This type of economic game is centred around resource scarcity. The main form of competition is, and will remain, around controlling the flow of resources.
Negotiations and “diplomacy” are also a vital part of this game. If you have a lot of accounts, and your friends have a lot of accounts, then you can keep your business circle small - there’s no need to engage in negotiation, your friends can just spool up another account to setup the new production chain.
If we were to allow players to create as many accounts as they like, then resources are no longer scarce. Most importantly, ships are no longer scarce.
Each company must act in a way which serves its own profit. If you had a main account, and a few alternates, then you would most likely not be behaving in a competitive manner from your alternates.
Furthermore, how do you define transactions? To what depth are they defined? How would you prevent players laundering money and resources through third-party accounts?
yup - I agree - a person with multi-account will be less social and try to do things with his main account and helper-accounts.
I don`t mind the social part - cannot force someone to be social.
Point is - can he misuse it to his advantage. I think - “No” and this is where the “transaction” definition comes in.
I am myself not sure but trying to define - some tweaking might be required - but say,
accounts with same IP cannot buy/sell each others goods and take up each others contracts. + no two accounts with same IP can have base in same planet
Seems like that will cover most parts.
I am trying to think how that can be abused - seems like quite safe but haven`t put too much thought like a tester making test cases.
To me it is a win-win situation → more planets developed → no cheating + players can try out different roles/chains of production. (can stick to 1 account if # of players is very large tho…many times the current population of players)
Unfortunately it is not so easy. What about players behind a NAT or in the same household (which we have a few), they’d have the same IP and limiting them to not be able to have a base on the same planet is unfair and in some cases they couldn’t even start on a CX planet.
On the other hand, a malicious player could easily use a VPN to switch between a multitude of IPs without effort.
yup!
imo - stopping multiaccounts is not a priority now - there will be far more other important things to do.
Just for sake of discussion(& killing time) - say, in some future date we want to stop cheating by multiaccounts.
The guys from same household needs to inform while registering - that way dev can whitelist their IP and remove those from cheating_detection report/query.
[side note:But how do we stop guys from same household settling in same planet and electing one of them as governors every term?]
VPN etc is very tricky - almost impossible to stop - but maybe that % of users will be very low and can be ignored.
It’s not simply a matter of getting higher account numbers. More players would be good - but more accounts is not equivalent to more players.
The quality of players is also a concern. Limiting players to a single account increases the quality of our community. Multi-accounts are low effort, shortcuts to avoid participation in the social aspects of prun.
Stopping multi accounts now is in fact a high priority. The devs are crafting a community concurrently to crafting a game. Allowing multi accounts now, then disallowing them at a later date would be a disaster.
When crafting a community, it’s important to be consistent. Consistency leads to confidence - the community needs to trust the devs.
Remember, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. It’s much more difficult to enforce a higher standard later. Better to start now.
ohh!! right.To take all factors into account is too broad a topic and beyond me.
So I will just stick to listing a few ideas based on other browser games I played. These are random ideas(might not be useful) based on some actual implementation in other games.
option 1:
In CX view there are already 4 options : info,chart,orders,trade
why not add another option -> “view last 10 trades” which show all details about buyer,seller,unit price,volume etc. in tabular form with an option for “reporting” the transaction to admins.
Doesn`t stop the crime but acts as a deterrent b/c there is a risk of getting reported & caught.
option2:
Once a player puts out a sell order in CX - it shows up only after a random time delay.(say a randomly generated value between 30-90 mins) which is not revealed to anyone.
(theoretically, another sell order by a player done later might show up earlier so bot auto-buying is risky)
Just want to add in that preventing, or identifying, transactions between two accounts is very difficult. This problem is not solved in the real world, even on highly regulated and visible financial networks, despite billions being spent on it.
As a simple example to show that simply preventing transactions between the main and the alt accounts isn’t enough…
Hey @Prdgi, I really need more ships. You think you could make a few extra accounts and take all my shipping contracts? I’ll sell your main account this-great-thing I can now manage to produce cheaply for almost nothing if you do!
Or! I’ll make a bunch of extra accounts, and I’ll have them take all your shipping contracts! Win-win!