Macroing & Alts

[fenrirfenix]

Alt thieves are already immune to justice because, well, they're throwaway alts. If they get caught and killed there's no loss because that was it's purpose to serve. It's the alt's neck instead of the player's main. While thieves should be able to make a living as a thief without immediately getting the axe, making it so they're more difficult to hunt down won't change the market for faceless suicide thieves. Some players like to play outside the means given or just want to covertly be dicks, and the best way to do that no matter what will be creating an entirely unrelated character and using him to steal and grief while your main assets are immune to retribution.

I think it would be neat if the dev's bloodline idea created clans and families for the players where alts are just different relatives of the same bloodline. Alt thieves getting tracked back to a clan and having the clan face justice. The purpose here would be to tier skills in a way that things like the black arts are only available to clans of certain sizes and experience, so that a person developing a clan would have legitimate access to the black arts, making it difficult to just clogspam your way to a throwaway alt thief. Of course, there's no way to make players stick to just the one family and then it will shift from alt character thieves to alt bloodline thief clans.

Serve justice by chasing the guilty clan barefoot with an armed mob of prosecutors, through forests and across rivers. Survivors are clearly innocent.

[Voideka]

Alt thieves are already immune to justice because, well, they're throwaway alts. If they get caught and killed there's no loss because that was it's purpose to serve. It's the alt's neck instead of the player's main. While thieves should be able to make a living as a thief without immediately getting the axe, making it so they're more difficult to hunt down won't change the market for faceless suicide thieves. Some players like to play outside the means given or just want to covertly be dicks, and the best way to do that no matter what will be creating an entirely unrelated character and using him to steal and grief while your main assets are immune to retribution.

I think it would be neat if the dev's bloodline idea created clans and families for the players where alts are just different relatives of the same bloodline. Alt thieves getting tracked back to a clan and having the clan face justice. The purpose here would be to tier skills in a way that things like the black arts are only available to clans of certain sizes and experience, so that a person developing a clan would have legitimate access to the black arts, making it difficult to just clogspam your way to a throwaway alt thief. Of course, there's no way to make players stick to just the one family and then it will shift from alt character thieves to alt bloodline thief clans.

Serve justice by chasing the guilty clan barefoot with an armed mob of prosecutors, through forests and across rivers. Survivors are clearly innocent.

I know a lot of the thieves in game, and the main reason they use alts is for the anonymity because thieving is broken right now. They want main thieves, but main thieves die. The idea is to make main thieving not fatal except in rare circumstances, yet at the same time providing protection to victims.

In other words, sustainable theft.

You're completely missing the point here though: you cannot stop alt abuse, ever, with mechanical hurdles. The vast majority of people do it to avoid shortcomings in the game, and as such the only way to fix the problem is to fix the game. Bloodlines, high LP cost for skills, all of these things are easily avoided by the people who want to be dicks, with proxies and extra email addresses. You can't track people between accounts and with separate IP addresses, you can only make it so people don't feel the need to go to these lengths.

Looking back to UO here, it had an absolutely huge problem with macroers, because everything was so difficult and annoying to do. Now look at WoW, a game with a vastly larger population yet a smaller incidence of macroing per capita when compared to UO, because most things in the game are more accessible to players. It isn't because the game is more complex or has anti-hack measures, because it is still a trivial undertaking to macro the game completely undetected, it's just that most people don't feel like they're being locked out of the actual game.