Mintyfresh
Skilled Soldier 18 & Master Commander 21 & 22
- Reaction score
- 4,386
Recently there has been increased kerfuffle over what constitutes account pushing and exploitation of loopholes within the shared connection rules. The rules in question i am referring to are:
4.4: Creating and/or using one or more accounts for the primary benefit of another account ("pushing"), as well as profiting from such behavior, is forbidden.
4.9: Users playing from the same device or network (e.g. same household, school, workplace) have to declare this in their account settings under "Connection Sharing".
The two issues are primarily that pushing is hard to determine at an arbitrary glace with no ingame proof of wrongdoing and also that its easy to pretend to be connection sharing several accounts. Combined they allow people to create an unfair advantage for themselves by either having people create villages for them to take for 'free' via arrangements on skype/discord etc or allow people to say that "My brother was playing and decided to nuke enemy village for me for no gain to himself because he is so nice". This has actually been a problem to some extent for many years, certainly as long as i can remember. The first rule is basically laughably easy to ignore as long unfortunately as long as you have more than 3 braincells between you and your friends because of how unprovable it is when the mods only have ingame actions/communcations to go on when looking at the issue. It has recently become more main-stream and popular. Certainly the past 20 worlds its become almost standard practice for some premade groups/tribes to get an early boost and try to get to the mid-game as soon as possible.
Part of the main problem i believe is the huge grey area that surrounds the issue of coplaying. If i recall correctly historically Inno has always said they dont technically support the concept of coplaying because of potential issues with account sharing rules but at the same time its also been broadly accepted as almost the normal/best method to play the game. I'd imagine the .net playerbase would be much smaller if coplaying was not implicitly allowed due to the 24/7 timezone nature of it. There are a few ways that i can think of to fix this and try and prevent the pushing meta thats become more common lately.
1) Ban coplaying - Slightly more viable an option with the new flexible night-hours feature. This blanket ban would probably solve most of the pushing issues. However i personally think this would be unhealthy for the game as i know a lot of people prefer co-playing to avoid the issue of burnout which is a common occurance for solo playing. Introducing this would probably please the casual population but risk alienating the 'elites' (im being generous to you guys) who in terms of long-term health for the game are probably more important to keep happy than casuals
2) Fully support coplaying. This would allow inno to actually impose rules and regulations on how this would work. For example cap the number of allowed players on an account to three. Instead of trying to prevent pushing altogether (impossible) you could allow it with boundaries and rules attached. E.g. 3 coplayers join a world seperately and declare that their accounts are linked together through an ingame process. Then going forward the players on it would have to merge by a certain time after world start and then the players would be banned from switching to other accounts after the merge. Should people join without declaring and then merge then that should be against the rules and bannable (shouldnt be too hard to monitor and catch most people trying this)
3) Increase the number of mods to allow for micro investigation of the accounts in question. I think most of the time people get away with pushing is that mods dont really have time to investigate it all in great detail. I dont have access to the GM tools but id imagine you can look in quite a lot of detail regarding how an account plays, logins, attack patterns and build orders etc. I think in 90% of the cases it should be determinable whether the village in question is pushed to another person just from a mod familiarising themselves with what the normal build or actions should be for an account in the first couple of weeks in the world. If a village just builds resource/wh buildings a couple of times a day and makes no effort to defend themselves when a local powerhouse nobles them then it should be flagged for investigation. Or if an account builds a nuke then suicides it while another player sends a train to land on it shortly after then it should be investigated.
Regarding rule 4.9 i think it should just be removed personally. I think that the number of players legitimately needing this rule is probably in the minority compared to the number of people who use this as an exploit. If your brother/coworker genuinely wants to play the game on the same connection then they should just play another world or coplay your account. Might be slightly controversial but i think just outright removing it is the best way to maintain fairness in the game. Cant really think of a way to allow shared connection but prevent it from being abused.
Please let me know your thoughts on the two rules and what you think the problems are with them and what your (reasonable plz) solutions might be
4.4: Creating and/or using one or more accounts for the primary benefit of another account ("pushing"), as well as profiting from such behavior, is forbidden.
4.9: Users playing from the same device or network (e.g. same household, school, workplace) have to declare this in their account settings under "Connection Sharing".
The two issues are primarily that pushing is hard to determine at an arbitrary glace with no ingame proof of wrongdoing and also that its easy to pretend to be connection sharing several accounts. Combined they allow people to create an unfair advantage for themselves by either having people create villages for them to take for 'free' via arrangements on skype/discord etc or allow people to say that "My brother was playing and decided to nuke enemy village for me for no gain to himself because he is so nice". This has actually been a problem to some extent for many years, certainly as long as i can remember. The first rule is basically laughably easy to ignore as long unfortunately as long as you have more than 3 braincells between you and your friends because of how unprovable it is when the mods only have ingame actions/communcations to go on when looking at the issue. It has recently become more main-stream and popular. Certainly the past 20 worlds its become almost standard practice for some premade groups/tribes to get an early boost and try to get to the mid-game as soon as possible.
Part of the main problem i believe is the huge grey area that surrounds the issue of coplaying. If i recall correctly historically Inno has always said they dont technically support the concept of coplaying because of potential issues with account sharing rules but at the same time its also been broadly accepted as almost the normal/best method to play the game. I'd imagine the .net playerbase would be much smaller if coplaying was not implicitly allowed due to the 24/7 timezone nature of it. There are a few ways that i can think of to fix this and try and prevent the pushing meta thats become more common lately.
1) Ban coplaying - Slightly more viable an option with the new flexible night-hours feature. This blanket ban would probably solve most of the pushing issues. However i personally think this would be unhealthy for the game as i know a lot of people prefer co-playing to avoid the issue of burnout which is a common occurance for solo playing. Introducing this would probably please the casual population but risk alienating the 'elites' (im being generous to you guys) who in terms of long-term health for the game are probably more important to keep happy than casuals
2) Fully support coplaying. This would allow inno to actually impose rules and regulations on how this would work. For example cap the number of allowed players on an account to three. Instead of trying to prevent pushing altogether (impossible) you could allow it with boundaries and rules attached. E.g. 3 coplayers join a world seperately and declare that their accounts are linked together through an ingame process. Then going forward the players on it would have to merge by a certain time after world start and then the players would be banned from switching to other accounts after the merge. Should people join without declaring and then merge then that should be against the rules and bannable (shouldnt be too hard to monitor and catch most people trying this)
3) Increase the number of mods to allow for micro investigation of the accounts in question. I think most of the time people get away with pushing is that mods dont really have time to investigate it all in great detail. I dont have access to the GM tools but id imagine you can look in quite a lot of detail regarding how an account plays, logins, attack patterns and build orders etc. I think in 90% of the cases it should be determinable whether the village in question is pushed to another person just from a mod familiarising themselves with what the normal build or actions should be for an account in the first couple of weeks in the world. If a village just builds resource/wh buildings a couple of times a day and makes no effort to defend themselves when a local powerhouse nobles them then it should be flagged for investigation. Or if an account builds a nuke then suicides it while another player sends a train to land on it shortly after then it should be investigated.
Regarding rule 4.9 i think it should just be removed personally. I think that the number of players legitimately needing this rule is probably in the minority compared to the number of people who use this as an exploit. If your brother/coworker genuinely wants to play the game on the same connection then they should just play another world or coplay your account. Might be slightly controversial but i think just outright removing it is the best way to maintain fairness in the game. Cant really think of a way to allow shared connection but prevent it from being abused.
Please let me know your thoughts on the two rules and what you think the problems are with them and what your (reasonable plz) solutions might be
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