Originally Posted by
warfrogs
If I remember correctly he did have a "flagger" that if multiple accounts were logged into from a single IP they'd be flagged and banned, I could be mistaken though as it has been more than a few years.
It would though. Though a heuristic method, most of it could be automated and very targetted at the people who log into their partners accounts. We can agree that most of the people that are mutli-ing are not that smart, and if they're using the whitelist, they know they're running a high chance of being caught. Through my system, if more than 60% of the logins are from the same place and pretty much the same time, it's most likely a multi. If there are multiple logins in extremely short time periods at multiple IPs, almost definitely a multi. It's not perfect, but I'm trying to salvage something that I really think is a integral part of the game and would be a shame to do away with if you're looking to expand the game population.
Hear me out with my logic, we have entered into an era where gaming is extremely social (see Farmville, Mafia, Vampire Wars) and it is not uncommon to see people playing the same game as a means of joint entertainment. Utopia is very much so like those games where it isn't something you have to dedicate 24 hours a day to, but instead, just a few hours every few days is enough to have a successful experience. You're eliminating a HUGE segment of potential players by saying that siblings, spouses, housemates, roommates, dorm-mates, and anyone who wants to play at a coffee shop cannot play together effectively (or at least in the same kingdom.) I have introduced probably a dozen players to the game by saying, "Hey, there's an open spot in my kingdom, let's set up an account for you and I can help you get going." If this wasn't possible, that's a dozen people that would have never even heard of the game.
Granted, my fix isn't eliminating the problem of whitelist abuse, but instead, it automates it in a heuristic fashion which should take a lot of the work off of the admins and would still smart target abusers of the system.
I have no idea to be honest, but that's also my point. Instead of doing away with the whitelist, why not modify the multi detection for people on the whitelist without doing away with it all together. If you're on IRC at all, drop by #dontdropthesoap and shoot me a message. I'll be around and I'd love to chat more about this.
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