multiple accounts

[Talad]

THIS MESSAGE IS TAKEN FROM OLD BOARD:

Thekkur
    Guest
                            posted 14-10-2001 12:47 GMT        

                         One very annoying thing in free MMOGes is that there are always many players with multiple accounts. There\'s almost no way to
                         prevent this. Many things have been tried, from IP logging to cookie scanning, although with very feeble results.
                         With a relatively low amount of players and a fantastic gameplay in ps, it wouldn\'t be fair to allow players to have multiple
                         accounts I think. Something you might try is integrating a software tag like in cs (not crystal space, but counter-strike).  

                         Thekkur

                         Thekkur
    Paradagnae
    Guest
                            posted 14-10-2001 12:52 GMT            

                         that sounds like a very good idea.. i love it.. no multis for a better place!!!

                         how do you know there will only be small amount of players? will there be restriction?
    icebolt
    PS W.T.B. Member
                            posted 14-10-2001 12:53 GMT            

                         What the hell is wrong in having a lot of accounts? I have 3 characters in Runescape, but I don\'t cheat or anything.
    Paradagnae
    Guest
                            posted 14-10-2001 12:55 GMT            

                         but there are a lot who do cheat.. sorry for those who are honest
    Thekkur
    Guest
                            posted 14-10-2001 13:09 GMT            

                         I\"ll tell you what\'s wrong with multipe accounts in PS:

                         If there will be 1000 places in game, and this is the ONLY FREE MMORPG online, don\'t you think there\'ll be thousands players
                         that want to play? Maybe you can subscribe 3000 players, for not all players will be online at the same time. That\'s still nothing
                         compared with games like PA though, in which more than 350.000 players were playing, and multi-ing was still disencouraged.
                         (in runescape you ARE allowed to have multiple accounts though, but that\'s because their motto is: the more players subscibed,
                         the more cash we get from sponsors. They don\'t have to care about server space or bandwith, for it\'s graphicly siple, and
                         characters take up almost no space at all.)

                         It wouldn\'t be fair to let one player have more than 1 character whilest other can\'t subscribe because the server capacity at limit.
                         you can\'t play with more than one at the same time after all.

                         Thekkur
    Paradagnae
    Guest
                            posted 14-10-2001 13:12 GMT            

                         i used to play PA :-)
                         now playing utopia and mechwars
                         and i adopted an alien at alienaa.com ;-)

                         hehehe

                         i dont like multis.. they often cheat, even if they dont mean to
    Buechler
    Guest
                            posted 14-10-2001 19:45 GMT            

                         Thekkur wouldn\'t it be ok if once someone created an account, they got it least 3 character slots?

                         But they could only delete a character AFTER 30 days. So lets say I create a dwarf only after 30 days could I delete him and
                         use his character slot. But I would still have 2 other slots, besides the one I couldn\'t delete till after a month.

                         If 3 characters are possible on 1 account it will give Planeshift more depth and make it more fun. But if It would take a lot of
                         memory or time to do, I say make it 1 character per account.
    Thekkur
    Guest
                            posted 15-10-2001 12:52 GMT            

                         that\'s a good idea Buechler. I\'ve seen that in other MMORPG\'s so I guess that\'s not too much of a problem. It alows you to play
                         with more than one different race/class(I know ps doesn\'t contain classes, but I dunno how to call it else). The main advantage is
                         that nobody needs 6 characters, so you can calculate how many players can be online at max.

                         -If there is a max server cap. of 1000 seperate accounts, and 1/3 is multi, there is no possibility that all players are online. If
                         there are 1000 accounts which all contain 3 character slots, there will be no multiing and all 1000 players can theoretically be
                         online.

                         Thekkur
    whitti
    Guest
                            posted 21-10-2001 22:58 GMT            

                         Will it be ok to have me and my bro playing on the same computer, on the same account or will he need to make another
                         account? I guess he can play on my other comp anyway

                         Is it one account per comp?

                         I guess you dont know
    TheDaiv
    Guest
                            posted 24-10-2001 10:17 GMT            

                         I am a multi acct man, and I don\'t know how anyone can live with just one acct. I mean, yeah if you have several char slots, then
                         maybe, but I cannot stand bieng stuck with one kind of char. I play Redmoon right now, and have 3 accts... 3 chars on each
                         acct, that lets me have one of each char (RM has 9 chars) and I, or my roomates, have gotten almost every char to lvl 100 at
                         least, with 1 lvl 300 and a lvl 500. If I just had say, the 500, I would get bored and deleate him at least once a mth. This way you
                         never get sick of a char perm. When they get boring, switch chars until you feel like playing the original again!
    corsairk1
    Guest
                            posted 27-10-2001 03:24 GMT            

                         Quite honestly I dont see the problem with server capacity. Assuming you write the game in an effeicent manner, an account
                         would consist of no more than a username, password and character information with perhaps some extras. I see no reason for it
                         to be more than 5kb or 6kb for each account. You could probably store thousands or tens of thousands without running out of
                         space, more likely I would imagine you would want to limit the maximum amount of people who can login at once. I still think if
                         you provide people with enough characters in an account they wont multi, either way, i find it annoying having to memorise
                         different passwords and usernames.
    Thekkur
    Guest
                            posted 28-10-2001 22:52 GMT            

                         Damn right about the server space... don\'t know how I ever came to such an Idea. Although I think the space needed WILL be
                         more than 6k. Multiple chars (3) on one account would be the ideal solution.

                         Thekkur
    corsairk1
    Guest
                            posted 29-10-2001 12:05 GMT            

                         Well, assuming you limit the items people have and leave things like the contents of houses and banks and etc out of the
                         character files and store it in other files then you could probably get it very small. As small as a few kb for each character, and
                         limiting that to 10 or so with additional 1k of data for password, username, profile, last login date/time, misc info, etc.

                         Bandwidth is not so likely to be in such as abundance as disk space though, and even companies like Blizzard and other free
                         online game providers have trouble keeping good quality connections to clients.

                         Im sure the programmers are thinking this all through and if done correctly, ie, using compression and effective database
                         solutions then the game can support alot of accounts as long as it isnt abused (ie, bots that go in and create thousands of
                         accounts and spam messages by concurrently connecting to hundreds of them) then they will be fine. Perhaps limiting
                         connections to 4 per IP address or something will be a good idea, maybe it can be upped for companies who force peopel to
                         connect via proxies and such making multiple people use a single IP.

                         Its all about planning and design though, and from what ive seen the team is quite good at that. Lets see how the game turns
                         out...
    Salbei
    Guest
                            posted 29-10-2001 01:16 GMT            

                         It should be one account that allows a set limit of characters that can be created.

                         It would be entirely unfair to allow us only 1 character and make there different classes, races, deities, etc. I don\'t know if any of
                         you play Everquest, but imagine that and imagine only being allowed one character. I\'m not saying have 50 characters on 1
                         account, but something within reason.

                         I\'d leave it up to the creators to decide how to prevent people from making multiple accounts.
    craigers
    Guest
                            posted 10-11-2001 07:30 GMT            

                         what if i want to play but so does my bro? how can you solve that
    Kendaro
    Guest
                            posted 10-11-2001 08:27 GMT            

                         i was going to say the same thing. several of these multy accounts belong to members of the family. like husband and wife, so
                         they can play the game together. same with like Craige(sp) said about siblings wanting to play at the same time. there are many
                         reasons for multiple accounts. only a few of them are people useing one to power another.

[Talad]

corsairk1
    Guest
                            posted 11-11-2001 17:43 GMT            

                         Well, imo, there is no way to stop multying. But I think there are ways to discourage it. Firstly, I think it is a MUST that multiple
                         characters be allowed on a account. At least one slot for each type of character, and do remember people do like to build
                         variations of characters.

                         Limiting each computer or each IP address to a set of accounts may be done, depending on what the team thinks but I do think
                         that each person (assuming this game is \'free\') should be entitled to an account. Perhaps requiring an email address, or maybe a
                         credit card, or some unique info. If a credit card is used there should be no money taken from it, but only to prove that people are
                         who they claim they are.

                         If the creators of this game dont want everything to get screwed they have to make some important decisions. They dont have
                         unlimited resources, I do think any decent server for a game like this should have several dozen gigabytes of space. But having
                         enough RAM, processing power, and bandwidth is not very cheap. They will have to aware that there are possibilities of hack
                         attempts or denial of service attacks that could seriosly damage the operation of the server. Multiplayer games, particularly those
                         like these are not easy to maintain.

                         Lets hope that the servers arent swampted with too many people that can be handled like alot of commercial games...
    whitti
    Guest
                            posted 11-11-2001 17:58 GMT            

                         corsark: this is a completely free game meaning no credit cards, teens dont have them and that will take 2/3s of our population
                         away! We know about thye risks and all but right now we are focusing on our first demo coming out before end of the year. I do
                         not like multiple accounts but IP tracking etc. is not neccesarry, i want to let my friends play from my computer with there own
                         charachters.

                         whitti,

                         WTB PR member

[dorbian]

trying to reopen this thing here :p

but i do had a great idea why not do it the pristontale way you have one account with several characters in the same account and a possibility to trade between accounts.

think about that !

[Grakrim]

SWG (Which is another skill-based RPG, for those uninformed) only gives you one character slot.  You\'d think that\'s not awhole lot, but due to the fact that its so easy to drop and pick up skills, it works quite well.

Most people use multiple slots for one of three things:

1) Muling, that is storing items for your primary
2) Trying out various Race/Class combos, which, if PS\' skill system ends up like SWG\'s, is unnessacary.
3) Starting over, which implies that you have a lack of content for the most advanced characters.

So, basically, multiple character slots aren\'t really nessacary, but we\'re so accustomed to having them, its hard to give them up.

corsairk1 had a point when he said \"Well, imo, there is no way to stop multying.\"  Its basically impossible to prevent it in a free MMOG, so its a bit silly to try and implement it as it is in pay-to-play MMOGs.

[Vengeance]

CB will have multiple character slots.

[dorbian]

woohoo another thing we know about cb that we didn\'t knew but seriously i think that is the best solution for the game

[Silvereign]

I agree, considering the number three is usually the magic number of characters someone would like to create. It is for me at least. I couldn\'t think of more characters then three. One warrior, one magic user and one ranger, all we really need.

[Moogie]

In my mind, people should have as many characters as they want- as long as they arn\'t all logged at the same time!

[Silvereign]

And that is precisely what the conclusion is all about, one account, one login at a time, but multiple characters.

*THE END*

[Kiva]

I\'d say that people can get as many accounts/characters as they want, but after a certain amount of unused time, the character says *poof*. Maybe a month or so... Just to remove useless characters from the server, you know.

[acraig]

Next version of PlaneShift will support mutliple characters. You create you account then login and select which of your characters you want to play as ( or create new ones ).

I think that we will have to come up with some sort of database maintenance tool to clean up unused or old accounts but that is fairly easy to do I think.

[KwartzTheKran]

atm im sharing a computer with my bro, would we have to share an account name and have different characters or could he create his own?

[acraig]

Originally posted by KwartzTheKran
atm im sharing a computer with my bro, would we have to share an account name and have different characters or could he create his own?

I think in this case you would have two seperate accounts.  We plan to base accounts on email addresses not IP\'s.

[Kiva]

Oooo, just like so many other games... Wouldn\'t it be better if you made some html/php/asp registration thing on the site, instead of having to register, exit the game, check the mail, then re-enter the game? Or maybe you just have to type in a valid email (no checking or anything) to create an account? ...

[shangralah]

yay multiple char slots Go Salad and Everyone else .... ermhph .... Talad