What's wrong with people?

[Potjeh]

One character per account, for starters, among other "anti-zerging" measures that Nexus War had.

LOL.

[Winterbrass]

One character per account, for starters, among other "anti-zerging" measures that Nexus War had.

LOL.

Ace contribution, champ. Care to elaborate?

[Potjeh]

I have seven accounts.

[Winterbrass]

I have seven accounts.

Naturally, that would have to be curbed as well.

[Gauteamus]

You actually can, very easily.
One character per account, for starters, among other "anti-zerging" measures that Nexus War had.

This is basically how it works today - there are a number of reasons to keep your alts on different accounts and not much to gain from having them gathered on the same account. What were the other anti-zerg measures in Nexus? How would you limit the number of accounts per player (other than the pay-"small"-fee-to-open-account route)?

EDIT: ninja'ed

[Winterbrass]

What were the other anti-zerg measures in Nexus?

Well, the number one anti-zerging measure was secrecy - if you don't know what's going to get your account frozen, locked, or deleted, you tend to not push things too much.

Nexus War permitted people to have multiple characters, however. It simply forced the players to keep their alts away from each other and not have them interact.

If the player had alts in the same faction (guild/village), the entire faction suffered (factions gave their members bonuses based on specializations). If the player brought their alts too close together on the world map, they would suffer various disadvantages such as penalties to Search (Perception/Exploration), and to-hit. If Alt X hit someone and Alt Y came along later to hit them, Alt Y would deal no damage and gain no XP. That sort of thing. Jorm was far more creative, knowledgeable, and thorough than I am, so necessarily, I'm forgetting things or simply was not aware of some. But yes, from what I gather, the time before the punishments would wear off had at least some element of randomness. Sometimes a matter of hours, other times, days.

ETA: With regards to crimes against people, claims, and villages, my suggestion would be that the minimum time for forced non-interaction would be at least a week. So, if you steal something from my claim on Friday, none of your alts can even trespass onto my claim for a full 7 days RL.

EDIT2:

How would you limit the number of accounts per player (other than the pay-"small"-fee-to-open-account route)?

I don't believe in positive reinforcement. Fear of punishment should be sufficient motivation to prevent people from abusing game features. If the devs said 'one account per player' and a player opened a second account, they should, upon discovery, be permabanned from the game.

[Chakravanti]

If you're going to make suggestions you really shoudl be up to par with the things the devs have said about how they plan to develop the game.

In this case the fact that they do not care to police the population into playing a certain way.

[Winterbrass]

If you're going to make suggestions you really shoudl be up to par with the things the devs have said about how they plan to develop the game.

In this case the fact that they do not care to police the population into playing a certain way.

On the other hand, you also have the fact that they want numbers to have an impact on combat, and that they want even large differences in skill to be fairly similar in terms of power - this means that equipment is going to make all of the difference. As has been mentioned before, the 'throwaway alt' is a concern. Especially when it's ten throwaway alts on ten throwaway accounts. I have read some material.

Enough to know that while they don't want to do 'policing' per se, that there is nothing wrong with restrictions. Some people would say 'artificial' restrictions, but there is nothing more out-of-character than Jim-Bob attacking Mary-Sue because Mary-Sue killed Jim-Bob's other character last week. That's textbook out-of-character. Therefore, perfectly fine for sanctions.

[Jackard]

You're wrong. You cannot prevent alt abuse.

You actually can, very easily. One character per account, for starters, among other "anti-zerging" measures that Nexus War had.

I don't believe in positive reinforcement. Fear of punishment should be sufficient motivation to prevent people from abusing game features. If the devs said 'one account per player' and a player opened a second account, they should, upon discovery, be permabanned from the game.

...what miserable hell of a game did you crawl from

maybe you should get a clue as to what this is all about before making suggestions

[jorb]

Our philosophy -- and I honestly laugh at any MMO that tries to apply any other -- has always been that if players play the game in a way that we don't like, then we should try to change the game, not the players. Trying to police a broken system is like trying to heave water out of a sinking ship with a teaspoon, instead of corking the holes that are causing the problem in the first place. Alting can not be reasonably prevented, nor is that something we would want to do if we could (After all, I play several characters, and why shouldn't I be able to do that?). For this reason we also take a relatively lax stance on "cheating". Only once have we tried to retroactively fix a major game-breaking bug, and the results were highly unsatisfactory. We've revived people who have lost their characters due to no fault of their own a couple of times, but the standards for when that happens have been high.

I have to date not tried to ban a single player from the game, and I hope I never feel that I have to (Though I have at times been very tempted).

... jesus christ. I remember when people wanted shockedfrog banned for cutting down trees.