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Ooga booga, folks!
I realize this might be too far into the future, but as well as myself, my two kids are potential CoT players. Just wondering if there's been discussion about family subscription plans, etc. Would multiple copies of the game need to be purchased?
Cheers!
"Ooga booga! It's Tortuga!!"
Founding member of:
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I seem to recall some talk about the potential for something like a "family account" where you could have multiple people authorized to use the same account (presumably parents and kids). But I don't believe anything has been firmly announced along those lines yet.
There's going to be a multi-level system where you can either have a "subscription" to the game or be just free-to-play. Again nothing much has been firmly announced beyond that.
Maybe once the "Second Chance" kicks off they'll start announcing some of the plans for these things in more firm language.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
We definitely KNOW that the Devs want to create a game where families can play together. So the kind of thing you're talking about is what they're ostensibly aiming for. Details on exactly HOW that is to be done however are yet to be revealed.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I seem to recall some random posts about tying multiple subscriptions to a single master account.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Tortuga, that's an interesting question.
Because no good deed goes unpunished, I can definitely see family accounts being abused by powergamer multiboxers, bots and goldsellers.
I know a lot of games have made attempts at deterring multiboxing, bots and goldfarmers/sellers. In fact, Ankama has gone so far as to create [url=https://support.ankama.com/hc/en-us/articles/115013728988-How-does-the-single-account-server-work-]single account only servers[/url] for their flagship game, [url=https://www.dofus.com/en]Dofus[/url], in which a single account is assigned a single IP address. This means that you can't play on a laptop using a public network, and it also means you can't have more than one account per IP address, which typically means one account per household. So in order for two people in the same household to play at the same time, they would need to subscribe with their ISP for a second IP address.
I am of the opinion, however, that we should enable people like you and at the same time attempt to place deterrents in place for the inevitible abusers. Then if the deterrents and roadblocks don't work, then and only then should we consider removing such a feature.
If the game gets so successful and popular that powergamer multiboxers, bots and goldfarmers and sellers become a problem, then that's a problem I'd like us to have.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I don't see how family accounts would be easier to "abuse" in this sense than separate accounts, though I base that on that every game-account can only have one single login at a time. Depending on how the EUAL/ToS is worded MWM could leave themselves room to ban a whole master-account (and thus every game-account on it) and not limiting themselves to just game-accounts.
As for multiboxing in general, what is so wrong about it that is should be discouraged? I have never understood that.
Most MMOs have always drawn a fine line between allowing an "acceptable" amount of farming and preventing an "exploitative" amount of farming. Each game has its own thresholds where the Devs start to consider that one has become the other.
Devs tend to realize that some people like to "casually farm" just so that they can collect extra resources for themselves. But they also realize that other people take it to crazy extremes where they're no longer farming for themselves but are actually working at it for third party "gold traders" who are trying to make real money profits by selling those in-game resources outside of the game.
So again the goal of most Devs are to let a game be open enough where legitimate players can optimize their personal farming efforts while drawing a line at preventing (or at least making life very hard) for would be professional farmers. The main problem with multiboxing is that it tends to make professional farming that much easier. Depending on the game it might become necessary for the Devs to completely discourage (to use your word) any player's ability to multibox simply because it's too hard to let causal, legitimate farmers use that trick without also allowing professional farmers to have free reign in the game.
I hope this helps explain the situation a little better.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Lothic's point about farming has its merits, especially in PvE. When a single person can put their own team together to farm team content, then it cheapens the rewards that come from team content and could be detrimental to the player economy.
Also, multiboxing is absolutely toxic to the PvP environment, for obvious reasons.
But I think another aspect of multiboxing that is undesireable in an MMO is that it stunts the social aspect of the game. When a single player can accomplish team content by putting together his or her own team.
At first, one would say that as long as each machine had its own account then MWM would be getting the money associated with them all and shouldn't care. And as long as this player is not interfering with anyone else's fun, why should anyone care. Those are valid points.
But the designers made it an MMO for a reason. We're not playing Dragon Age. The vision for the game includes a community that will actually depend upon a certain amount of social interaction. The game will already have some people who prefer to play solo and for them, just knowing there are other players out there is social aspect enough for them. That's okay and I hope the game is designed to be fulfilling to these players. But the fact should still remain that team content is meant to provide a level of interaction and satisfaction, and yes even frustration, that can only be provided when multiple people come together. Accomplishing it with a team of your own making is not just against the spirit and design of the game, but it skews the difficulty of encounters and does not reach the potential it was meant to provide.
As a result, if the developers want the game to reach its highest potential, it is in their best interest to deter multiboxing. I guess it could be summed up as an admission that there are actually certain playstyles that would be preferred by the game.
One could make an argument that "if everyone did it, then, what would the game be like?" But those kinds of arguments never appealed to me since it is an unrealistic proposition, and thus any conclusion would suffer from the same unrealistic nature.
So if there was a very small number of multiboxers who just don't have the personality to deal with strangers and are comfortable with their own self-made teams, I suppose that really wouldn't be an issue as long as they didn't use them to farm content or bully people in PvP. But then we get into Lothic's argument of how will we know and where do we draw the line?
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I knew a player who ran a multi-box 'hydra' and, from how they talked about it, the reason Why was that just one character was boring.
I mean, I found that a little baffling, since I usually found a single character plenty challenging. I get that they essentially 'inherited' some of the accounts and bought others - mostly because they got into the game before one could purchase extra character slots.
Here's the key, though. Beyond auto-follow and the one auto-power that CoT allowed, that player ran all five keyboards by themself. No 'bots', just 'maestro organ-player'. I found I had to respect that. Teaming up with 'character of the day' and the 3-4 flying Radiation Defenders that kited along behind could be a lesson in OP playing and they almost never talked during a mission, but I liked that player.
I got that, like me, they enjoyed playing with one or two others, occasionally, but a full team of eight was overwhelming - too many people to keep track of. In the end, I learned that multi-boxers are good people. A little strange, but still good.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Eh, I don't think anybody ever said that all forms of multi-boxing are inherently "evil". It's just that -most- of the time it's used for at best [i]questionable[/i] purposes. That said there could always be potential outlier cases like your "hydra" friend here.
I could accept (on the surface) that this guy may have genuinely had more fun playing the game with multiple characters via multiple keyboards. But in the end an easy case could be made that whenever your friend was running around as "an army of one" that he was getting multiple chances to get any rare drops. Sure that might not have been his primary goal but it was certainly a beneficial "side-effect" of his method of play. Besides if the "entourage" the hydra player was using really was a pack of Rad Defenders then I have to automatically question his complete "innocence" in the matter. Multiple Rad Defenders were among the most popular "teams" used by professional gold farmers. Just saying if it walked and talked like a [b]duck[/b] it might have been a [b]duck[/b], or at least took advantage of the same trick the [b]ducks[/b] used to maximize farming efficiency. *shrugs*
If there were an easy way for a game like CoT to reliably "predict/police" whether or not a multi-boxing player was doing it just because they considered it fun versus trying to push the edge on exploiting the system then worrying about things like this might not matter. I just don't know how a game enforces a strict policy based on not being able know for certain what a player's "intention" is behind the way they're playing the game. As a matter of practicality it's sometimes easier for the game to just assume the worst and restrict the ability to multi-box accordingly.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
We had some prevalent multiboxers on Champion back in CoH/V, and while I don't inherently have a problem with it and them, I did have a problem when they wanted to take up two spots on a task force or logging their multiple accounts into the Hive for a Hami Raid/iTrial. One person getting double rewards seems patently unfair, especially when it's roughly half the work on two characters. Because I don't care how good they say they are, they can't contribute 100% with both characters as much as two separate people on two separate accounts, no matter how much programming/scripting/botting was put into it.
Additionally, multiboxers tend to powerlevel too. Again, I don't really care how they play a game when it's just them (and their accounts) on their farm maps. However, leveling a character is a learning curve, and powerlevelers seem to be under the impression that they're ahead of the class and can learn how to play one [i]effectively[/i] in a matter of hours. That's not to say that I haven't seen an effective powerleveled character/player. I most certainly have, but those are the exceptions and not the rule. The sheer number of powerleveled players (AE Babies, for example) that have been utterly useless and unable to play their character effectively is mind-boggling. Personally, I don't like to be ineffective at something (e.g. not suck) so its always been difficult for me to understand why someone wants to get to max level fast, like it's the finish line, and just be bad at whatever their function is supposed to be.
I'm sure it's been batted around before, but I remember reading on the old CoH/V forums someone saying that journey of level 1 to 50 was important, not the destination. And that's pretty much what I subscribe to.
This is a good point. Even if a multiboxer doesn't have enough to form their own team, they are effectively 'taking someone else's spot' with every additional character they play in such cases.
Sometimes when you need just one more player, a multiboxer could be a godsend; but if you ever have to announce the team is full and more than one team member is being run by the same player, then shame on him.
The game Wakfu allows you to use other characters on your account as sidekicks. It's a nice mechanic, but is basically an endorsed version of multi boxing. When I do use other characters as sidekicks, I am the first to dismiss them when I get into a team for that very reason.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Well, as for taking someone else's place, there's a big difference between max-team-size = 4 and when there's plenty of room for more. I don't recall my friend ever showing up for a league event with more than one character. There's a big difference between that and running team instances 'solo' while multi-boxing. It's not like there was competition for limited team slots in CoH and I never noticed a big difference between playing with a team of six and playing with eight. I often thought that those who insisted that the team could Not Go without every slot filled were being ridiculous.
Be Well!
Fireheart