In the other thread I was talking about IP addresses being worth knowing about, and I think it's true, though I'd like
to clarify I don't care much about multiplaying and my interest in IP's wouldn't be defeating multiplayers.

In my experience 90% of the people who break your rules and need an IP ban don't seem to circumvent
the ban. Whether it's because they don't know how, or it's just inconvenient enough not to be worth circumventing,
or they're now following the rules under another name, I don't know. I do know that even at 30%, it's not a tool I'd
blithely dismiss as worthless.

Sure there are concerns about some cases where a natted IP means you have to judge whether you
want to throw away the baby with the bathwater, that is certainly true. But that alone is not reason
enough to dispense with the ability to get rid of the bathwater in the obvious cases where a baby is not in it.

I agree it's a flawed tool. I'm not sure I'm all the way aboard with its imperfection equaling uselessness,
as a practical rather than theoretical matter.

In the more-on-topic case of spotting multiplaying, I once again stress that it's easier just to make it
unmeaningfully advantageous to multiplay. But if you do want to have a simple, "get the obvious ones
too ignorant or lazy to overcome an IP ban", there's nothing wrong with having that as a first line filter,
if multiplaying is something that bothers you.

And really even at say, 10% fewer, that's unpaid work you didn't have to perform sorting them out
manually. Of course, in Achaea's case, there might be even more incentive to automate the process :)

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

What's so bad about multiplaying anyways?

A quick example is a game where a low-level puzzle involves speaking "friend" in elvish, but
learning languages is expensive and your character's native language is something
else and rolled very low int so learning a language is even more expensive.

A one-time use elf alt solves this nicely. Perhaps to some people that is an amusing and valid
choice, perhaps to others it defeats the carefully balanced game design choices they made.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Like Crat, I prefer that players experience the full range of classes / playing styles the game can offer. Multi-playing, although rare, is more often used to share useful characters such as max-level enchanters who are logged in only to enhance and locate items, and are then gone. This not only deprives individuals of ever experiencing the game as an enchanter, but it also presents unfair advantage over players who don't have the password for a 60-level enchanter. Multi-playing can also be used to generally 'help yourself out' by grouping several of your own alts. This degrades a very important community aspect of my game where everyone is interdependent and so is forced to be nice to others (as a result, PvP is almost symbolic, and full of apologies on both sides). While I'm not religiously opposed to multi-playing, I do want to discourage it in my particular game for these reasons.

Actually, the system I'm outlining is less aimed at limiting multi-play and more geared towards providing conveniences to players who voluntarily link their alts. Some of the things I'm planning include combined rent discounts, shared nobility titles, ease of use for private houses and storage, automatic ability to loot an alt's corpse, ability to manage inventories entirely offline, etc. And last but not least, the obvious reason for asking people to register an email address is so we can reach them with occasional quest announcements, major events, etc. Those who provide a real email address can also get automatic password reminders, etc.

I'm sure many of the above reasons to know unique players apply to MUDs regardless of whether they have multi-play restrictions or not.

It's not that you can't BAN an IP address and manage to have it work 90% of the time. It's that you get false positives.

If you banned me, you'd also ban my two housemates, even though they have NOTHING TO DO with whatever I did to get banned. We sit behind the same NAT router on the same ISP connection. Big deal you say, sacrifice two to save dozens.

Ok, when I was in college, I played in the dorms, and in computer labs. Like many universities, each floor of the dorms had a lab, and that lab had X computers (nowadays, it'd be X wireless connections). They ALL get NAT'd to one address. So, now when you ban me, you ban the whole floor of my building, or the whole public computer lab.

In most of the workplaces I was at, servers all got their own IP, but all the developers were on a private IP LAN and shared a single IP to the outside.

The point I'm getting at is, using an IP address as any kind of identification fails, because it might refer to more than one person. MUD's are social games. I would hope it's MORE common for people who are already friends to decide to all jump on the same MUD together, than not. People who are already friends quite often live or work together, and so, if you try to use IP's as multiplay detectors, you're just hoping it's some guy with 3 windows open, rather than a family.

So, let's say you do use your IP + email option. My roomate and I decide to check out your game. You see two connections arrive from the same IP with different email's filled out. Do you believe we're multiplaying? How can we prove that we're not? I submit the only way to do so is by actually talking to you (or one of your staff) and convincing you (as a human) that we really are two different people.

Now, what happens when I'm at home and my roomate is at work, and we both log in at the same time, perhaps to chat over lunch? Now we're on DIFFERENT IP addresses, which don't match your records. Is that "game over" then?

To me, all this does is push the problem from the "I have to manually approve character creation" to "I have to manually verify that suspected multiplayers really are multiplayers." I dunno, maybe that is less work. *shrug*

So, build a better house of cards. Don't try to find a way to prevent the slightest breeze. Like with the "item locator" example, how does multiplaying actually come into play? I know some games don't want people to trade between their own characters, but they can trade with anyone else. These types of design decisions seem backwards to me, and I'm not sure your own players like them. Why not just design a game where multiplaying is not really even useful? I guess you could do that like Achaea and charge everyone out the butt. (cratlink-required) Or you could honestly make it so that multiplaying just isn't that beneficial.

A really common example in diku muds is experience. A lot of people multiplay because experience isn't shared. It's 100% across all characters in the party. So split it. Or even make a system where you get more or less experienced based on how much you contribute to a fight, not just the foe being downed. Or make it so that the combat system is engaging enough to where you can't drag around alts, and you can't effectively bot it.

How bottable is your game, KaVir?

I don't think GWII is bottable at all. But then I haven't played it very long.

Experience is calculated with a rather complex formula in my game, but that doesn't prevent people from gaining an edge when grouping with themselves and power-leveling their alts. This usually happens with new players who don't have good equipment and who need firepower badly. I'm sure that as the player base increases, this practice will become rare, but right now it's not always easy to find partners. I don't wish to punish players for the player base being small, but I do want to keep a level playing field during this early period, and those who multiplay gain an unwelcome advantage over those who don't.

The way I want to make combat fun is not by policing botting and allowing multi-play but by doing the exact opposite. I believe that playing with other people, even if you're just botting your different chars cleverly together, is more fun than playing with you, yourself, and yours. So I guess that makes us very different on a philosophical level, but we can both be right :)

I was just giving an example, I actually don't care and indeed I find the single use elf funny and wouldn't mind someone
using that solution on my mud (where it is an actual puzzle I just handed out a "cheat" for! omg!)

Nor would I mind if someone logged in a temporary mage to cast water breathing and buffer on a guy to give him an
edge against Grendel's dam.

Why not? Let's look at the worst case scenario. J. R. R. Hacker logs into my mud and spends half an hour rolling chars
until he has a full party, a perfect mage, cleric, thief, and fighter combo. These four low level chars get ganged up into
a party that tear through the low level areas with an efficiency and fury that no single character of the same
level could equal. J.R. uses their complementary skills to crush otherwise daunting mobs, uses one char to manipulate
that handle that can only be used outside that one room so the other chars can get at the quest…etc.

After laying waste to several newbie areas and quests, they've split among them the spoils that one char would
not have to share, including exp, quest points, and treasure. Their advancement may even still be stunted…where
a single char might have reached level 4 after completing their exploits, these 4 are still at 1. While it might
take the single char 4 times as long to perform the feats the party did as a group, the party still has to spend
extra time getting the rewards for *all* of them to to advance to level 4…perhaps an amount of time about the
same as our lonely single player.

And this is critical, because these four chars need to be on some rough parity, right? If you relegate your mage
to be the one outside the room casting buffs on people who go back inside to fight, eventually everyone else
will be higher level and this low level mage's buffs won't really be that much use with the mobs the party is
now facing. Ditto a big bulky mule guy who carries stuff and doesn't engage in combat. Eventually the party will
have weapons and armor for him to carry beyond his capacity so you need to bulk him up or get a mule train…
and keep track of all those drone junk carriers tramping through the aggro woods. Oh no! Where's Josh! Joosh?

And that's my point. If you're worried that people will miss out on the magic and mystery of this mud
by multiplaying, then you're not seeing that J.R. really has to master a pretty complex set of skills and
advantages and make quite alot of tradeoffs and know the mud very well indeed and frankly, if J.R. is
having fun with his little toy army and it doesn't hurt other people's enjoyment…why on earth would I care?

The game played by someone keeping track of their concurrent multichars in this way seems just as valid to me
as the single player version, if anything, it strikes me as a rather fun exercise to try and I'd feel kinda
bad discouraging it.

The main problems I'd see with single user parties involve PK and scorched earth issues, and frankly those are
so simple to address with code and building that they're hardly problems at all.

That's the worst case scenario I can think of, and the reasons it's not only not "worst", it's not
even "bad".

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Different strokes for different folks. If in your mind the ideal player of your game is someone like J. R. Hacker, who has mastered the art of alt + tab, and plays an online game without needing to team up with another living soul, then I guess I'll know where to send him if he comes to my game by mistake.

Like I said, my game has a very strong co-op aspect, and strong class specialization. Allowing mulitplay will undermine communal cohesion and make the solo classes we offer useless. I believe it will also shorten the length of the average player career - if they get to play all classes all at once, there will be no opportunity to rediscover the game with a differently able char. That's not something I care about happening.

One thing to consider is that my player base is women:men=50:50. I think if J. R. Hacker was my ideal player, the ratio would be somewhat different. Which makes me think… Maybe J. R. will like to stick around and develop some social skills instead!

I'm surprised no one's ever made a mud where you could make a team from available classes (FF1, Dragon Warrior, etc.) and play with that, rather than one single character.

I'm sure someone has, but it probably was in a unified interface for controlling the party. What might be interesting is programming multiple characters to do things, and controlling any one at any given time like some of the more unconventional RPGs in the last few years have done. Like FF12. Of course, this would be almost embracing multiplay. :P

Regrettably, GW2 is highly bottable (and botted). The bots often suck at combat against other players, but they perform adequately against mobs. In some cases, they can be effective against players as well. Making combat engaging is not a useful defense against botting.

Is the botting legal on GW2?

Yes. GW2 doesn't really have any rules.

Do people multiplay? Is it a hive of villainy and scum?

Players on my mud routinely played three to five characters cooperatively. I'd advice against it as 1) You end up with a MUD balanced towards multiplaying 2) Players go through content (most notably classes) much faster 3) Learning to multiplay five characters is too challenging for most oldbies - to such a degree you'll rarely see anyone multiplay cooperatively even on MUDs that do allow it 4) You'll attract a kind of players you may not want to attract.

In the sense of having multiple characters online at once, yes. Exchanging gear between characters, yes. Running multiple characters simultaneously is much less frequent, except for Freakazoid, and people botting war.

It seemed to me to be mostly the same as other muds, but not much bothers me. Gossip can be pretty nasty in comparison, but it's optional, and I don't know why anyone would ever watch it. There's also Fraust. I suppose that's a yes. It's not much different from other muds when there aren't any staff around to police channels. Sometimes people try to be offensive, but they generally don't bother. Botting is more prevalent than it might be on a game that explicitly forbids it.

I'm mostly in favor KaVir's approach, if that answers your question.

People at school or work shouldn't play at all :P

With free IPv4 addresses being depleted in a few months, the ISPs may install NAT, too, giving private IP adresses to the people. So a group of people from that one ISP may share the same public IP address…

They rarely do well against players, as they can be built against. Bots also tend to get farmed by other players - I've even had a player complain to me that people kept killing his bot and stealing its primal. Another player used to follow a bot around and steal all the loot drops.

The experienced botters used to program their bots to quit if they died more than a few times, so that they could manually adjust their build before letting them loose again. But with the way boosts and daily kills work, the advantages of botting (even if unharassed) are fairly minimal. And then there are things like tasks, which can't really be botted.

It's only really the Great Wars that are a problem IMO. People have stopped botting them for now, but some of the war bots were quite effective.