Originally Posted by
Macrosun
Please read this first part carefully.
DISCLAIMER: I am not stating official Funcom policy, and these are my personal thoughts. I do not represent the official Funcom views on this issue, and the policies on this are mostly not decided by the AO team at all anyway.
From an entirely technical stadpoint, and without saying multilogging/boxing (which are essentially the same thing) is bad or good, I don't really see how you expect to be able to tell the difference. Multiboxing refers to using multiple computers, but you can just as easily "multibox" using a single computer and very similar software, and this is not even taking into account someone just playing several clients at the same time without any software at all.
I am not going to argue either side in this debate, but there are many reasons most MMOs do not "ban" multiboxing. One such reason being there is no reliable way to "prove" that you are multiboxing without capturing all your network traffic and analyzing it, and even if we did (which would be against many laws in many countries, not to mention the amount of work it would take), someone could circumvent that in about 5 minutes and force us to patch again to detect it. If someone has a reliable technical solution that is not illegal, and can not be trivially circumvented, please let me know and we'll look into it.
Lets imagine we somehow made a solution where multiboxing was banned, and was detected by the system reliably; Now we have to look at people doing the same thing using only one computer. Should we just disallow/ban playing multiple characters on the same computer? What about bank characters, mules, and so on? If we don't fix the "single computer" issue, we will have the exact same problem as multiboxing; people will still die to gangs controlled by one person.
If we want to "ban" multiboxing, the only way I see we could accomplish that is to not let any similar accounts log in at the same time. For example if you use the same credit card, have the same name, or the same address, you will not be able to log in those accounts at the same time. We could also make it so that the client does not allow you to run more than one copy on the same machine (to prevent "multiboxing" on the same machine). This solution would of course also prevent you from logging on your mules, banks, and using multilogging in PvE and I really doubt that's what you wanted. Someone could just use fake names and other people's credit cards to get around it anyway.
It's true that there could be a policy stating multilogging and multiboxing are forbidden in any PvP situation, but this also as many corner cases and problems. We would have to forbid any player controlling more than one character in any PvP situation for this to be a viable policy, and it would have to be investigated on a case by case basis for every PvP encounter. This would end up being a huge amount of customer service time/work, because I'm willing to bet anyone who feels they died "unfairly" will use this in a petition, true or not.
As I said there are many corner cases as well: What if you're PvEing with your 3 accounts and someone gets you flagged, should you now be banned? How can we tell if you were intending to PvP or not? Does it depend on if you lose or win the fight?
I'm sure there are a large number of issues that I haven't thought of as well.