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Thread: multiple accounts on the one server - acceptable?

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  1. #1

    Default multiple accounts on the one server - acceptable?

    Can I presume by the absolute lack of action by Evony that multiple accounts on the one server is acceptable and "legal" in Evony?

    Can I now go ahead and set up accounts 2,3,4 and have myself 8 cities for nothing?

    Wonderful.

    I cant wait to start.

    Evony have been questioned about multiple accounts on many occasions here and via the contact me button, so I will now set up 3 more accounts and have myself a dukedom without having to pay for medals. And I dont expect to be penalised because ever since Evony complained about bots being cheats, Evony users have complained about multiple accounts being cheats. Obviously multiple accounts arent cheats.

    Look out server. Her I come, I come, I come, I come.

  2. #2

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    It's complete bs,i've reported a host of a large faction for multi accounting(and its completely obvious)3 weeks ago and as far as i can see no action has ever been taken,so i shall now do the same myself.

  3. #3

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    You guys are dumb.

    You don't know for a fact the people you reported are using multiple accounts, so you're going to use multiple accounts yourself and get banned.

  4. #4

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    Quote Originally Posted by devek View Post
    You guys are dumb.

    You don't know for a fact the people you reported are using multiple accounts, so you're going to use multiple accounts yourself and get banned.
    The guy admitted to me he was in mail,his cities on seperate accounts are all named after him with small variation,and they are all placed adjacent to each other,so yeah...

  5. #5
    Join Date
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    I agree. Because we have been unable to instantaneously police the actions of 11 million accounts and immediately ban every single one that could even possibly be a multi without any evidence whatsoever with regards to family members, friends, roommates, etc. that you therefore have full rights to disobey our rules and do whatever you please.

    [/sarcasm]

    Maybe you ought to rethink that. Or then again, do as you like, but could I please have your lord name and server number?

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jul 2009
    Location
    Canada, Ottawa
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    Quote Originally Posted by FoxyBunny View Post
    I agree. Because we have been unable to instantaneously police the actions of 11 million accounts and immediately ban every single one that could even possibly be a multi without any evidence whatsoever with regards to family members, friends, roommates, etc. that you therefore have full rights to disobey our rules and do whatever you please.

    [/sarcasm]

    Maybe you ought to rethink that. Or then again, do as you like, but could I please have your lord name and server number?
    You actually choose not to "police" accounts. There are ways of fixing this problem, and I know Evony doesn't want to put the effort into doing so.

  7. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by FoxyBunny View Post
    I agree. Because we have been unable to instantaneously police the actions of 11 million accounts and immediately ban every single one that could even possibly be a multi without any evidence whatsoever with regards to family members, friends, roommates, etc. that you therefore have full rights to disobey our rules and do whatever you please.

    [/sarcasm]

    Maybe you ought to rethink that. Or then again, do as you like, but could I please have your lord name and server number?
    This is nonsense. None of the posters complaining implied that they expected the game's staff to trawl around every server and find every potential "multi-accounter" and ban them. The complaint was that there has been no action taken against players with multiple accounts even when complaints were submitted in the appropriate fashion and with valid evidence, such as quotes from the offending players themselves.

    Nobody complained that action wasn't "instantaneous." The first poster mentioned complaining "multiple times" and the second stated that it had been three weeks.

    It's not difficult to enforce the rule when an appropriate complaint is submitted. A staffer looks at the complaint, checks the accounts complained of and looks for a variety of factors - IP addresses, account names, email addresses, alliance membership, statements by the player, just to name a few, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. This is made considerably easier by the fact that most often when someone is cheating to this degree, multiple players have submitted complaints. If the complaint seems valid, you suspend the accounts and inform the users. If they can somehow show that the accounts didn't belong to the same person, you can reactivate them at the click of a button.

    The administration of such a process is not the daunting task that you've claimed, because you've mischaracterized the problem. As an instructive example, there is a player on my server who several members of my alliance have complained of. The name of all of his accounts is exactly the same, with a different numeral at the end of each one. The name of each of his cities is the same, with a different numeral at the end of each one. All of the accounts happen to be a member of the same alliance and have almost exactly the same prestige. Attacks from one account are very frequently accompanied by attacks from the others. All of his cities are in close proximity to each other. In each of our complaints, we've even included statements made the player bragging that he was cheating and that the staff would never take action despite being aware. It's been days since we submitted these complaints, not hours, not minutes.

    This isn't a problem of a "gray area." The fact that this guy is cheating has been served to the Evony staff on a silver platter, and they've declined to take action.

    The argument that "there are just too many people" doesn't apply in the cases that I or the other posters here have complained of. If Evony isn't going to enforce a rule, than don't make it.

  8. #8

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dadric View Post
    This is nonsense. None of the posters complaining implied that they expected the game's staff to trawl around every server and find every potential "multi-accounter" and ban them. The complaint was that there has been no action taken against players with multiple accounts even when complaints were submitted in the appropriate fashion and with valid evidence, such as quotes from the offending players themselves.

    Nobody complained that action wasn't "instantaneous." The first poster mentioned complaining "multiple times" and the second stated that it had been three weeks.

    It's not difficult to enforce the rule when an appropriate complaint is submitted. A staffer looks at the complaint, checks the accounts complained of and looks for a variety of factors - IP addresses, account names, email addresses, alliance membership, statements by the player, just to name a few, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. This is made considerably easier by the fact that most often when someone is cheating to this degree, multiple players have submitted complaints. If the complaint seems valid, you suspend the accounts and inform the users. If they can somehow show that the accounts didn't belong to the same person, you can reactivate them at the click of a button.

    The administration of such a process is not the daunting task that you've claimed, because you've mischaracterized the problem. As an instructive example, there is a player on my server who several members of my alliance have complained of. The name of all of his accounts is exactly the same, with a different numeral at the end of each one. The name of each of his cities is the same, with a different numeral at the end of each one. All of the accounts happen to be a member of the same alliance and have almost exactly the same prestige. Attacks from one account are very frequently accompanied by attacks from the others. All of his cities are in close proximity to each other. In each of our complaints, we've even included statements made the player bragging that he was cheating and that the staff would never take action despite being aware. It's been days since we submitted these complaints, not hours, not minutes.

    This isn't a problem of a "gray area." The fact that this guy is cheating has been served to the Evony staff on a silver platter, and they've declined to take action.

    The argument that "there are just too many people" doesn't apply in the cases that I or the other posters here have complained of. If Evony isn't going to enforce a rule, than don't make it.
    I have to agree with this. People who are dumb enough to use multiple accounts and brag about it should be banned. I understand that some people, even family members, might carry the same or similar names, but when someone brags in writing it's pretty cut and dry. The people claiming here that they're going to open multiple accounts, not very smart BTW. Doesn't really help your cause.

  9. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dadric View Post
    It is not substantially more difficult and time-consuming than I suggest, and I would assert that there are likely other methods than the one I mentioned that are even more efficient. There are dozens of other online games that have managed to figure it out. If the complaints had been that Evony staff had not been doing enough to find these people, what you're claiming might hold up, but that's not what's at issue. The violators being discussed here have already been found and exposed in such a way there there can be no legitimate question that they are indeed using multiple accounts. All that's left for a staffer on the other end to do is run a few quick checks and take disciplinary action.

    Invoking "priorities" is no excuse either. First of all, it's not necessary for the task of rule enforcement to be assigned to developers. It's absurd to act as if account suspension - or the minimal investigating that would accompany it - requires the skills or access of a developer. If it does, then someone did something seriously, seriously wrong at the most basic level of game design, but I have a hard time believing that's the case. And regardless, to answer your question; Yeah, I absolutely want the enforcement of equity-ensuring rules to be a priority. If I'm going to contribute money to a game, there's no question that I want to know that it's a "priority" that players aren't allowed to gain an advantage by ignoring rules. But even still, the larger point is that enforcement of this particular rule isn't an issue of "priorities" on any level.
    At no point is anything that simple. Screen-shots can be doctored and chat sessions altered to fit what the accuser wants. In order to prevent the system from being abused such that innocent players get banned, each accusation MUST be investigated using the actual game logs to verify the claims and proof. To do otherwise is to give players the opportunity and ability to get innocent players banned and suspended simply because they don't like them or because they can.

    Investigations take time and resources away from doing something else, and no one here, me included, have any idea how many people even deal with these issues.


    Quote Originally Posted by neko_lord View Post
    This is because apparently nobody fully tests these changes to the filter. As it stands right now, you cannot ask "isn't it" because there's that naughty word being formed across the space. There could be all kinds of other combinations that form that naughty word, that it (there's an example) makes things very frustrating. Then there was the anti-Santa incident that got all kinds of words simply because they had that 2-letter combination in them. Then there was the time when even the name of the game was filtered, so any shared URLs to scouting reports or even to these very forums showed up as ****. There may have been another time when numbers were filtered, thus all the numbers in the URLs got filtered.

    As someone who has also done programming, all of the errors are likely due to misunderstandings involving Regular Expressions. For example, not understanding how [\w] works... It does take a little bit of practice with regular expressions to get it to do exactly what you want it to do. Bottom line though is the changes need to go through more rigorous test cases / scripts, as clearly there have been some major side-effects which then have to be backed out at the next server reset.

    Look, as I've said in other threads, I used to do what you do. I understand, perhaps more than most here, how frustrating it is. However defending a clear failure to run code changes through Quality Control / Quality Assurance by telling customers that they are being too demanding is not a good PR move.
    You don't know how word filters work. They look at the text stream and look for those letter combinations mindlessly. They are not intelligent, they are simple, stupid, automatic. They incorporate the usage of spaces in them because that is one common way of bypassing the filter, and while this might break chat, they put those variations in the word list anyway to catch the instances of someone trying to bypass the word filter.
    Last edited by Ashanta; 11-24-2009 at 10:50 PM.
    But....the eternal ray of sunshine REALLY wanted to see you, so I helped brighten your day by removing the city from around you! ^.^

  10. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ashanta View Post
    You don't know how word filters work. They look at the text stream and look for those letter combinations mindlessly. They are not intelligent, they are simple, stupid, automatic. They incorporate the usage of spaces in them because that is one common way of bypassing the filter, and while this might break chat, they put those variations in the word list anyway to catch the instances of someone trying to bypass the word filter.
    I don't know how filters work?

    Do you know what Regular Expressions are, without using Google? Have you programmed in Java or C++? Have you adapted a VBScript module into a LotusScript module and used Regular Expressions to validate input data?

    If you have, then great. If you have not, or even if you have, it's highly presumptuous for you to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. Validation / filtering can be done elegantly and effectively, or it can be done hurriedly and sloppily. The difference is the amount of time put into the process and the amount of testing that is done on the work.

    Edit:

    It boils down to really you have to recognize that this is a "free game". As such, you're pretty much going to get pranksters and people who want to do things from the comfort of their own home that they could not get away with in public, at least not for very long. With the structure that's in place, basic word filters are about the most that should be done. You might consider adapting some of the adult content filters in various mail programs spam detection, or get it from major ISPs / mail providers (Earthlink, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) and look for those specific variations and add to them as time goes on, but looking for "ho" in every single bit of text has two main drawbacks:

    1) It is resource intensive.
    2) It will likely have an enormous amount of false positives, particularly in a game where you have "host" and "vice-host". Also people can't ask "How can I...", or say the word "however", "I'm going home now", "Who needs help?", and on and on and on...

    [/edit]

    I know that people try to defeat filters. The problem becomes one of making too much of a deal about it and then having people who don't understand that you just can't look for every instance of "ho" in a word and filter the word just because it contains that 2-letter sequence. It's about common sense, and about proper Quality Control / Quality Assurance.

    Also, to stay relevant to the thread, all the multiple changes to the filter takes time away from fixing bugs or addressing people who use multiple accounts to gain an advantage over others by having a small account that feeds the larger account by providing resources through raids just often enough to be profitable.
    Last edited by neko_lord; 11-25-2009 at 12:34 AM. Reason: Had another thought...

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