Some thoughts on theft and things.

[theTrav]

Are you going to ban people by IP address?
I know of at least 4 other people on my ISP who play the game and also have dynamic IP's from the same pool which I retrieve IP's from.

Are you going to ban account names? Griefers don't care, they'll just cycle their modem and create a new account.

Who is going to police it?
Do you want Jorb and Loftar to take time off from development to look at statistical analysis results and deal with people who feel they were wrongly banned?
Do you want other people to have admin rights and the ability to lay down ban hammers on accounts?

I'm in favor of one account per person, however I don't think it's at all enforceable, and I'm strongly opposed to diverting effort to a measure that does not solve the problem.

[Milaha]

baning by IP is pointless, you simply ban the accounts involved and move on, let them start from scratch if they want. As far as who enforces, ideally it would not be jorb and loftar, though I am unsure anyone in the community could be trusted with it at this point other than kaka, who probably does not want the job (hopefully by the time implementation comes there would be someone)

I realize that right now you do not see getting your account banned and having to restart as a big problem, however as the game progresses and there is more character development involved that will be a much greater consideration for people.

I unfortunately can not provide details, but I work in position that entails examining accounts for fraud and patterns of abuse, and I can tell you that at least within my field there are patterns that are pretty easy to catch and investigate which are completely different than normal behavior, and a computer can be programed to detect many of these patterns.(which then get investigated by a real person) I have no experience with this particular case, but I suspect the same would hold true. Sufficiently crafty people can evade detection of course, but that applies pretty much regardless of what you are talking about, 100% foolproof is not a goal.

EDIT: Just for the sake of ending this argument, lets assume enforcement is not reasonably attainable from this point forward and completely eliminate #2 and #2b from the discussion table.

The rest of the ideas should stand on their own, and although people could create alts, they would need high skill alts to do it, and in theory you could track the stolen goods back to mains once in-inventory tracking becomes available anyways.

[kimya]

1. allowing players to register for multiple accounts and have them lightly monitored to prevent abuse solves this problem.
4 - No, you simply monitor and flag, ban upon abuse
5 - great, not a problem, that is why we are not locking it to an IP, but rather watching for multiple accounts within a region with patterns that show possible violation.

hey why not ask the MUST if they could help, theyd get two accounts per person and wouldnt be observed

[Ferinex]

Here's what I think: You are taking an ingame problem and looking for out-of-game solutions. Do you think real police officers like being distracted from their burlap sack-carrying diamond thieves by some white-trash asshole who beat his grandmother to a pulp? Hell no. They'd much rather be chasing crafty, intelligent criminals who actually present a challenge. But you know what? That's just not how it is. In real life as is ingame, there will always be jerks and twats that need a bullet/arrow to the head. Some of these criminals are merely newbs learning the ropes - no one is to say their next character will not be completely legit. Then, some of them are griefers. Griefers are not necessarily 'stupid'; they are just good at what they do. Some may say the game would not have the same spice and excitement it currently has without the threat of griefers. Then of course some are n00bs, which when killed may return once or twice, but eventually grow bored and move on.

This post solves no problems what so ever, because I do not perceive it as being a problem.


Then again, I have not yet had any of my things ravaged by griefers and n00bs.




Feel free to disregard this entire post and skip to the next one; even I do not believe half of what I have written.

[Trafalgar]

SUMMARYish: Although H&H isn't a strict roleplaying game, I think it would be best to have rules forbidding multiple accounts, multiple people on the same IP (because that's the only way to detect multiple accounts by the same person without trusting the client), and giving items from one of your characters to another, and limiting the number of characters to 3 or so. Apply automatic bans on the account and IP if more than one account is found on at the same time with the same IP, or within a small timeframe. Remove the IP bans after a day. If new accounts on the same IP do the same thing again later, baninate with IP ban for 2 days, then 4, 7, 14, 28 (4 weeks), but no more than 4 weeks. The IP's former ban status can decrease by one every month or so, so that the database will eventually purge the level 1 IP ban histories after a month of waiting for the perps to come back. Prevent items produced by your characters from being used by any of your other characters by marking the creator in the item's data structure and comparing creator.account with characterUsing.account, and prevent characters from using anything within a three-screen or so radius of any of their player's other characters. It should show a message explaining why you can't seem to use things if you trip those restrictions. The unable-to-use-in-radius restriction should not apply to things you have created or were carrying, in case you're using a bow and have to defend yourself, or were carrying something and had to drop it.

The client could also send something like a salted CRC of the hard drive serial number or the like as an indication of whether someone might be someone who's supposed to be banned. In theory someone could modify the client or go through a proxy of their own design to get rid of this, etc, but they'd have to know how.

And thus the system is automatic, will not result in a plethora of permanent IP bans, etc. Thoughts?

Reasons:
If you want to know why I think that, and won't TL;DR on this huge amount of text:

2. I tend to reboot my router about once every month or two, in the event that it loses connection with the internet, which happens about that frequently/rarely, actually.

On the subject of multiple accounts per IP, in the UO shards I was ever staff on we had rules forbidding multiple accounts on the same IP without special permission, and a policy that if we saw multiple accounts on the same IP, we presumed that it was probably multi-account abuse, because the number of people abusing multiple accounts vastly outweighed the number of legitimate multiple accounts on one IP.

I also disagree with limiting accounts to only one character. However, I would not disagree with limiting them to 3 characters.

First, I think there needs to be rules. Without rules, anyone who gets banned will go "But there was no rule against it!"

I'd forbid alt-abuse, firstly, as far as passing items to alts and so forth goes, and using them to help each other, but I'd make it automated (Nexus War managed to accomplish this), but I wouldn't make it bannable.

If you make multiple accounts (to get around a number-of-characters limit, or to have multiple characters logged in at once), I'd consider that a servere offense, and bannable.

I would use the IP, even though you can have multiple people at one IP, mainly because I don't know anything about what Milaha's talking about. If it's better then sure, use that instead. It sounds far more difficult, and like you need actual people, however.

If there are multiple accounts on the same IP, perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not, on free UO shards, in my experience most of the time it was one person with multiple accounts rather than multiple people on one IP. And he almost always says "Oh, that was my brother," although you would think that WOULD be the best story, right? What makes me sure that we weren't just banning innocent people? One of those shards had an application process with a character background/story, and some other stuff that I've forgotten. We checked the applications to compare them, and there's also that I saw it happen firsthand a few years earlier - Someone I knew with no brothers used that to explain away his mule characters, and the GM believed him.

Due to there being no way to tell whether someone was lying or not about them actually having a brother, besides spending hours watching the characters on the two accounts (which we didn't really want to do), we adopted basically a zero-tolerance policy. One account per IP, that's it. You have a brother? Well, I'm sorry. The other imaginary brothers were ruining the roleplaying and gameplay by muling and producing items for their mains which their mains couldn't produce. However, in our case, banning actually was a feasible solution, since you would have had to go through the application process again (and not get noticed as being the same person due to us having banned peoples' applications in a subforum so we could easily compare the people trying to get in against the ones recently banned) in order to get a new account. And most of the people trying to run multiple accounts were either too stupid to get through the application process again without getting caught, or they didn't even bother trying.

World of Warcraft on the other hand apparently encourages people to make multiple characters with different specializations and mail items between their characters, so it's got completely the opposite focus as far as alt-abuse goes... It says "Hey! Alt-abusers! OVER HERE! THIS GAME'S FOR YOU! IT'S NOT REALLY ABUSE!"

On that same shard, we also had rules forbidding having any of your characters anywhere near each other. And by near, I mean "on the same continent." We also had the Recall teleportation spells disabled, but that was because we didn't like players being able to *pop* around the entire world in the blink of an eye instead of having to walk, run (through extremely dark caves/dungeons if you're going to another continent), or sail a ship.

[Ferinex]

World of Warcraft on the other hand apparently encourages people to make multiple characters with different specializations and mail items between their characters, so it's got completely the opposite focus as far as alt-abuse goes... It says "Hey! Alt-abusers! OVER HERE! THIS GAME'S FOR YOU! IT'S NOT REALLY ABUSE!"

And look how well WoW has done for itself. I don't hear people whining about the game being unfair or tilted towards alt-abusers.

Also, the only other argument I can come up with is LANs/Friend's houses. I have already played H&H at a couple friends' homes at the same time that they were playing. This is a frequent occurrence for me. Mainly because I have multiple computers here (so multiple people can be/are playing at once) and because some of my friends have more than one computer.

Although I have not personally held a LAN party in ages (maybe I should; I kind of miss it), this is a LAN type of game. Just as people enjoyed playing UO and Warcraft at LAN parties, I could see them enjoying H&H.

Then again, I typically play FPS's at LAN parties

[Sean_Mirrsen]

I think that one character per account is perfectly reasonable, and it should be that way. It's not really possible to enforce one account per player though.

What should be done though, is expanding the game in such a way that making progress in any branch of development requires time, and switching branches of development requires inordinate amounts of effort.

For example, consider Belief effects on skills' availability and LP costs of skills.
Add a new Belief, Law/Chaos. As long as you're Neutral, neither Trespassing nor Yeomanry are available to you.
Start progressing into Chaos, and the LP cost of Trespassing, Theft, Murder, and Stealth decreases, from five-digit numbers to something attainable. Make Trespassing possible for +1 Chaos, Theft and Vandalism (if it makes it in) possible for +2 Chaos, Rage for +3, and Murder for +4. You cannot learn Yeomanry while being Chaotic.
Start progressing towards Law, and the LP cost of Yeomanry, Ranging, Valor(maybe), Exploration (or something with a more fitting name) and whatever other civilized skills there will be will decrease. It is not possible for a Lawful character to learn anything from the Chaotic branch. A Lawful character does not leave Clue marks as long as he does not actually take something from another's claim, or knock out/kill another.
Other interactions could be:
Chaotic characters suffer from being on Lawful claims, depending on the Law level of the owner. At +1 Law, negative Karma is applied for any action undertaken on claimed land. At +2, there is a Fatigue penalty for all such actions. At +3, SHP loss. At +4, HHP loss. At the maximum, +5, I propose the ultimate penalty, Constitution damage. The exact magnitude of these penalties is decreased with high levels of Chaotic belief.
Lawful characters suffer no Karma penalty for attacking/killing Chaotic players.
Chaotic characters suffer reduced Karma penalties for killing anyone.
Lawful characters may get special skills that would allow them to Requisition, and Punish - basically, equivalents of Theft and Rage that do not generate crime signs when used. A punishable Clue object would have to be equipped to invoke any of these though. It would be possible to be Chaotic with these skills, but it would mean spending the time to become Lawful, get the skills, then spend more time to become Chaotic again.

The principle could be expanded beyond theft problems, like preventing people from becoming "Jack of all trades, Master of All" - the closer you are to Industry, the less LP you spend on increasing Industry-related skills, and the like. (I really think all skills should be levellable).

[Yolan]

I don't see Jorb and Loftar implementing any of these recommendations regarding IPs.

As they have stated in other threads, they seek to fix problems in the game that allow exploits such as building drying racks in front of players houses, etc.

From what I have read of the above, who exactly are you seeking to ban? For some people, I suspect 'so and so stole my xx' or 'cut down my apple tree' is sufficient.
If the devs didn't want to let people be jerks in this game, they wouldn't have added the thievery/trespass/murder skills.

Of course, we could come up with a strict definition of a banable 'griefer', as has been done elsewhere, but the problem remains as to applying this definition to each individual case. It is a highly subjective matter, about which people can get very emotional.

As I see it, as Jorb and Loftar continue to develop the game, many of the more abusive practices will become impossible/highly difficult/not worthwhile. For the dedicated thieves/idiotic newbies, there is the pitchfork mob of angry players.

The only time in which I would prefer to see a person's ISP banned would be in the case of serious racial slurs, etc. Otherwise... yuk!

Many people have said that they see nothing wrong with limiting players to one character per account. I am really surprised by this. So, you don't ever want to be able to play a different kind of character? I am considering all kinds of options for when the next world starts up. Maybe I will play a crazy druid who hunts anybody who enters 'his' forest. Maybe I will play an assassin for hire, traveling only by night. Or maybe I will attempt to be a merchant, trading goods between various settlements. Why should I have to choose to play only one of these options at a time? If I get tired of playing one for a while, I want to be able to make another, and perhaps come back to my original at a later point. Adding this kind of unnecessary restriction because of the influence of alt-griefers would be really negative for people such as my self who have a legitimate reason to want alts. Why let griefers harm this game in a way that we can control?

[Rift]

serious racial slurs?
like.. I hear that guys from bottleneck.. you know how THOSE guys are?

..j/k.

I'm really 100% against censorship of any kind.

[Milaha]

World of Warcraft on the other hand apparently encourages people to make multiple characters with different specializations and mail items between their characters, so it's got completely the opposite focus as far as alt-abuse goes... It says "Hey! Alt-abusers! OVER HERE! THIS GAME'S FOR YOU! IT'S NOT REALLY ABUSE!"

And look how well WoW has done for itself. I don't hear people whining about the game being unfair or tilted towards alt-abusers.

... seriously, someone brought wow into this topic.

How are the games at all similar, you could have at least gone for a pvp game like Darkfall where somewhat similar (though less severe) issues could in theory occur.... erm... wait... they have a 1 character limit.... Hmm... how about EVE... damn... 1 character again... Shadowbane, YES! Shadowbane allows multiple characters, wait, that game died a horid death just a year or two after launch (not for this reason, the game had many many flaws, but still). Well, that is all the examples I have, feel free to bring up some more bluebie games that do not compare at all.

TBH, the only game that I can think of that is at all similar is old school UO, and the issue did occur in that game, you will note that UO went to a non-open PvP format relatively quickly, this issue could easily be listed as one of the causes.

EDIT: On the topic of EVE you can have more than 1 account if you pay them for them, and it is widely accepted. Due to how the in-game is set up trying to hide the fact that they are both yours is nearly impossible, which solves the problem. The same holds true for darkfall, the difference between there and here is the combination of requirement to pay for the 2nd account, and the fact that all (good) land is essentially player controlled, and if people do not know it is you, your going to be killed by everyone constantly (including your friends)