Thoughts on alt accounts

[JollyRoger1516]

Alrighty this has obviously been a topic before but I thought as the tribunal case a few days ago not being the palce to discuss this we might take a look at the problem of alt accounts again.

This is just my own opinion feel free to add your 2 cents on the matter but keep it calm and peaceful. Also please bear in mind there isn't a single nation with the morale high ground or anything anymore (there are palyers but not nations with this). Also I'd like to add that I don't own any alts myself.

The way I see it alt accounts although already having been problematic before have now turned into a major contributor for exploit usage (some of these have been fixed but they should be mentioned to see the problem with the attitude of certain players). From hostility bomb trading, to battle screen hideout creation, hostility generation, quick leveling and dragging screeners or attackers into waste of time battles with basic cutters this has jsut gone too far now. Half the time enemy activity is compeltely invisible as one single ship will just trade to an alt and nothing can be done against this kind of hostility. In addition the nation chats have turned into an infoless box that fills my screen with only private chatter and the occassional spotted enemy or callout for people to show up for a battle. The threat of spies has rendered any communication outside of personal TS talks that are limited to known people (and even those have been attacked) into a rather dangerous business for entire fleets. While I will admit that was fun for a short while seeing a nation ahving the odd spy I by this time feel like a quarter of my antion can't be trusted...

So what could be done about this?

1. I see no problem with alts being used for additional crafting hours. As long as the alt account is in the same nation this literally only equals another player who limits his activities and is supported by others in the nation. Though it increases your output rate there is no real threat to anybody coming from this. I would however replace the alt account with a buyable officer who then adds up an additional 2000 hours and has the same recharge rate on top meaning you'd double your output.
2. I also see no problem with people using alts to run additional trade ships. Coming back to the officer idea though I would suggest that we could either take a trade officer(officer equipped with trade perks) on board of our ship or put him on board of a delivery ship (deliveries should change to hire a ship that traverses the open world as a regular AI trader). Once the trip has been made he would automatically return to our officer pool.
3. Alts being used for inter warring nations trade should be stopped. It has only caused exploit problems and nothing good comes out of it. I am not that well versed in the possibilities but maybe the same IP  should not be able to join different nations. Any ideas for solutions are welcome.
4. The main reason however for a removal of alt accounts is clearly with the warships. If we continue to allow alt accounts at the very least the same IP adress should have to declare one of their accounts as the main one and warships should not be accessable to the other ones. On top again the same IP should not be able to join two different nations to prevent the spy, hostility and basic cutter drag in shenanigans.

Generally I would say that alts should become a banned thing and additional officers that can take on these jobs should be the replacement to keep production and trade going as before.

These should be an ingame thing that is bought with regualr ingame gold otherwise this would be as much pay to icnrease your lifelihood as it is right now just with more limits. This would also allow for a generally equal increase of the economy across all players and not jsut those that have the computers to run two accounts at once. After all we all paid full price for this game and should ahve full access to everything that isn't purely cosmetic. I would say there should be a limit of 5 officers which can then all be adjusted to your own preferences - i.e. 5 crafting officers or one for trade, one for crafting, one for port battle combat, one for ganking, one for PvE.

I am aware that my proposal would leave a bunch of people with a lot of useless accounts and quite frankly I don't have a solution for it. It is in all fairness a fuck up of GameLabs to allow such an extensive use of alt accounts in the first place. All I could think of is that players with an alt account would get the next Naval Action for free (or sth like that - I am seriously not sure how to solve this). But pelase do not go around with yet another set of special ships that in the end will define half of teh combat. We already ahve enough problems with the way things go since the last 3 patches when it comes to crafting and fleet compositions.

Edited January 7, 2017 by JollyRoger1516

[Archaos]

The problem is not alts, the problem is people and how they use them. The people who use alts to cheat and gain unfair advantage are the same people who will use modding software or any other option to gain unfair advantage in the game. 

I personally have alts but do not use them to cheat, in actual fact I have found myself on my alt on a trader being chased by my main nation player and dragging him in towards the forts which almost sank him. I just find that a sense of not wanting to lose kicks in and I play that alt as I would play my main character. I do not deliberately put my alt in such positions and I find I tend to ignore the nation chat while on my alt. But I guess everyone is different.

If you try and get rid of alts you will run into the usual excuses some of which are quite valid, like people in the same family playing from the same address. It is also difficult to police properly without using systems that end up blocking genuine people and are still easy to evade by people who want to cheat. 

[Guest]

If we finally end up getting custom chat channels that we can invite and moderate ourselves the alt spying could be mitigated a fair bit. Hoping to see that coming with the UI overhaul.

I think it's already been highlighted elsewhere that there are many problems with using IP to sort out who is who. If there is a way to sort it out, an easy way to not make those alt accounts obsolete would be to simply allow them to be directly transferred to the main account's faction to avoid pissing people off.

The most pathetic thing to see is when the loudest PvP braggarts are also the ones who resort to using plentiful of alts as a crutch to safely spy on fleets and whatnot.

[van der Clam]

Alts provide extra ports, ships, buildings, resources, materials and etc, that a single player would not be able to have. I personally despise alts, even though I wish I had one myself to gain all the doubling extras.
However, we cannot ask the devs to cut their income in half (funny) by not allowing alts. We cannot ask devs to force everyone with the same IP address to play same nation, because my child and I wish to play different nations (hypothetically). It is too difficult to prevent alts. Giving one account more, as suggested in OP, means that alt users would simply have more of more. It will not stop them.

Edited January 7, 2017 by van der Decken

[VirtuallyIdiotic]

Been back only a week from a Fall hiatus and I must say that I can go either way in the concerns with Alternate accounts. I do not think people should be limited to just playing one faction on a single server so I see some benefits for having alternate accounts. I do however believe the ability to have alternate accounts has been abused excessively so if the ability to have an alternate account is removed, I would not be displeased at all.

[Jean Ribault]

I have mentioned on this forum in the past I think alts are breaking a lot in this game, or in other words if alts were not allowed, much of what the devs intended for this game to play out would at least work better.  And because of that, it has been lessening the amount of real fun we can have with it.

Archaos hit the nail on the head above, it's not necessarily the alt accounts themselves but the way in which some people choose to use them.  It's like this fresh influx of superhero movies we have; it's not bad that they have all those superpowers, it's just that some of them use the powers for good and some use it for bad.  Sorry for the bad analogy, lol.

Doing nothing about this would be bad IMHO.  Any measure towards fixing it could make this game better and more fun, or as a minimum more fair if that is a concern.

For transparency, I will state flat out I have bought two copies of this game.  I have a son who plays this game too, in my household.  And when he's not playing because he'd rather do Minecraft then I periodically log onto his account and craft for him to keep moving his XP forward.  This is a legitimate use of two accounts, but as stated above if that's not allowed because we're on the same IP then my son and I can't play together when he sets Minecraft aside.  And we both play different factions in this game, so if we are forced to the same faction that would make no sense.  We've never used the two accounts to cheat the gameplay, but if we chose to do so then how could it be stopped other than to ban the second account, and that wouldn't be fair to us.

The reason alt accounts can be used to cheat is because of secrecy.  If people were exposed for what they were doing then I would venture to say abuse would mostly stop.  Once you're infamous as a cheater you won't do well in the community.  I am not a computer programmer, but in my opinion it would be very easy to expose an alt account from the same IP instead of banning it.  If it's the same IP address, you just put that in brackets after the player name, not the IP address itself obviously for privacy reasons, but something like this:

PlayerName1 [Acct-1]

PlayerName2 [Acct-2 PlayerName1]

Or for those who practice Alt-mania:   PlayerName5 [Acct-5 PlayerName1]

or something to that effect.  It doesn't mean you are a cheater, but people will know who your alt accounts are, so if you do cheat it will be obvious.  If you don't cheat, then it has no effect on your gameplay.  Exposure is the key IMHO.

I will say that after 11 months of playing NA, and without a single shred of evidence at all that I personally hold, I will still state without any doubt that people are using alt accounts to cheat.  It's obvious.  Fix it.

Edited January 7, 2017 by Jean Ribault

[SirSamuelHood]

Nothing irks me more than tagging a French trader and then having British nation chat explode because I'm robbing someone's alt. 

[Powderhorn]

I know some households use the same IP with multiple people playing.  However, I think many more people, and much more harm is done, by those who are individuals running multiple accounts on multiple factions.

My dream would be to IP-bind to factions, but allow for piracy to be a sort of "permanent toggle" so that you might have Danish Pirates, Swedish Pirates, American Pirates, etc. etc. with its own set of rules.

[SirSamuelHood]

1 hour ago, Powderhorn said:

I know some households use the same IP with multiple people playing.  However, I think many more people, and much more harm is done, by those who are individuals running multiple accounts on multiple factions.

My dream would be to IP-bind to factions, but allow for piracy to be a sort of "permanent toggle" so that you might have Danish Pirates, Swedish Pirates, American Pirates, etc. etc. with its own set of rules.

Sort of a distinction between nationality and occupation? Where three people can be from the same nation, but one chooses to be a naval officer, one chooses to be a merchant, and one chooses to be a pirate? 

[Powderhorn]

More like a smuggler flag, except, once activated, it can't be deactivated.

[SirSamuelHood]

Interesting. Could one perhaps remove the flag by paying an exorbitant bounty? Or would it be permanent?