Potjeh wrote:I'll tell you a trade secret: we get good resources by spamming alts. Basically, wilderness spawn alt, check quality of soil, water and clay, and then do it all again. A guy in my group has been doing this 8 hours a day since the reset, spawning several hundreds of such characters, and we still haven't found anything over q60
I'm no programmer so maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like hundreds and hundreds of basically "junk" characters spawned (multiplied by dozens of accounts) would have some sort of strain on the server or database or at least be a generally bad thing for making things run smoothly. I'm aware that people use alts for various tasks, and a dedicated hermit might have 10+ separate characters on his account for various tasks, but this just seems ridiculous. There should probably be some sort of cap as to the number of active characters one account can have. I'd say something like 10-15, but perhaps people more intune with the game would know what the reasonable limit for actual characters is. Also, it's extremely easy to grief someone this way, by spawning a junk character and then setting their HF outside of the targets claim and spawn away. Within 30 minutes you can have hundreds of HFs blocking the way and generally causing annoyance for whoever lives there. I'm aware that if you set the account limit to 20 that people will still be able to create hundreds of characters by making new accounts every so often, but at least it slows them down or prohibits their progress a little.
If in fact the creation of hundreds and thousands of "junk" accounts doesn't actually clog up the database or cause any sort of server problems, then I suppose things can just stay the way they are. Still, it's kind of offputting that it's entirely possible for someone to spawn 300 characters on the same account. Just doesn't seem right.
