Acct sharing legal?

[silo32]

I know sooo many people sharing accounts at ruby bp and ms with proof

[Tecmos Deception]

The rules I've read and stuff from staff label it as a "proceed at your own risk" activity, but not as an illegal one.

[zodium]

it's basically legal and supported. despite the written word of the rules, if you share your account with someone and they steal your stuff and delete your dude, staff will generally restore it and ban the offender. the blue raid scene rests on an army of account shared characters lol.

welcome too p99

[Tecmos Deception]

I dislike the mechanic. It strikes me as a good example of when the staff should deviate from the classic mechanic/rule in favor of achieving a more classic experience, either by disallowing account sharing as much as they reasonably can, or by disallowing the creation of multiple accounts as much as they reasonably can.

Sure, some folks back in the day had multiple accounts and some people shared their accounts. But since people had to pay for their accounts, few did these things at all, and those who did barely did it (so they'd have like, 2 or 3 accounts, or like 1 person per server had a full group they boxed, not 1 per character like p99 raiders tend to).

Staff banned boxing here even though it was legal on live and done on live. I think this was because of negative effects it has on the game and how relatively rare it was during classic era. This seems like a pretty close situation to that, yet account sharing has been pretty integral to the raid scene since forever. And now on green and teal (maybe it was like this on blue too), it's integral for /lists and permacamping lore items and PLing alts and everything else, too.

[zodium]

tbf "no account sharing" isn't remotely possible to enforce and borderline unethical given the time-to-drop and how /list works, but seeing whole groups of shared bot characters restored after some nerd rage-deleted them all on blue, multiple times across multiple guilds, felt a bit much

edit: it's also Problematic because it incentivizes endless powerleveling. you can never have too much guild infrastructure that's never at risk and doesn't decay. it's why DN spiders are permadead on blue, because why not level a 22nd coth mage?

[Tecmos Deception]

Originally Posted by zodium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

tbf "no account sharing" isn't remotely possible to enforce and borderline unethical given the time-to-drop and how /list works, but seeing whole groups of shared bot characters restored after some nerd rage-deleted them all on blue, multiple times across multiple guilds, felt a bit much

If the staff made it official policy that account sharing or multiple accounts were illegal, then most people currently doing either would stop willingly rather than try to cheat the system and potentially get in trouble for it (again, pretty much just like the situation is with boxing). Only a minority would be using VPNs or whatever other nonsense intentionally to have multiple accounts or share, especially since with it illegal there would be whistleblowers around and it wouldn't be trivial to keep it secret that your alts are all on different accounts by any stretch, especially if staff looked into it even remotely ("oh look, a hardcore raider with only 1 character on his account").

But yeah, even if the staff didnt try to enforce it at all, and even if they didn't even make it illegal, just not actively supporting it any more would go a long ways. Tracking/port/rez/coth alts for guilds would no longer be widely shared or as-easily recovered. A small subset of players would arise who actively try to infiltrate guilds and rob people who trust them with account info (reminds me of eve online style thefts). Etc.

/shrug

[zodium]

yeah imo the issue with account sharing is more larger organized groups using shared accounts as industrial infrastructure than it is having a friend ad-hoc tag in on your guise or w/e so you can get some sleep like a normal human person, and you could mostly get rid of it by just enforcing the rule as written

[DMN]

[QUOTE=zodium;3063063 they steal your stuff and delete your dude, staff will generally restore it and ban the offender. the blue raid scene rests [/QUOTE]

WTF this better not be true. This was never done in original EQ unless they had evidence the accunt was hacked. From literally stacking the deck so only multi-users on one account can get legacy items to removeing all the supposed danger of having someone use your account if this is true, it appears p99 is going out of its was to be as unclassic as possible.

[Tecmos Deception]

Originally Posted by zodium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

you could mostly get rid of it by just enforcing the rule as written

Nah. The rule as written is permissive. The staff MAY punish the offender, MAY assist the victim, MAY penalize the account even when it wasn't under control of the actual owner. They could decide that the spirit of the rule is "let's deter account sharing" if they wanted, but the rule as written definitely doesn't do that more than very minimally.

[Tecmos Deception]

Originally Posted by DMN [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

WTF this better not be true.

Speaking with a bit of experience, they definitely don't always help the victims.

(I wasn't the victim. Don't share your account info with me, although nowadays I probably wouldn't even accept it anyways!)