Shattered Kingdoms

Yeah, this is definitely where we differ. The way I read SK's rules, there's no circumstance in which a character of yours should place an item somewhere that you then retrieve with another character, regardless of how public the place is or how much time passes between them. Whether the item transfer is innocuous or not, intentional or not, I think that goes against the rules of SK.

I think intent should matter in judging the severity of the punishment or whether it warrants a warning, but you seem to be pulling a Comey on this one and inserting intent into a rule that doesn't need intent to be read into it.

While it would be difficult for an IMM to prove intent to cheat when it comes to multiplaying, it would be equally, if not even more difficult, for a player to guarantee that one of their characters does not benefit another one of their characters.

If one character alters the game world, whether it is by adding WoR vials into it through brewing, helping someone level, affecting the economy through the selling of items, or any other normal, innocuous action, that character will be altering the game world in a way that can and will affect other characters they play.

Is it okay to accept a rez from a priest you helped level with another character?

If you enchant jewelry for someone with one character, and then that character gets ganked and the jewelry is handed off to your other character, have you broken the rules?

If you sell an item to a shopkeep, and then another one of your characters gets a tell "Hey, shopkeep x has item y, can you go buy it for me?" can you do so?

You pick an item up from a bin, identify it, and drop it where you found it. A day later another one of your character's comes across the item, picks it up, identifies, and keeps it. Have you broken the rules?

You kill an enemy, and decide to let him keep his gear. Now your other character doesn't have to enchant for him. Did you break the rules? What about if some of that loot you didn't junk gets offered to your other character?

You help a friend gather some equipment. Then he asks your other character to enchant it for him. Kosher?

You are offered a piece of loot, and turn it down. The same loot is then offered to your other character. Can you accept it?

There are a lot of ways that one character can "benefit" another character, and I would argue it is pretty close to impossible to completely avoid it from happening. However, if you always make your decisions based on what your character would do, without considering how you expect those actions to affect your other characters, you should know that you aren't going to get deleted, imo.

I would argue that the grey area is much more extensive when you do NOT include intent. While intent is hard to prove, including it in the definition of the crime makes it much clearer what is, and what is not, against the rule.

Like I said, if intent was provable, it would definitely prove guilt. If it's possible to prove intent when determining if someone is guilty of multiplaying, then that should be done.

However, you stated earlier that -unless- you can prove there was intent, you should never punish someone for multiplaying.

Those two things are very different. I realize that this introduces a grey area in enforcement, as there always is, but I think that it's very reasonable to say that when the rules define multiplaying as that anyone who puts an item in a bin on one character and then retrieves said item from that same bin on another character is undeniably guilty of multiplaying. I would argue that with rare exception, anyone who leaves an item on the ground anywhere and then later picks that item up and uses it on another character is guilty of multiplaying.
It's perfectly fine to play a character who, on every reboot, logs on and spams create food at every portal stone.
It's perfectly fine to play a character who routinely junks their training NPCs and leaves the gear on the ground afterwards.
It's perfectly fine to leave gear in bins.

You cross the line, however, when your characters take those specific items later and use them.

You should be willing to leave the food at the portal stones alone if you're the person who created it.
You should be willing to, upon finding gear on the ground next to a NPC you killed on a prior character, junk the loot and kill the NPC on repop yourself in order to get the gear again.
You should purposefully avoid taking items from bins that you placed there on prior characters.

Is this an overwhelming demand? I don't think so. With the game resetting every 3 days, I would be surprised if a player who played multiple characters would be unable to recall the EQ he left around in the last 72 hours and avoid using it to his advantage.

I don't think it's necessary to have existential crises over it though and start considering the butterfly effect, because that introduces rules that aren't in existence: If you help a priest level and then get a rez from them, you never transferred EQ or items. For what it's worth, the incident you're describing with the cloak totally wasn't against the rules.

It's important to keep the text of the help file in mind when looking at this situation: "Using two characters to give you an advantage over someone who only has one is unfair and thus expressly forbidden." You could help someone else level up with just one character and you could get resurrected by that player with just one character. That you have two characters is not entirely relevant to this situation.



This is a conditional probability problem where you have assumed the condition to be true (the character gets ganked), but that's not the appropriate way to approach it. In order to analyze this against the base case of a one-character player who did not enchant the gear for the other player, you have to determine what that enchantment was worth in terms of the other players's character winning or losing in a PvP to know if it really produces an advantage.

Let's say you didn't enchant for the other player. In that case, the character would, in theory, be easier to kill in PvP because its gear would be inferior. So, maybe your other character would benefit from you not enchanting for the other player because your other character would now be more likely to receive some items from a PvP victory against the character with the unenchanted loot. On the flip side, those items wouldn't be as valuable if they weren't enchanted, and the difference in value could vary widely. In some cases, possession of the item is more important because you can enchant and reclaim easily on a blowup, and, in other cases, possession takes a backseat to whether the item was enchanted, if it cannot be easily reclaimed. It's also entirely plausible the most relevant item to your other character isn't one of the enchanted ones, in which case, again, not enchanting for the other player would be more advantageous than enchanting. There is also the issue of there being multiple ways to get enchantment in the world. Could the other player still have gotten enchantment even if you weren't the one who did it? Maybe. Maybe not.

In short, it isn't clear that you produced any advantage for yourself without more specifics. As such, situations like this would have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Foul play would also have to be checked for (equipment dumping, for instance).

It's important to realize all of this is highly theoretical. In terms of practical enforcement, I never enforced any item transfers in situations like this during my sting as the Rules Manager, nor am I aware of any such enforcement decisions ever having been made.



I wouldn't advise it. There's really no generic answer to whether this could result in an advantage, but it sure seems like an easy one to not do. You know for sure you just sold that item to that shopkeeper, so just don't go buy it with your other character. Even if you think you had some rock-solid case for doing this, it would be a violation of Rule 1 because you're knowingly creating a headache for the Rules Manager.



I never punished anyone for this. The first character didn't change the state of the item (it was already in the bin). If the first character enlarged or shrunk it to better suit the other character, or enchanted it, or rendered it more accessible to the second character, then the second character is clearly benefiting from the actions of the first. This is another case where there is no demonstrable advantage for having two characters. If you didn't have the first character, the second could have just as easily come along, identified the item, and taken possession of it. The only argument that could be made that the second character benefited is that it never would have known the item was in the bin and wouldn't have "happened across it." But, if we're talking about high traffic areas like bins, it's not really a stretch that the second character would have gone there anyway. it's not like we're talking about one character locating loot in some remote area and then the second character going to get it (a case where the actions of one character "rendered it more accessible" to the second by pinpointing its location in the world).

I would just give the player the benefit of the doubt in your scenario. It seems innocuous and not unfairly advantageous.



This has all the same considerations as the previous example of enchanting and PvP. By letting the enemy keep the gear, it could mean one of your character's allies then gets looted later by this same character because he has a good kit and was able to beat him. So, while your second character didn't have to enchant for this guy, maybe now your first character has to do an equipment run for one of his or her allies. It's just too complex to try to answer these questions in a vacuum. In any case, advantage cannot be unequivocally proven to your characters whether you loot the opponent or not.

All that said, I think it's always safe to not loot someone. You can't be accused of undermining the purpose of the multiplay rules, which is to make the game "fun, fair, and enjoyable" if you don't loot another player.



Seems like it.



Provided some third character of yours didn't previously have it, almost certainly.



This ignores the previous analogy I made to Rule 3 - No Sexual Harassment. If you try to defend your decision to have your character engage in sexual harassment because "it's what your character would do," that's not going to cut it, and you will find yourself facing a siteban. You could say the same about Rule 6 - No Exploitation of Game Mechanics. If you discover some infinite money bug and exploit it because, IC, "that's what your character would do," that justification is not going to get you out of having your character retired. Multiplay is no different. You are responsible for your character's IC actions and, in fact, its entire IC personality. If you decide to roll up a character that is a habitual bin looter and another one that is a habitual donor to bins, you are just setting yourself up for a problem, and that's entirely on you. What this says, and what the analogies to Rule 3 and Rule 6 indicate, is that not 100% of character concepts are on the table at SK, and you should base the type of character you play on the OOC conditions of the game, which includes the rules.



I think what your asking is not feasible. Rather than trying to determine intent in each case, I like the approach of cutting down on potential false positives. Functionally, this is a stand-in for assessing intent.