Alts are working as intended

Alts are a part of the gameplay which is thoroughly tested by our QA team at all stages. Thus, we exclude the possibility of any breakdowns in its functioning.

Hence, our Technical Support team does not consider tickets regarding Alts.

Plarium's Revenue is heavily dependent on the activity of Alt accounts, so must be considered to be a legitimate game feature, just like bot castles.

After plarium started making all the new stuff pay or lose and took away the consistancy of bg payouts we had a bunch of players quiting and some left their logins to others, But as of recently we have had a bunch of new players that have come in and pushed the oldies out, It sounds weird at this stage of game implosion for SF but i only know 1 for sure with maybe 4-5 guestimates, may be others but i dont know them.

Of course we took in quite a bunch from sister leagues, maybe thats why it seems so busy there now.

But before our influx of new family i would say 10-30% possible alts with about 12 ish% i knew, not thought.

Maybe im naive, i say we got maybe 5-8% guestimate, (and at least 1 is crusher) but we are slowly narrowing him. LOL

Gadheras said:

BiohazarD said:

johanrayne said:

djmoody said:

For the record I don't mind about alts personally.

If you work 10 accounts and get 10 lots of progress then tbh you are putting in 10 times effort and getting your just rewards. I know slightly controversial view. I would prefer a no alt world but it's very difficult to provde alts and no developer I know of has really got to grips with the problem (other than by very clever game design that means multiple accounts give little benefit)

I am more interested in how badly Plarium are interpreting their so called "analytics" when the game is swamped by alts.

Hopefully this thread is an eye opener to Plarium about the reality of their game. I doubt it will be and will be ignored by some failure of a CM who will feel the need to post some copy and paste platitude BS to tell me the sky is purple when I can see with my own eyes's it's blue..... "alts what alts...."  "our devs are gods and don't make mistakes".......

alts are like guns, if you make them illegal then only the criminals can have them. if you make them legal then anyone can use them. how hard would it be to regulate how many characters an ip address can have? limit 10 characters per ip address, whether it be 1 player or 10 players. could that help limit bots as well? when the illegal use of alts is not enforced, it only hurts the honest player, just another way the game is "rigged against them"

That probably wouldn't be helpful, as an experience programmer (which I assume the bot developers are) could easily route the connections through proxies.  It would be at best an inconvenience for them.  There's very little way to detect players who run a few accounts if those accounts don't have interaction with each other.  However, it would be possible to detect the bots based on activity patterns and reactions to events (ie they always do x then y then z with a 2-4 second delay in between, and when event A happens they always exhibit action B). 

So I doubt they will ever get rid of all alt accounts unless they somehow change the game to make alts useless (which is very difficult to do in strategy games like this) but it should be possible to get rid of the massive waves of bot accounts. 

Imho nuke all the bots, even those suspected to be bots, but not certain. Players can contact support and sort it if they get wrongfully caught in the clean up. And when I say nuke them, I mean remove them from the map totaly.

This might dissatify the new players as well since they might also get wrongly affected by it. For an old player, the player can contact support cause he/she has invested time in it but for new players it will be not much time so they will either create a new or will quit trying and obviously we both dont want that to happen so that there are more active players.

Make it so you need to login every time you want to login to the game. Session expire after idle for x time or something like that. The randomized picture captcha they use, is kinda hard for bot programs to deal with. If you start require much more time and effort by the bot operators to log them into the game, maybe they might start think again. If you run 100+ bots, then have to login everyone manualy each time, will be a bit time consuming and pain in the bum..

Yup that is obviously good idea and i agree on this with you completely.

BiohazarD said:

johanrayne said:

djmoody said:

For the record I don't mind about alts personally.

If you work 10 accounts and get 10 lots of progress then tbh you are putting in 10 times effort and getting your just rewards. I know slightly controversial view. I would prefer a no alt world but it's very difficult to provde alts and no developer I know of has really got to grips with the problem (other than by very clever game design that means multiple accounts give little benefit)

I am more interested in how badly Plarium are interpreting their so called "analytics" when the game is swamped by alts.

Hopefully this thread is an eye opener to Plarium about the reality of their game. I doubt it will be and will be ignored by some failure of a CM who will feel the need to post some copy and paste platitude BS to tell me the sky is purple when I can see with my own eyes's it's blue..... "alts what alts...."  "our devs are gods and don't make mistakes".......

alts are like guns, if you make them illegal then only the criminals can have them. if you make them legal then anyone can use them. how hard would it be to regulate how many characters an ip address can have? limit 10 characters per ip address, whether it be 1 player or 10 players. could that help limit bots as well? when the illegal use of alts is not enforced, it only hurts the honest player, just another way the game is "rigged against them"

That probably wouldn't be helpful, as an experience programmer (which I assume the bot developers are) could easily route the connections through proxies.  It would be at best an inconvenience for them.  There's very little way to detect players who run a few accounts if those accounts don't have interaction with each other.  However, it would be possible to detect the bots based on activity patterns and reactions to events (ie they always do x then y then z with a 2-4 second delay in between, and when event A happens they always exhibit action B). 

So I doubt they will ever get rid of all alt accounts unless they somehow change the game to make alts useless (which is very difficult to do in strategy games like this) but it should be possible to get rid of the massive waves of bot accounts. 

Imho nuke all the bots, even those suspected to be bots, but not certain. Players can contact support and sort it if they get wrongfully caught in the clean up. And when I say nuke them, I mean remove them from the map totaly.

Make it so you need to login every time you want to login to the game. Session expire after idle for x time or something like that. The randomized picture captcha they use, is kinda hard for bot programs to deal with. If you start require much more time and effort by the bot operators to log them into the game, maybe they might start think again. If you run 100+ bots, then have to login everyone manualy each time, will be a bit time consuming and pain in the bum..

johanrayne said:

djmoody said:

For the record I don't mind about alts personally.

If you work 10 accounts and get 10 lots of progress then tbh you are putting in 10 times effort and getting your just rewards. I know slightly controversial view. I would prefer a no alt world but it's very difficult to provde alts and no developer I know of has really got to grips with the problem (other than by very clever game design that means multiple accounts give little benefit)

I am more interested in how badly Plarium are interpreting their so called "analytics" when the game is swamped by alts.

Hopefully this thread is an eye opener to Plarium about the reality of their game. I doubt it will be and will be ignored by some failure of a CM who will feel the need to post some copy and paste platitude BS to tell me the sky is purple when I can see with my own eyes's it's blue..... "alts what alts...."  "our devs are gods and don't make mistakes".......

alts are like guns, if you make them illegal then only the criminals can have them. if you make them legal then anyone can use them. how hard would it be to regulate how many characters an ip address can have? limit 10 characters per ip address, whether it be 1 player or 10 players. could that help limit bots as well? when the illegal use of alts is not enforced, it only hurts the honest player, just another way the game is "rigged against them"

That probably wouldn't be helpful, as an experience programmer (which I assume the bot developers are) could easily route the connections through proxies.  It would be at best an inconvenience for them.  There's very little way to detect players who run a few accounts if those accounts don't have interaction with each other.  However, it would be possible to detect the bots based on activity patterns and reactions to events (ie they always do x then y then z with a 2-4 second delay in between, and when event A happens they always exhibit action B). 

Gadheras said:

djmoody said:

For the record I don't mind about alts personally.

If you work 10 accounts and get 10 lots of progress then tbh you are putting in 10 times effort and getting your just rewards. I know slightly controversial view. I would prefer a no alt world but it's very difficult to provde alts and no developer I know of has really got to grips with the problem (other than by very clever game design that means multiple accounts give little benefit)

I like how EVE handle alts. Even it recently went f2p, you can't run multiple accounts at the same time, if you run a f2p account. Even if you have a sub'ed account you can't run f2p account active at same time. But you can have as many sub'ed accounts active at the same time and play at the same time as you please. However, if you found using macro's and bot software, you will get a ban for uit.

The game I now play has simple rules. Caught cheating, inc running multiple accounts at same time, you are banned for life, no excuses.

For the record I don't mind about alts personally.

If you work 10 accounts and get 10 lots of progress then tbh you are putting in 10 times effort and getting your just rewards. I know slightly controversial view. I would prefer a no alt world but it's very difficult to provde alts and no developer I know of has really got to grips with the problem (other than by very clever game design that means multiple accounts give little benefit)