Trader exemption, thoughts?

[Loke]

So a recent thread in RnF about a player being banned over 2boxing on his trader made think of this, curious what the community/devs think...

Obviously the anti-2boxing rules in place on this server are intended to promote social interaction in our community. Let me first say, that I think it has been absolutely vital to the success of this server. While I enjoy the social aspect of the game, I have no problem admitting that if 2boxing were allowed here it would drastically change my play style - almost certainly to the detriment of the community.

That being said, there exists various aspects of this game in which the social interaction of two characters does not cause any cross-over. By this I mean, a character doing trade skills or selling in EC will have no, or little effect on a player search for an EXP group. Like wise, when a single player wants to partake in more than one of these aspects, they must choose between the two. If a player chooses to experience, other players engaged in trading lose out on the wares that player would have bought or sold had they decided to play there trader. Like wise, if the player chooses to trade, the pool of possible players to group with is diminished, possibly having a negative impact on players searching for other players to group with.

Now, I am not sure of the technical aspects involved with policing players acting with two characters in the same aspect of the game - but if it were possible to say, allow multiboxing only within the limits of EC, or maybe a level limit, like if a character is L1 (i.e. a trader) they can multibox. These are just a couple of the possible ideas I came up with in the past 2-3 minutes, so I haven't put much thought into the possibility of them, or whether or not another, better, option exists. It just seems to me that if there were some way to regulate that players who wanted to trade and level were allowed to, there would be a net benefit to the server through increased activity in EC as well as freeing players to conduct whatever actions they want on their primary characters (be it farming, tracking, leveling, etc).

I'm aware there are some possibilities for abuse here - both with players trying to take advantage of whatever system would be used to regulate it, as well as assisting those who engaged in farming for extended periods of time - however, my opinion (and it could be wrong) is that the benefit we would see would outweigh any negative caused by the few players that would attempt to use the ability to trade while playing their primary character.

Obviously the guy who broke the rules that prompted my post broke the rules - I don't know/care about his situation really and am in no way trying to say that what he did should be acceptable under the current rules. Basically I just saw that the intent of 2-boxing rule in that particular situation didn't really apply, so that maybe there was the possibility for improvement.

So yea, curious what other players/staff think.