Shattered Kingdoms

I took this out of a recent afterlife thread, because I would like to see more discussion about this. The current multiplaying policy is actually outlined in the multiplaying help file. Just one portion of that (and the part that is relevant to Cordance's original post) includes this:



I would like to hear more about what would be considered appropriate punishment. It is certainly true that the best way to avoid any accusations of multi-playing is to never have more than one character at a time. I tend to think that the best way of preventing a reoccurrence of these problems is to explicitly put a violator on a one-character only policy, which protects them from further abuses and fits the crime. But perhaps this would be seen as even more extreme than the current policy.

The problem at the moment is the difference between intended cheating and accidental cheating. You are putting the burden of proof on the accused when many of them have no access to the data being used to incarcerate them. Item transfer and accidentally touching an item through six degrees of separation are two vastly differed things but are being bundled as one. Punishment should fit the crime, but you need a better definition of the crime in question.

Introducing different punishments for different players would not be a good idea; It would open the IMMs up to a new array of favoritism/unequal enforcement accusations.

I agree with Dulrik that the most appropriate consequence is limiting the offender to one character at a time.

I also agree with TheX that there isn't really a problem with the consequences, but there seems to be a problem with the enforcement of the rule. There seem to be several cases of "You play character A and character B. Item Z was on character A at some point in the past, and now it is on character B. You are a cheater," without any discussion or investigation into whether the player in question did anything intentionally. Maybe players are BSing, but there's a lot of "apparently I touched an item with two different characters." Players should only be punished when there is evidence that character A behaved differently from how he normally would with the intent of helping character B, or due to information gained on character B.

It reminds me of one time I ate a curse because both of my characters needed a cloak. While playing my sorc, I located for the cloak of wind of fire, but there weren't any available. Shortly after this, while playing my rogue, I went to the vendor to see if they had the cloak of wind and fire, and it wasn't there. In my view, I would have been cheating if my rogue HADN'T gone looking for the cloak. OOCly, I knew the cloak wasn't there, but my character would still look for it, right? Somehow I still ate the curse, though in my mind, I went out of my way NOT to share information between characters, and absolutely nothing was gained.

There doesn't seem to be any actual criteria to determining if multiplaying occurred.

How do you rectify these two things? And, isn't it already being done? If you look at the recent posts in the Rules Manager afterlife thread, you see that one player had a character retired for passing staves between character A and B and another got a warning for the exact same thing. The reason cited for just giving a warning in one case was that enough time had passed between the item going from A to B. In the Holion thread, the Rules Manager made specific mention of a "direct transfer over a very brief amount of time."

Does it not seem like the Rules Manager is already inserting judgment into discerning between honest mistakes and likely intentional rule breaking? Or do you suspect that is not being done but, for some reason, the Rules Manager is giving preferential treatment to Damakos/Taran and not Felben or Sterhul/Holion? I personally think the Rules Manager has been doing a good job on all of this, and that it is highly unlikely there is some sort of favoritism being shown toward the player of Damakos/Taran and not to others. I think the Rules Manager identified differences in the cases that merited different responses, punishment in some cases and a warning in the other.



A lot? I think we should look at some hard numbers for perspective on this. In the entire history of the Rules Manager afterlife thread, there have been 14 instances of characters getting punished for item transfer, and 2 characters received a warning. That's 14 characters, played by five or six players, who got punished over the course of two years, during which time hundreds and hundreds of characters were played by who knows how many players. Most of those punishments happened while I was Rules Manager, and most were overt cases of things like one character removing and dropping all before logging out for his next character to come take, or a player using one character to enchant for another character. Given that we're talking about a scant few cases where there is some perceived grey area, I'm not sure how this constitutes "a lot."

There have also been many instances of item transfer over the years that never even got brought up, because it was obvious they were happenstance. For instance, if you play a priest who makes a recall potion for someone, that character goes and dies in PvP, and then you participate in PvP later against the victor on your alt, winning back the recall potion, that's not something that has ever been enforced as multiplaying. That is trivial and clearly not some sort of premeditated instance of multiplay. There have been lots of cases where items have gone through long PvP chains, passing between three or four or five other characters, before circling back to the same player's alt. There's just no way we would punish anyone for that and, as evidenced by how there are zero instances of punishments, or even warnings, for such in the entire history of the Rules Manager afterlife thread. When I was the Rules Manager, I always gave the benefit of the doubt in situations like this. I can't speak for the current Rules Manager, but I imagine this hasn't changed.

Perhaps this is an issue of survivorship bias. Those cases of item transfer that survive initial scrutiny and make it to light in the form of publicly documented punishments do not represent all cases of item transfer. The majority of item transfers are as I just described, where they are discarded as a non-issue before they ever make it to the public, so you don't see them and aren't aware of them. You aren't aware that we do not punish every instance of item transfer, because those instances of non-punishment are invisible. Maybe if we could somehow account for this in some way that would not be impossibly tedious and time-consuming for the Rules Manager, it would help with the public perception of this issue.



You are welcome to suggest something concrete that everyone can understand, that takes as much personal judgment out of the equation for the Rules Manager as possible, so as to avoid charges of favoritism, and that doesn't create loopholes for cheaters to exploit. It also has to be actually enforceable. If motive or something is to be considered, it has to be something the Rules Manager can discern.

I also agree with this.

You're not seeing the forest for the trees.

Rules are only accepted as fair and reasonable when those governed by them can determine when or if they might be in violation of the rule. There is no way for a player to determine if an item they acquire (picking it up, buying it, or what have you) has been in the possession of another character they play(ed).

Obviously, some sort of alert is generated when multiple characters from the same verified e-mail address or IP touch an item. Why not simply send that alert to the verified e-mail address of those characters? If the player of those characters doesn't correct the issue themselves within 48 hours, the rules manager can do it for them.

Alternatively, you can continue with the current enforcement regime of deletion and/or bans, even though the players involved might not even realize they are in violation of the rules.

This is golden, and perhaps serves to illustrate what I think about the situation.

I would argue that most players aren't concerned about the punishment for multiplaying, but rather the criteria for determining what multi-play is. This is due to two reasons: the criteria and methodology for determining whether someone is multiplaying is a secret, and the details of multiplaying punishments are not posted publicly. In other words, the only people who know exactly what gets punished are the punished and the staff. No one else is given a definitive answer by the staff as to why one case of multiplaying was punished, and why another was let off. In fact, as Thuban even mentioned above, the players don't even know -any- of the cases in which the staff decided that the incident wasn't actually multiplaying.

How does one solve that problem? On one hand, I respect the fact that it makes sense for some of the tools made to detect multiplaying to be kept under wraps. Detailing exactly how people are caught for multi-playing could very easily serve as a manual to avoid getting caught by cheaters. However, I think that the playerbase at large would benefit if the punishments thread were more detailed when someone is punished for multiplaying. If nothing else, it would allay the concern of those who wonder whether or not their standard play could be construed as guilty. There's a big difference between seeing a post that says "xxx was punished for multiplay" as opposed to "xxx was punished for multiplay. They logged onto an alt to give coin and enchant EQ for their freshly rolled characters."

TL;DR: When even one story like the one posted by Baldric above is in circulation amongst players, yet there's no detail given by the staff when multiplaying punishments are posted, then players are easily concerned that the rules might be getting enforced inappropriately. More detail on the posted punishments may help combat that. For what it's worth, the full description that Sadr gave for the punishment right -before- the last is a great example of what I would prefer all multiplaying punishments look like.

Using items that circled over long PvP chains and appropriately disposed of and then reacquired items as examples of the Rules Manager being lenient on the item transfer rule is sort of strange to me, because I don't even see that as breaking that rule. Items, especially limited ones, are going to go from one character to the next, but certainly some players have preferences and knowledge that biases them to certain things in one way or another. Item transfer, to me, is moving an item from one character to another in a way that doesn't fit the normal way to acquire that item, not two of one players characters ending up with the same item. You're always going to be able to Kevin Bacon an item back to either a character or player, always. If I retire a character who has a stave and then log on my other character and go buy it from a store, am I cheating?

No, because part of retiring is having the limited items removed from your character. Buying the item again from the store is not going to track back to the previous item because it is a completely different instance. And also, except in perhaps rare circumstances, items sold in shops are not limited.

We aren't this advanced, but it's a pretty good suggestion. Currently we can run various commands to dig for information about who has owned what. An alert system would be a fairer and more systematic way to catch everyone who is cheating without needing to do any "player profiling". It could also potentially be implemented in such a way as to take place off the main game thread and not lag the game to a stand-still. The alert could go to both the rules manager and the affected player. Of course, if you don't register an email, then it would only go the staff.

I will put some serious thought into whether this could be implemented.