

In Korea for example it is standard to have real IDs linked to game accounts, from my knowledge.

They do, but they use a type of identity that is best compared to a social security number, just without the implications if it were ever leaked - and is easy enough as a system to get around. I was using one to play Archeage in Korea before it was released in NA/EU - I've never been to korea, nor met anyone from korea, yet was able to get a number to be able to play the game.

Ideas are good, unless they are bad ideas. This is a bad idea.

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