Open Discussion Co-play discussion

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Discussion: Co-Playing, Should It Be Allowed?

Co-playing is a long standing practice: sharing your account login with another player, so the account stays active when you can't be online. It isn't a rule players invented to cheat, it's a response to the game's 24/7 nature, but it's not supported, leaving it in a gray area where it's simply tolerated and not something players hide.

This thread is for discussing purposes for the .net community, a place and opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of allowing, limiting, or disallowing co-playing. It's important to note that there's no agenda attached to this, no plans or projects and it's unlikely that we will reach any conclusions - but since the topic is always relevant we think it's interesting to keep the discussions open to hear the community's views on the topic. Share your opinion below.



1. Allow Co-Playing (No Restrictions)
Pros:
  • No single player can realistically cover 24/7 activity alone. Co-playing is how most competitive accounts stay active across time zones.
  • .net is the international server, players log in from all over the world, so features like night bonus or attack breaks always land in the middle of someone's day. Those settings help far less here than on single region servers, making co-playing the more practical way to get real coverage.
  • Already the norm among experienced players and top tribes.
  • Sharing account responsibility reduces burnout, letting players stay in the game long term instead of quitting from exhaustion.
Cons:
  • Sharing your password is against the written rules. Formally allowing it without any limit means fully abandoning that rule rather than adjusting it. It's also not something that could be formally allowed at all, since two people can't legally hold one account's licensing agreement.
  • Creates an activity or coverage advantage over players who genuinely play solo and cannot match 24/7 presence, which is unfair to players who follow the current rules, and further raises the overall activity bar needed to stay competitive.
  • With no cap on how many people can have the password, the risk of the account being sabotaged by a co-player (resources dumped, buildings scrapped, flags traded away, premium points wasted) grows with each additional person given access.

2. Limited Co-Playing (Capped by Device Count)
Pros:
  • Keeps the coverage and burnout benefits for small, genuine partnerships without an account becoming accessible from an unmanageable number of devices.
  • A declared device limit gives moderators a clear enforcement line: more devices logging in than declared is a straightforward violation, not a judgment call.
  • Limits how far co-playing could be used to let separate players start independently and later merge accounts to gain an advantage.
  • Fewer devices with access means fewer people who could sabotage the account, reducing that risk compared to unrestricted co-play.
Cons:
  • There is no way to verify who is actually behind a given login beyond trusting the account owner's declaration, even with a device count limit.
  • The sabotage risk is reduced but not removed. Even one co-player with the password can still dump resources, trade away flags, or waste premium points, and in practice the password sometimes gets shared beyond the declared limit, in the worst cases with an entire community.
  • Requires an enforcement process (declaring devices, checking against actual logins) that adds moderator workload compared to a flat allow or disallow.

3. Disallow Co-Playing
Pros:
  • Removes the sabotage risk entirely. No shared password means no co-player who can dump resources, trade away flags, or waste premium points.
  • Removes the activity advantage co-playing gives over solo players, keeping the playing field more level, and removes the constant pressure to be more active.
  • Enforces the existing "don't share your password" rule consistently instead of tolerating a known violation.
  • No gray area to moderate. A password shared with anyone is a clear violation, with no need to define or police limits.
  • Could increase the number of active accounts, since groups who currently co-play one account might each start their own instead, making worlds larger again.
Cons:
  • Removes the coverage and burnout benefits players rely on. This matters more on .net than on single region servers, since players are spread across the world with no shared down time, unlike servers where most players live in the same time zone.



Discuss: Which arguments do you find strongest? Are there points missing from any side? Keep it constructive and on topic.
 
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No co-playing sounds nice. That's where its feasibility ends though in my eyes.

Most people likely follow the rule.

Some would not.

Some of those who did not would get caught and banned. Others who did not would get away with it undetected.

The end result is that this would punish honest players, and it would punish people who skirted the rule and got caught, while giving a gigantic benefit to those who skirted the rules without being caught.
 
I am very anti-coplaying myself, but even I acknowledge the reality of trying to fully ban it. At no point do you do anything except hinder one group of players or another. This has been argued from one end of the field to the other, and the reality is its not a tenable suggestion. Would I appreciate some way to make this reality? Yes absolutely...put a server of coplayed accounts that get 48 hour sit blocks in a server with players like me...the chaos would be beautiful.

If you try and lock out devices people would bypass it similar to how they currently bypass creating barb clusters to push for themselves right now. If you do it by IP then all the people that travel are locked out of the game effectively. I myself play from 2-9 different devices/ip addresses a day. So while I would love to see coplaying go away, and more accounts on a world...and god forbid the mods turn the 129 feature on to make worlds bigger again, I do miss single digit continents, it just would not be something that would be by and large more feasible then now.

As far as your deep dig about coplayers dumping accounts and ruining them that is the risk on the player for playing in a way that is not supported...you need to trust your coplayers and if you do not then you should not risk them on your account.
 
Full ban on co-play.

There is no good-faith argument to allow co-playing, with the exception that it takes too much time to be competitive, which is why I'm pretty sure you will not see many people trying to defend it, even the ones co-playing.
But if it takes too much time, you can always stop playing a certain world and go touch grass. And if co-playing would be banned, the time requirements to stay competitive would drop.
It should not be this common to play multiple worlds late-game simultaneously at the top level, but this is almost standard practice.

Co-playing practically breaks the game for solo players: no-haul worlds are almost unplayable starting from mid to late game, and if it's a farming world you can basically skip it.
 
Why doesn't inno put effort into preventing players from large scale multi abuse, abusing VPN to log into multiple accounts on a world, rather than this nonsensical 20 year old hypothetical about banning coplaying.


"This thread is for discussing purposes for the .net community, a place and opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of allowing, limiting, or disallowing co-playing. It's important to note that there's no agenda attached to this, no plans or projects and it's unlikely that we will reach any conclusions"

What a way to start a conversation, here's a discussion thread, nothing will come of it and feedback will go largely unnoticed but have it nonetheless.
 
Olve said:
Why are we using ChatGPT to puke out discussion topics as mods?
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Does it matter if a tool is used to create some structure for the topic we chose because it would be nice to have a dedicated space to discuss it?

Choco Death said:
What a way to start a conversation, here's a discussion thread, nothing will come of it and feedback will go largely unnoticed but have it nonetheless.
Click to expand...
We simply wanted a place to discuss co-playing as that topic keeps popping up in discussions and feedback. But this is an initiative from the local team on this market, it's not related to any task or request from InnoGames which is why we don't want it to be seen as something that will lead to a future change.

Discussing different opinions, different perspectives and trying to see the other sides is constructive, otherwise we'll all just be sitting in our own personal echo chambers where everyone agrees. If someone don't want to participate in the discussion, they can just ignore it and someone that has strong feelings about co-playing in particular, can share their thoughts here instead of going off-topic in other threads.

And no, I can't promise that anything will come from this.
I can promise that it won't go unnoticed, and that feedback, as always, is appreciated. When and if the time comes for the team to provide potential feedback regarding co-playing to the higher ups, I for one think it's nice to have an idea about what the community thinks.
 
The game has a declining age playerbase.

The problem is that the game bloomed during a period that 90% of it's playerbase was between the ages 15-25. Nowadays, most players are around 30+.
The game is designed in a way that rewards you for no-lifing it and be active 24/7. Let's be honest, this is absolutely impossible nowadays for most players and that's why we are transitioning into a stage where the most popular worlds are actually becoming the slow speed- Watchtower - fake limit worlds.

I can guarantee you that most people who complain about co-playing haven't experienced the burnout that comes from a competitive frontline. When you experience it, you usually seek to coplay if you are good and don't try to undermine it to "bring equal footing". I am absolutely certain that most people who complain about it, are probably people who were rimmed while sleeping or something, by a coplayed account.


I have only played through co-playing my account for over a decade and not only I can't even imagine playing solo, but the game is exhausting and demanding even through co-playing, just because of it's nature. The core is fine, but honestly it either needs to be fundamentally re-designed (which will never happen) to become more idle and afk friendly so it can actually be played solo, or leave coplaying as is and on top of that keep adding afk-friendly features like WT and fake-limit.

The game will seriously suffer and probably die in a few years because of it's nature and declining age playerbase and you are here discussing nonsense to make it's death come faster. Please be realistic.

Edit: One actual solution could be to implement it as a setting on a specific world. Whoever wants to coplay can skip the world, whoever wants to go solo can join it. It doesn't have to be either this or that.
 
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I think this is a really worthwhile discussion. From a management standpoint, co playing has always felt like a weird thing to me - it's allowed, but not supported. There are obvious risks that come with it, but it's just an embedded part of TW culture so it's accepted.

I think the trouble with co playing is it is basically the definition of an unfair advantage. With the nature of a realtime game like this, you just can't be online all the time, but 3 people can be.

To me, co playing is a symptom of a somewhat unhealthy existing game formula (for the average player). The bottom line is that if a normal person could play as effectively as an account with multiple people, there would be no need for co playing, and it wouldn't need to be banned - it might not even exist. I think co playing allows people to play TW who wouldn't have time otherwise. Right now, I don't know if that's actually a good thing, though. This tells me that there are other issues with the game if a normal person can't play TW because of the time commitment involved.

Probably another unpopular opinion - but I think that the barrier for entry needs to be lowered for this to happen. I think NB was a good addition to the game, and is a good example of lowering the entry barrier. Scavenging. Auto minting. Watch towers. I think that we probably need more things like this to make solo playing a more viable option. This is an extreme example, but things like scheduled time sending of troops (going through the attack/support screen and landing it at an exact MS, but delaying it x number of hours). Change the attack increment from 100ms between nobles to 10ms, but let me snipe trains whenever I can be online (within reason). That way, the *skill* shifts to landing the perfect snipe in a tiny window, and away from the burnout inducing *I need to be online every hour between 3am-7am* when I have to be at work the next day. A game that forces you to do that stops being a game.

The reality is that, until someone can play almost as efficiently as a single player as a group of people could on a single account, there will always be an imbalance.
 
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--G-- said:
The game has a declining age playerbase.

The problem is that the game bloomed during a period that 90% of it's playerbase was between the ages 15-25. Nowadays, most players are around 30+.
The game is designed in a way that rewards you for no-lifing it and be active 24/7. Let's be honest, this is absolutely impossible nowadays for most players and that's why we are transitioning into a stage where the most popular worlds are actually becoming the slow speed- Watchtower - fake limit worlds.

I can guarantee you that most people who complain about co-playing haven't experienced the burnout that comes from a competitive frontline. When you experience it, you usually seek to coplay if you are good and don't try to undermine it to "bring equal footing". I am absolutely certain that most people who complain about it, are probably people who were rimmed while sleeping or something, by a coplayed account.


I have only played through co-playing my account for over a decade and not only I can't even imagine playing solo, but the game is exhausting and demanding even through co-playing, just because of it's nature. The core is fine, but honestly it either needs to be fundamentally re-designed (which will never happen) to become more idle and afk friendly so it can actually be played solo, or leave coplaying as is and on top of that keep adding afk-friendly features like WT and fake-limit.

The game will seriously suffer and probably die in a few years because of it's nature and declining age playerbase and you are here discussing nonsense to make it's death come faster. Please be realistic.

Edit: One actual solution could be to implement it as a setting on a specific world. Whoever wants to coplay can skip the world, whoever wants to go solo can join it. It doesn't have to be either this or that.
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Pretty much this yeah.

You can add the occasional world that is just for solo players that is totally fine, but making it the default would kill the game as it currently is.
Almost all the high ranking account (the ones that pay the bills, and have the most skill/experience would be gone from the game.

The new game would become more about activity who has the time to be online the most and skill becomes far less relevant.
I know that co-playing is a feeling unfair for some players, so I think it is totally fair to try it out, main downside to that would dividing the already declining player base making worlds even smaller.
 
Vanquisher. said:
Pretty much this yeah.

You can add the occasional world that is just for solo players that is totally fine, but making it the default would kill the game as it currently is.
Almost all the high ranking account (the ones that pay the bills, and have the most skill/experience would be gone from the game.

The new game would become more about activity who has the time to be online the most and skill becomes far less relevant.
I know that co-playing is a feeling unfair for some players, so I think it is totally fair to try it out, main downside to that would dividing the already declining player base making worlds even smaller.
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I actually somewhat disagree with this argument.

There is definitely a population of players who prefer to co play over solo play. I'd expect that the reason for this is that most of them don't have the time to manage an account by themselves, which is fair. Some of them probably also just enjoy playing an account with a friend which is also valid.

But, I'd wager that if proper mechanics were put in place to better support solo play, we'd see more of these players joining worlds on their own accounts, rather than crowding 2+ people into a single one. More accounts = bigger worlds. Coupled with the fact that extra tools will lower the entry barrier for new players, we might see more new folks stick around as well.

I also think that this would encourage skill > activity, and not the other way around. The entire reason for co playing is activity - if there are supports implemented that lessen the burden of needing to be online every hour of every day, the game becomes less about "how much can you be online" and more about "how effectively can you play". Waking up at 3am to start sniping trains isn't a skill issue, but it's the expectation for skilled players.

I think the best way to accomplish this is by continuing to put supports in play for solo play. Eventually, with enough support, we may see folks not feel like they need to co play anymore, and it naturally declines on its own. Co playing only exists because it needs to. I think banning it outright would be a mistake, but I would be interested to see how it plays out on its own world, or with experimental changes for solo play.
 
I think the biggest issue to tackle would probably be the noble system.

Grepolis one of Inno's other games is actually for solo players and there you have a different noble system where effectively you need to hit the village twice.
the first time to start a timer on speed 1 that would be 24 hours.
and after that 24 hours you get a 24 hour window where you need to land a noble to take the village. (different terms on grepo but in tw terms it is like this.)

This way the whole tribe can try to defend within those 24 hours before the second attack and your activity is less of a issue.

the question is do you want something like that here as well, tbh just as a trail I won't mind it, but you could argue that at that point you should just play Grepo instead and accept that TW is the game for multi accounts and Grepo for solo.
 
Tbh the biggest issue that co-players fix is defence. TW at its core is gated on time/effort on the defensive end.

It takes me 1 hour to get out 300 nukes + 200 fangs + 3000 fakes. It takes the opponenent 48 hours of consistent play to dodge all the attacks, set up the stacks, move resources to rebuild catted buildings, snipe or stack the nobletrains that gets timed behind backline nukes with low to no troops just to be "annoying".

The world of "endgame" TW, if we ban co-players, will probably just result in worlds turning into massive curbstomps as nobody will possibly be able to deal with the time-demand end-game defence requires.

(Removal of co-players will also have a ton of players have to just either quit, or accept that they can never do anything but backline. I can't play at that point, since as a nurse I don't have access to TW for the majority of my shifts. Meanwhile someone who works at the office can tag incs/do sends while they work).
 
"i've had 20 years to adjust to what everyone playing has in a time sensitive game on the international community instead of my local server and know inno cannot and is incapable anyways of fixing this, so instead of being a normal human using my brain to coplay, i will cry because it's totally realistic to manaage and would improve the gameplay so much. ahaha
 
Dis-allow Co playing completely.

There are obviously pros and cons for both arguments, but the overwhelming majority of players do not Co-play. It would completely change the dynamic of end game, but given the decline in players we are seeing this anyway.

If the barrier to entry means co play is essential (Right now this is the case) you alienate new players and overall experience from the majority of players is lower. The number 1 goal for the future of game should be player acquisition and retention, impossible to do this if you are a new player, pitted against experienced players in an uneven playing field.

My opinion:
Create a simulator for new people to freely practice launches, snipes, cancel snipes, back times etc without being in game play, make some entertaining mini games that can offer small rewards that aren't just money grabs and hammer the advertising to get the game Kick started again.

Cater for the masses, make the game highly accessible for those who have never played, someone should be able to join the game and with the tutorials and simulations be able to fully learn everything without reading years of ancient forums or having to spend 3-4 worlds integrating into the community before they learn anything.

It does mean some players won't be able to play a front line role, but the majority will find this fair and be more inclined to play and invest into a world.
 
The people who write here co playing should be banned are bots who quit on first incomings,never compete properly and dont know how much time this game takes,imagine some american plays from office 8-10 hrs+free time versus some blue colar worker from eu,dude goes to sleep tired from work and wakes up without villages...if i didnt have co players i would quit this game long time ago since i dont enjoy nobling 5 villages make them all deff and wait for someone to start spending nukes on me...
 
Playing solo is only feasible in early/mid-game and perhaps that's the largest part of the playerbase.
At midgame, there's a shift in time allocation from farming/scavving and simply building villages to more and more interacting both offensively and defensively with other players. This is where a need for coplayers arises.

In the current state of the game, defending attacks is by far the most time intensive part of mid/late game and it gets worse for a solo player as a world continues.
People have responsibilities in life, meaning there are times/days where they can play properly, but certainly also times/days where they simply can't spend the time to defend. The times where an account has to defend are dictated by the attacker and attackers will figure out weaker activity windows and plan the ops to land in these times.

It's not fun to be a solo player and be targetted when you have family responsibilities, this is where currently coplayers are life savers.
When coplayers are banned, this adds significant strain on a solo player, effectively forcing a choice between defending his account, or being a responsible adult in real life.

Coplayers currently allow accounts to be active more consistently throughout a week, keeping frontline accounts from imploding as quickly. By banning coplaying, we will see long and competitive wars disappear from the game, to be replaced by frustration amongst tribemates as account after account implodes.

Account sitting is of course still an option, but often times there's already a shortage of sitters compared to requests and this will only get worse with less players per account.

Other than this, it will be impossible to enforce.
There are already plenty of players that multi-account through proxies and VPN's that are getting away with it.
Once coplaying is banned, there will be plenty of accounts where the players all simply connect with the same residential proxy to always show the same IP adress regardless of where they are in the world.
Only way would be to limit amount of devices, but that also impacts regular players and people will finds ways around that as well.

I can see how banning coplaying would appeal to a portion of the playerbase, it does make early game more of a level playing field.
It will however, be at the cost of a competitive mid/late game.
 
I think its also worth stating, that the "gap in growth" between accounts, will not change with ban of co-players.
People seem to think that accounts outpacing them, oftentimes massively, has to do with co-players. But it is mainly efficiency, planning and just experience.

The same accounts will outgrow you, and overwhelm you with size. This won't change, and is worth to state towards all the people who feel "cheated" in mid-game as they get attacked by much larger accounts.

A co-player of activity will maybe, at most, add 10% to your total villages by the time an account reaches 200.
 
Olve said:
I think its also worth stating, that the "gap in growth" between accounts, will not change with ban of co-players.
People seem to think that accounts outpacing them, oftentimes massively, has to do with co-players. But it is mainly efficiency, planning and just experience.

The same accounts will outgrow you, and overwhelm you with size. This won't change, and is worth to state towards all the people who feel "cheated" in mid-game as they get attacked by much larger accounts.

A co-player of activity will maybe, at most, add 10% to your total villages by the time an account reaches 200.
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Assuming,(big assumption) that everyone that plays keeps playing after some miracle ban of co-playing, the worlds sizes would theoretically increase by a factor of maybe 1/3. While those accounts will be successful it might make the worlds just big enough to create a proper rim zone which in theory would mitigate some of the gap in growth through to mid world. From there you would need truly experienced players leading in those rim zones to teach the schlubs how to stand up with that small advantage balanced.

In spite of all of the above you are 100% right, the game and growth is less about activity and more about efficient planning, experience, luck, and money. If you have 3 of the 4 previous then co-playing becoming illegal is mostly mitigated. To be honest most experienced players try to meta as many hours into as few clicks as possible.
 
valtheran88 said:
Assuming,(big assumption) that everyone that plays keeps playing after some miracle ban of co-playing, the worlds sizes would theoretically increase by a factor of maybe 1/3. While those accounts will be successful it might make the worlds just big enough to create a proper rim zone which in theory would mitigate some of the gap in growth through to mid world. From there you would need truly experienced players leading in those rim zones to teach the schlubs how to stand up with that small advantage balanced.

In spite of all of the above you are 100% right, the game and growth is less about activity and more about efficient planning, experience, luck, and money. If you have 3 of the 4 previous then co-playing becoming illegal is mostly mitigated. To be honest most experienced players try to meta as many hours into as few clicks as possible.
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From what I have seen, I don't think you even get rim-zones in modern TW (accounts grow to fast with flag boosters and res packs).
But even then, the last time I saw rim-zones develop, was worlds the size of 117. So I think we need worlds twice the size of current ones, and I don't think we will get that unless Nova is willing to double barbs per player.
 
For me it is a disappointment that INNO games does not allow co playing fully.

The one idea I had was to modify account sitter rules. The account sitter can replace co playing if it allowed coordinated support / attack etc.
Account sitters must be registered (prior to joining the world) to the account they sit and only registered people could account sit. Also, limit the number of sitters and with no limit for days sat. As a registered sitter you cannot noble each other preventing the pushing of multi accounts. Details would have to be fine tuned and worked out. For example registered sitters cannot trade flags.

I feel like the people who are against co play have never really played the game / do not buy a lot of war packs / do not win / and burn out.

This may be my first ever post in the TW forums over many years. Please allow co play or change the account sitter to make it so.
 
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