GENERAL

Kigan, I tip my hat off to you -- beautiful summary, and I agree with your conclusions ☺ especially the reminder that the game changes and shifts, due to the weight of the different player mentalities.

Now, back to the topic at hand.

I have seen sudden and dramatic policy changes like this in other contexts (e.g. forum moderation), always followed by a similar amount of drama. Here's a simple list of questions that will point the dev team in the right direction:

• Do the changes serve a good purpose? Do they address current ailing points?
• Could the problem be solved in a more elegant way?
• Impact on current user base: how many people are directly affected, positively OR negatively?
• Impact on future user base: how many people will be affected?
• What is the scale of the impact on the users? How dramatic is the change in their day-to-day activities?

I will list my own answers below, with my personal guesses. Wall-of-text warning.

Do the changes serve a good purpose? Do they address current ailing points?

I believe they do. This thread is proof by itself: many, many comments talk about multiboxing and cheating, in the same sentence. At this point, it does not even matter if the players are cheating or not. The perception of unfairness and potential cheating exists and is fairly spread; it concerns most aspects of multibox play (faster leveling, easier boss killing, easier to kill npc bosses etc etc). It goes to the point of saying Ryzom can be "pay2win", a discussion that is 8 years old at least.

I will not address the point regarding "encouraging player interactions", because this change is insufficient in that regard. As long as a player can have one alt, they are already self-sufficient for most of their game time.So, overall, even if the wording of the announcement is incomplete, the change itself is (imho) good.

(My only gripe is that this change would make it more inconvenient for me to juggle materials between guild halls.)

Could the problem be solved in a more elegant way?

Perhaps.


Other variations have been proposed, e.g. to restrict alt armies only from "big fights" (boss mobs and NPCs, OPs etc). It seems to address the most instances where people would perceive unfairness, but it would shift a lot of weight to the enforcement team, to settle the arising disputes -- and believe me, they *will* appear.

And, on the other hand, it would prolong the suffering of those that do have armies. To have a tool and to only be allowed to use it when it does not really matter... yeah.

Impact on current user base: how many people are affected, positively OR negatively?

This is actually the crux of the matter.

Negatively impacted (from a gameplayer perspective, and personal play style) -- only the players relying heavily on multiboxing. There are not too many instances, and some already said they can adjust. As such, this is not a large-scale change affecting hundreds of people; it's just that the reactions are strong, especially since these players have invested a lot of time in their alts (and also reaped the rewards, I would say....)

Positively impacted -- probably the (small?) percentage of players who were actively frustrated by this behavior. Also, passively, those that were only mildly irked by multiboxers, but didn't complain much.

So, to my mind, the overall effect is a somewhat positive improvement in player mood, and at worst it's a zero-sum game. I assume this point is also contentious for some readers ;)

Impact on future user base: how many people will be affected?

Since multiboxing with more than two accounts is not common in Ryzom, I do not think the future impact will be significant.

I do not foresee many new players getting frustrated over not being able to run an alt army. They will see the CoC, shrug and say "oh well, one alt is ok".

On the other hand, since I do not really believe this change will increase inter-player interactions, I do not see much of a positive influence over the future players either. Perhaps only in the sense that alt armies stop being a contentious point.

So, again, just a slight overall benefit. Maybe.

What is the scale of the impact on the users? How dramatic is the change in their day-to-day activities?

The affected players will undoubtedly have to re-learn how to function with reduced firepower. Putting the genie back in the bottle is always difficult, but ultimately I don't think it's a game-breaking experience. Mourning the time sunk in leveling the rest of the characters may be more difficult to process, but, again, I hope people who trained alt armies have already reaped some reward for their effort...

That's it. Sorry for the long post.

I wasn't going to comment on this thread however reading Laoviel's post I just had to say this provides an extremely well balanced review of the situation in general and also my own thoughts (GG). I really only have 3 points to add:

- My only strong feeling on this entire matter is that OP wars just are depressing comming up against armies of alts, regardless of whether I am on the loosing or winning side. As Laoviel said, I really don't see the devs managing to police & ban alts from every single OP war.

- Really excited by the prospect of upcoming small team events/activities that Ulu hinted towards.

- In a bid to fix storage issues that people have brought up, I have made a post on the idea thread here.

Right from the beginning this all reminded me a bit of the merge and how so many player said they would (and did) quit the game complaining about their years of hoarding multiple guild halls not to mention the contoversy over wiping of F2P levels.  Sure some did quit but most eventually came back.  Those that continued to play tackled the challenges that the merge created of which there were many but for me the ensuing years were some of the most enjoyable.

My point is simple - no one likes change.

But rest assured we can all adapt and in fact a lot of players lost years of farmed mats and unique items and yet here we are today.

Four seems like a convenient number. I'm with logic on this one. Should be all or nothing. I have an alt, and started playing this way when I found nobody to team with. Maybe I haven't been around long enough to make friends, don't know but that's the way it is. If you are not going to allow multiboxing then even a single alt should not be allowed. Anything after that is just a silly made up number. This complaining has been going on for years from every which angle. All or none. I honestly don't care how other people play, their money, their choice Good luck!

here i was thinking of coming back and subbing multiple toons for the kami side!!!

the multiboxing debate has been around for forever, beefie is a noob when it comes to multiboxing, you should all have 4 toons subbed and beat him at his own game :D

As for op wars, implement a guild vs guild only feature where members who have been in the guild for more then 30 days can participate in op wars, most alts will be removed from the war.

...for 30 days exactly...

Smart reply but most alts are person storage guilds and op wars are not though 30 days ahead. People don’t want to log in an out of multiple toons to access craft mats

This completely ridiculous - if you can't police your own Guildhall the solution is not to make a rule that applies to everyone.

**DEL** Irrevelant

Sure if you are talking about small fight scenarios. Big difference when applying this to OPs and 1 person can suddenly bring 3 alts all spam healing. Played many OPs against many an alt heal pod- sure its a challenge to beat them but is it fun? Won many times, lost many times but regardless it is irratating either way. It is just stupid that in an OP 5 people can turn into 20 toons all spam healing, especially on a low pop game.

As for the fix of guild locking alts, accounts have 5 spaces- people will just have a GH alt on the same account on a different character and put their main toons in their Guild.