Mendicant Cheating

[Vellos]

You can chat up on IRC all you want: nobody disputes that.

But OOG means can never substitute for IG means. If the communication doesn't have your character's name beside it in a game-produced document, it never really happened, and your character didn't say it. Is that something we are able or interested in policing for everybody who gets an idea after talking on the forum? Nah.

But does that mean that's OKAY to substitute OOG communication for IG communication?

Absolutely not.

[Tom]

If I had this problem, I'd charge 10 bucks a year to play BM.

One of the reasons Might & Fealty will not be free is this - it will definitely cut down on multi-cheaters dramatically and even those who multi-cheat will do it with 2 or 3 accounts, not with 10 or 20.

But for BattleMaster, I have made a promise that it will always be free.

[Tom]

So we CAN coordinate moves OOCly; that is not illegal and will result in punishment? That is the conclusion of High Above, yes?

No, the word from High Above is:

Tom is not the head of the NSA, so he won't know if you send each other an SMS or an e-mail about the game. You should be using in-game communications for in-game stuff. It's just that we have no way of checking if you do, so we don't make a rule about something we can't enforce.

We do have a rule where we can enforce it - if you, say, ban someone in-game for not following an out-of-game order, we CAN check that the order he allegedly disobeyed does not exist in-game, so for all we care it doesn't exist and your ban will be reverted.

[Chenier]

What if a bunch of people from an "elite army" move around, and never leave any traces? Torture reports don't show any signs of orders? Could they be targeted by a complaint by a player to have the titans look up their message history and punished for doing it all on IRC?

While it may be hard to enforce, it doesn't seem harder to enforce than some of the other rules we do have.

[vonGenf]

What if a bunch of people from an "elite army" move around, and never leave any traces? Torture reports don't show any signs of orders? Could they be targeted by a complaint by a player to have the titans look up their message history and punished for doing it all on IRC?

While it may be hard to enforce, it doesn't seem harder to enforce than some of the other rules we do have.

There is a rule for that:

Don't use your clan to ruin other peoples' fun.

Are clans allowed in this game?
My position on clans is very simple. One, it is not illegal to have friends. Two, having fun with friends should not diminish the fun of everyone else.
If you want to play with and/or against friends, whether you call it a clan or not, that's fine with me. When whatever your group does wipes out the fun for other players, you'll feel my wrath. This mostly means that it is not ok to take over a realm for your clan. There are always other players around, and I expect you to play nice with them. You can form a guild and use that as your in-game clan representation, as long as other players can join as well (imposing conditions is fine, imposing unrealistic and especially OOC conditions like "must live in our street" is not). You get the idea: As long as your clan does not exclude others from having fun, I'm ok with it.

[Scarlett]

This would reduce player count, which would make the game less fun, which would reduce player count even more, which would reduce the fun even more, which would...

Not viable option.

On the contrary, it's a perfectly viable option. It's just an option you don't like. So, probably a good idea.

Removing multi-cheaters 'reduces the player count' just as having them reduces the player count. If the problem is a one-off thing, then we can all go home and stop posting on this thread. I didn't lose a lot of work due to Aurvandil so I'm not as upset as others understandably are.

It would deny access to a subset of players without cards, and if that solution is more bad than the level of cheating, I'm happy staying how we are since like I say - this problem hasn't impacted me a whole lot.

And if you're already setting up card processing for another game, you already have a merchant services account, meaning the marginal cost to run validate-only (zero fee) transactions just to verify billing addresses is zero.

[Anaris]

It would deny access to a subset of players without cards, and if that solution is more bad than the level of cheating, I'm happy staying how we are since like I say - this problem hasn't impacted me a whole lot.

I think you're underestimating the percentage of BM players who are poor students.

I suspect it would deny access to at least 50% of the player base.

[vonGenf]

I think you're underestimating the percentage of BM players who are poor students.

I suspect it would deny access to at least 50% of the player base.

Not only that, it would be a block for new players. Today, I would pay 10$/year to play BM (I have donated more than that). If there were a paywall, however, I wouldn't even have started playing. It's easy to say it's worth it now that I've been playing for 4 years, but I didn't know it at first.

[Scarlett]

I think you're underestimating the percentage of BM players who are poor students.

Then don't charge any money and just validate the card. That's what a validate-only transaction is - when we process cards in my line of work, we submit a validate-only transaction first, and if that's approved, we submit the actual transaction. All you're doing is checking on the billing address.

Or go a step further and say you can play for 15 days or 30 days without being verified, but you can only have one character.

None of this is worth it if you don't think cheating is a big problem, and I have no idea how big it is.

[Anaris]

Aside from the cheaters we just locked, I don't think there's more than about 10-15 more (accounts, not players) in the entire game.

[Miriam Ics]

I think you're underestimating the percentage of BM players who are poor students.

I suspect it would deny access to at least 50% of the player base.

Agree, and, to pay will not avoid all cheaters. I can assure to you that in another game, we have hundreds or thousands of clones that pay to play. It will be just another kind of cheater, richest ones.

It took some time to me to understand this OOG and IG thing. There are many and lots of reasons to have a one account/one player rule and we could discuss one by one for years, and at the end of the day many will still disagree.

BM is a special game. If there are players that dont see this and cheat, and in a way that make it difficult to dennounce, let them do it. Ignore them, move out. Imagine what could had happened if everyone that was not cheating at aurvandil moved out to another realm leaving the cheater alone?

They are getting creative, be more.

[Lefanis]

Then don't charge any money and just validate the card.

... I'm a poor student without a card.

[Scarlett]

... I'm a poor student without a card.

Then you're clearly a cheating communist!

(okay, okay...)

[Chenier]

There is a rule for that:

What if it's not "ruining the fun for everyone", what if that realm also has other armies that do plenty of fun stuff? But it would still 1) segregate people according to their ability to login to something like IRC at certain times or 2) prevent enemy judges from torturing military info out of those people.

It was my understanding that using OOG communications that avoid leaks through torture was against the rules, but the recent messages don't all seem to support this.

[vonGenf]

What if it's not "ruining the fun for everyone", what if that realm also has other armies that do plenty of fun stuff? But it would still 1) segregate people according to their ability to login to something like IRC at certain times or 2) prevent enemy judges from torturing military info out of those people.

It was my understanding that using OOG communications that avoid leaks through torture was against the rules, but the recent messages don't all seem to support this.

My point was that what you describe looked like clanning, and clanning is not right, whether it uses OOG means of communication or not.

Also, requiring a group of people to log in on IRC would violate the activity IR.

There are plenty of rules to prevent bad behaviour, and taken together they take care of the vast majority of actually objectionable cases.