Goblinworks Executive Founder
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It's crystal clear: Multiple accounts won't be banned, nor will they be required to play the game as designed.
I'm not sure how what you suggested would prevent illicit accounts; it would stop some, but not all, casual users.
What is the exact behavior you wish to prevent by your suggested restriction?
Goblin Squad Member
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Your talking about multi-boxing with bots. If they are using bots I'm sure Ryan will have measures in place to ban them and other botters. But I have never seen multi-boxers as a major issue in any game. They became popular for a time in WoW but soon became niche again.
As for gold farmers, again NON-ISSUE. The game will be using a EVE PLEX like system which has proved extremely effective to stopping gold sellers. Aka game time is a in game item you can buy and sell. In other words Goblinworks is the solo "gold seller". By being safe, and most of all legal they choke out any competition.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Multiple user accounts. For example, if Ted and Fred know each other, they might both buy six user accounts under their own names. If they both have multiple computers, they could play the game as several characters using pre-scripted software to run their extra characters. They can gain alot of gold this way. It's been done in several places, most notably Everquest.
The behavior that you want to stop, then, is RMT. Cutting down on botting to reduce RMT is only marginally effective, and making it slightly inconvenient to have multiple accounts won't deer professional botters or gold sellers at all.
A better counter to RMT is in the design phase- eliminate tedium as a gameplay element and replace it with activities that are fun. With player-generated content, PFO doesn't need to follow the WoW model of gating content behind timewalls in the form of gold.
I was saying that people aren't being required to have multiple accounts in order to play the game as designed.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would like to see the game allow a single account to log in multiple characters at once. If there are any mechanics that require little interactions over long periods of time, such as crafting, I would like to be able to play my adventurer, and switch between the two KoTOR style as freely as I choose. When I am not controlling a character that is 'logged in' it is still in the game world and open for interaction(positive or negative).
I believe roleplayers would like the ability to bring two of their characters to a tavern, and control both of them at once, possibly having them interact.
You would still have to purchase individual training for each character.
If you can juggle 6+ characters in a adventuring party at once successfully(Without the use of bots/scripting) in an open PvP environment, you deserve to forgo social interaction. I am confident there are not enough of these people to impact the atmosphere of the game, and they equate to multiple players, but on a single account so GW sees more income. And I would love to see a train of /follow accounts from a player that thinks they can do this get slaughtered by an ambushing party.
I wouldn't mind seeing only 2 characters being able to log in at once, to reduce server load if necessary.
Ideally I would like to see a system such as this support multiple monitors, so you can see all the screens at once(if you have enough screens and a powerful system)
If there isn't a system like this, I would like to see a system like SWGemu has where you can log in the same account from different locations. I would like to be able to multi-box without having to create two separate accounts and juggle authenticators.
PFO won't have a problem if people share accounts, skill training is per character so the net income is the same, unless there are some account wide purchases, and everything in the cash shop isn't per-character(I think everything in the cash shop should be per-character).
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's been a long time since I logged into Eve but I believe it was set up to allow only one activity per account that required a timer. I know this was the case with skill training but I was never able to get into the higher level crafting activities. Any Idea if timers are going to be shared accross account and if those timers are going to be categorized or all in one?
From the implications of the GW staff, they intend to allow as many timers on an account as you want, provided you pay for them. The difference in PFO and eve's ideas, is PFO intends to have multiple payment options, instead of a set cost per account. A standard subscription, will most likely work as eve's does IE you pay X a month, and can train 1 character, you can pay some extra on top of that to train a second character, or buy skill training for the second character from another player with money you have made in game, for use on the second character.
Basically in eve multiple accounts was the only way to get simultanious training, while in PFO there will be options to do so on one account. But as Ryan has mentioned, preventing multiple accounts is entirely unenforcable, and punishes legitimate players.
People doing who want to do so, can use multiple credit cards, get CC's in other countries, use proxies to have multiple IP addresses etc... Then legitimate players, say Couples, siblings, roomates etc... that may share a location and/or payment method, get caught in the crossfire that inevitably will happen.
I see nothing wrong with people paying for multiple accounts.. heck, I have my main account and 3 alt accounts right now in EVE. My main's a missioner, I have an explorer (Scanning, Hacking, Archaeology, Salvaging), I have a Miner/Industrialist, and I have a Pvp'er.
I know people with more. Since we can only have 1 character training at one time per account, it makes perfect sense to have alts on another account thats training for something totally different - the miner/industrialist being a particularly good example, if you don't want to do that stuff on your main.
I mean, if GW is going the same or similar direction with real-time training skills (And thus, one character training skills at a time on each account), why not? As long as they're paying for them, of course. Its very hard to organize that many accounts anyways.
And about EVE and an account timer - no, you can have as many accounts up as your computer can handle, provided they are not trial accounts. Trial accounts only allow you to have one account up on a computer, even if one is a real account and one is just a trial. But I've had all four of my paid (With Plex) accounts up at once, though its a big laggy and I've had to turn down the graphics to bare minimum.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To me, the more important thing is to make sure they Never Punish a Player for Using a Single Account.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Limiting how many accounts a single person can have is bad business. I fully intend on having multiple accounts for the game so I can play alongside my kids. There are plenty of better and more efficient methods to prevent gold farmers/botters from ruining the game than limiting people to a single account.
EVE doesn't charge for skill training on individual characters - they charge for accounts only, but you can only have one character training skills at a time per account (Three characters total per account). So, basically everyone only has one 'true' character per account, the other two might be someone to check prices in the market hub or something else.
For each account, its the normal price for an MMO - $15 a month (less if you pay for more months at a time), or of course, you can pay with PLEX's (Pilot Liscense Extentions), which count as one month of game time. They're paid with in-game money, but are quite expensive, and are currently going for about ~570,000,000 ISK each, as someone's been raising prices lately.
PLEX's are an awesome way to have alts without having to pay real money for 'em. Someone else in the game universe pays $30 for two PLEX's and puts them on the market, thus 'buying gold'. Then you buy it with the money you made doing w/e.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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To be clear: PLEX are in-game items that are made out of money: anyone can acquire as many PLEX as they want by spending cash.
PLEX have all of the characteristics of in-game items: they can be traded for ISK (EVE currency) like anything else
PLEX can be redeemed for game time by the owner.
Buying a PLEX creates a PLEX out of thin air, as far as the in-game economy goes; selling PLEX for ISK simply moves ISK around within the in-game economy, and using a PLEX for game time causes it to evaporate from the economy. Selling PLEX for ISK has exactly the same economic effect as paying someone else's subscription fees and then having them give you ISK.
Some other models of sanctioned 'gold' selling break the pattern, by having the in-game currency made directly out of cash.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If I can't have multiple accounts, then how can I log onto my assassin and use him to assassinate my other character to convince the company I've infiltrated with that other character that I'm not really a spy?!!
Your platform for president of Pathfinderland sounds biased against any form of espionage, subterfuge, and even skullduggery. You are alienating a large segment of the voting population. How do you honestly expect to get elected like that?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Here is what will happen once the game has reached a certain level of sophistication and paranoia. Say, 48 hours after launch....
You apply for membership in a Settlement.
The recruiting officer for that Settlement contacts you and directs you to go to a webpage they have built. On that page you're asked a variety of personal questions - your real name, maybe a driver's license or social security number.
You'll also be asked for your account username and password. For all accounts you have.
You'll be asked to disclose all alt characters you have created, across all accounts you may have.
The Settlement will run a background check on you, and flag you for a variety of reasons uncovered in that check as undesirable.
Assuming you clear the background check, a script will be run that will log into your account and extract as much information as possible. It will look through your private messages and through the transaction log.
It will know all the characters on that account.
The script will flag potential alt characters based on behavior patterns, like giving a lot of money to a character or a valuable asset to a character without any reciprocal payment in kind.
The recruiting officer will then compare the list of alts detected to alts disclosed and will flag any ommissions for follow up questioning. Maybe you can convince the recruiter that they're characters of friends that you just give stuff too. Depends on how paranoid the recruiter is.
They'll also flag interactions with any characters known to the Settlement to be trolls, spies, RMT sellers, false fronts, etc. You'll have to explain those interactions as well.
Maintaining two strictly separate identities is very hard, thus few people are able to do it. Of course those that can do it are pretty valuable as double agents, spies, thieves, backstabbers, etc. so it can be lucrative.
There's an entity in EVE (Guiding Hand Social Club) that makes epic stories out of their ability to do this. But for every Guiding Hand master there's a thousand amateurs who are caught fast and easily.
Having multiple characters on an account is fine, just don't think there will be any separation from YOU between those characters.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think the biggest concern for me with multiple accounts is how it tends to create an environment where a single account often cannot be competitive. I don't think that it is merely enough to say "We won't build the game assuming you are running multiple accounts." I think you should build the game assuming some people are, and take some measures to ensure people with a single account are still competitive and I'll explain why.
Variety is the spice of life. Most people, will desire variety in their game play. If not from the start, then at some point down the road. When I say most I mean probably 99%+ of players would prefer an experience that involves many diverse activities as opposed to pure PVE combat, or pure PVP formation combat, or pure crafting, or pure trading etc. Probably a good 80%+ of players who only have one account are going to diversify it's training because of this. They'll put a bit of training into being a bard. And a bit into their PVP skills, maybe a few points into vampire slaying, and some skills into say farming, and social/trading skills. They may focus MOST of their training on reaching the bard capstone, or maybe most of it on farming and trading, but overall they put in enough diversity to really enjoy a lot of what PFO will offer them.
Now there is the multiple account model. This player still enjoys diversity. But he gets his diversity through his many alts. One character is entirely dedicated to PVP. One is entirely dedicated to crafting. And one is his wildcard account where he dabbles in trading, vampire hunting etc. This player enjoys all the diversity of the player with one account, but he has the power of a dedicated crafter and pure PVP account at his disposal. Basically, in this model, the first people to reach capstone will be purists who devote themselves entirely to combat, and the best crafted items will come with purists who dedicate themselves entirely to crafting. And almost 100% of these accounts will be alts.
I'm going to make suggestion which I'm sure will be very controversial but I beg you to consider it. You need to nerf pures. There are many ways you could do it but I think the best suggestion is this. Divide the skills in the game into various categories. Crafting, combat, social etc. Then find a percentage... lets say 70%. Make it so that if you invest more the 70% of your training in any single category your character is "wearied" of training that type of skill. Being wearied slows down your skill training. So basically, a player who invests 100% of their time into training combat, or 85%, or 95% is wearied to the point that they are training no faster in that category than someone who only invests 70%. So there is no advantage to not using that 30% of your time to train something outside your main focus of the character.
So that player who want's to be a top rate PVPer but only has one account isn't restricted to train nothing but PVP skills. And that player who just wants to be a competitive fighter but really likes to take in all the game has to offer won't be nearly so far behind with just 60% or 50% of their training invested in combat. It will make the purist alt far less of a driving factor in this game, allowing single account players to get a fuller and more rewarding experience from PFO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It is in our best economic interest to get each paying player to pay as much money as possible. One way to do that is to have a game design that encourages you to pay for more than one training character.
So it's unlikely we'd ever do anything to disrupt the desire of a player to have more than one training character at a time.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Having multiple characters on an account is fine, just don't think there will be any separation from YOU between those characters.
Does this mean that we will be seeing account ID's?
@Andius, I don't think it will be much of an issue, from what I have been reading in the blogs and forum responses, the progression is very open, the main thing you can't do is bring up a fighter and dabble in wizardry if you want to receive a capstone. And Ryan seems to be advocating less of an impact in extensive skill training. If you want to be the best you will have to focus, if you want to be competitive, you will have a good chunk of extra skill training to dabble with.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You'll also be asked for your account username and password.
The Seventh Veil will never ask for you password. We are well aware that we very likely have already been infiltrated by spies. We accept this as a cost of doing business. We'll judge the characters based on their actions and not spend a lot of time worrying about what else the player is doing. The way we look at it, if you as a Player are spending part of your time helping us and part of your time hurting us, that's really no different than you spending part of your time helping us and someone else spending part of their time hurting us. Access to classified information will be restricted as much as possible, but we're not going to waste a lot of effort trying to enforce a rule that can't really be enforced.
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Goblin Squad Member
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OK so you honestly believe the majority of the settlements in PFO are actually going to ask for one's real name, driver's license number and/or SNN for a video game? After 48 hours noless? Plus how is your DL or SSN even relevant information? It's great if I want to commit identity theft, not so useful for figuring out if your a spy with many accounts. Do you think there would be a database to compare it to? You know, like the FBI or other law enforcement? I have a friend...sadly...in the Goons alliance in Eve and that wasn't the case in their recruitment. That's what API keys are for.
If Ryan wasn't joking I still think he laid it on a bit thick there. I could well be wrong but I thought he was exaggerating.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well in Eve they do background checks this is true. Most I know of (which is I admit limited) use script from your API key. This is key in EvE that has basically all your account info for your character. It will tell a person what all your skills are, what you are current training, what your flying, how much money you own, what all your assets are and their location, etc. It will also have your complete guild history. It has more uses too like plugging your key into a skill planner.
I hope we will have these in PFO.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Ryan: I don't see how any civilian organization, operating within the law, could verify that the names and numbers they are given correspond to the player they are accepting.
Here's a tip- I know from an anonymous source that the people those settlement is using as a recruitment officer, as well as the people that maintains all of those scripts, are all members of the Guiding Hand Social Club. So are the people that you would replace him with if you caught on. They're just gathering information on other groups trying to infiltrate, for now...
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Goblin Squad Member
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It is in our best economic interest to get each paying player to pay as much money as possible. One way to do that is to have a game design that encourages you to pay for more than one training character.
So it's unlikely we'd ever do anything to disrupt the desire of a player to have more than one training character at a time.
I would beg you to consider my model for a bit. With the 70-30 ratio suggested a character cannot be both a top notch fighter and a top notch crafter unless they are subscribed for a very long time. This is simply going to allow someone who is focused on a single area of training to dabble in others.
There are still multiple benefits to using multiple accounts. It will allow you to be top notch in several areas. It will give you the benefit of being able to control more camps, and any other benefits this game will allow you to receive by running multiple accounts at once.
In EVE I know someone with 11 accounts. He doesn't use those accounts to train 11 specialties. They are all miners. I think this idea will make it less so that people who want and can afford multiple accounts will buy them, and more so that people like me who are simply not interested in running the game several times at once and are therefore not interested in multiple accounts don't feel so excluded from the content of this game.
I will give you one alternate suggestion you might consider though. Perhaps if money is the bottom line. You could still divide the skills up like the 70-30% idea and make it something where your character actually trains faster than others but is forced to use that training on things outside their main specialty, and make that option something you pay extra for.
PS. GL will also not be requiring any information we could use to steal your account.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Here is what will happen once the game has reached a certain level of sophistication and paranoia. Say, 48 hours after launch....
Good to see my antennae are working :)... I think there must be real grounding in this.
a) It just takes one especially big "sting" to result in a community of productive players to see their works wiped by someone working with an ulterior motive and BANG! the paranoia/safeguards all rise up?
b) If that is so, I'm sure the reputation system and more serious consequences of eg losing stuff when your corpse is not retrieved/your goods are taken and your business is not insured etc will add more "edge" and atmosphere to the game.
c) There are sharks out there... just waiting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was not joking. But I was exaggerating on the timeline. And many Settlements will not be that rigorous. But once a certain scale is achieved the security risks become significant and people will impose lots of screening hurdles to new recruits.
Heh the refference he made actually reminded me a bit of an old control alt delete comic, and yeah from what I have gathered, spy paranoia in eve is pretty extreme, corps do typically go all out as far as they can to reduce the issue, simply because of how much damage a single spy can accomplish if he is determined. I've heard of no shortage of scams and tricks that via cash to plex conversion rates, had damage totals over the 30k USD mark.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Wow, I can't imagine ever giving out my SSN just to play a game, even to the gaming company.
As far as access to my account...yeah no thanks.....no organization is really worth going through that for.
Some people simply take games too far...they are supposed to be about having FUN and fair play not about fear and background checks...
From my perspective anyone who uses that alternate account method of play to wipe out someone elses holdings is really cheating themselves more then anyone else.... no matter how extensive those holdings were.
Ultimately all we are really talking about here is make believe things in a make believe place....the only value they hold to me was the FUN you had in working together to aquire them....and that CAN'T be taken away.
In terms of worth...the real worth of a player is the "Social Currency" they've built up from thier interactions with others and how they've played....and the only person that can destroy that is the Player themselves. That's how I grew up playing games...and I've no intention of changing.
I guess I'd be completely out of place in a game like EvE...maybe why I've never tried it. Hopefully PFO, or at least parts of it...can preserve an atmosphere where the concepts of fun, respect and fair play are still valued.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Maybe it's just one of those caveats to major growth of a kingdom? You can safely assume if you start PfO with a group you either know previously or build up a level of trust in the early release, that group of people or network is safe. But if another kingdom wants more power and needs to recruit more people, short-term it might work out but longer term stability is then an issue?
As said,
" But once a certain scale is achieved the security risks become significant and people will impose lots of screening hurdles to new recruits."
It definitely is ideal if the world is populated in a sort of "warring barons" scenario more than a united kingdom state imo :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Since we're on this subject, I'd like to gauge the community's reaction.
Do you think it's appropriate to require a Video Voice Chat with a player before that player is given access to high security assets?
The idea is to not worry so much about ensuring that a player can't burn us, but rather to ensure they can't burn us twice. If we've actually talked to them and seen their face, it's not very likely they'll be able to get a new account and get past that screen again.
I also want to be clear that I'm not talking about generally requiring Video Voice Chat just to join. I'm talking about requiring it for a very small subset of members who are asking to be given access to extremely high value assets.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Turning the question around, as above, if I were having to make that decision to allow a player access, it's a big responsibility hand-over/sharing, so something to validate of suitable rigor eg video-chat might be one of the options to consider: Then I admit yes it's conceivable [edit: d* form-filling, there's no escape]. On the other side, I'd probably decline to submit to a video-chat for the position, I'm more of a "spies like us" than the real deal!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was not joking. But I was exaggerating on the timeline. And many Settlements will not be that rigorous. But once a certain scale is achieved the security risks become significant and people will impose lots of screening hurdles to new recruits.
I have no doubt there will be screening hurdles but in EvE people in high end corps honestly ask for your SSN and DL number? And then others freely give it over?
And is PFO going to do anything that will allow for background checks without the need for such measures? Aka API keys or something like them?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am aware even of WoW raiding guilds who required members to give the leadership their account name and password in order to join. It's not that unusual at the highest levels.
I was a content pushing "hardcore" raider in WoW and I never heard of that. Nor did my friends in Alpha, the first to clear US Wrath launch content, do this. Nor Midwinter, once top 25 in US. There isn't anything to gain by such information in WoW. It doesn't matter if you're in another guild or not with another character. It has no real metagame. The WORST WoW meta story to ever have a double agent in it was the one that used up all of a guilds raid attempts in ToC Hardmode. (I can dig through WoW insider for that one if you would like me too.)
Maybe Ensida the top WORLD FIRST elite guild MIGHT have done something like that but that is so rare I'm calling it ridiculous. Ensida was a professionally sponsored group. It would be a exception of like what? 50 guilds in a game of 12 million? This is not the standard, nor the rule.
EDIT: Also since its against the WoW TOS to share your account info for anyone but "1) minor child for whom you are a parent or guardian and whom you have authorized to play the Game using the license granted to you." this would be a banning offense. All it would take would be one snubbed (self destructive) recruit or a rival guild that is aware of your archaic recruitment practices to blow the whistle. Why did this not happen?