Account System Proposal:

Every player would create an account from an e-mail address (with an option to receive newsletters at that address). He can then create as many characters as he likes from that account. The game keeps track of PK wins/losses, overall PK ratio, total hours played, how many active characters each account has, how many heroes that account has had, and other interesting/useful info, then publishes these stats to the website in the form of a playerlist and leaderboard. Stuff like specific details about current and even past characters such as names, races, class, cabal, etcetera, would be hidden from the public.

Goals:

The goal for all of this is to better track those players that may play multiple characters, especially on either side of the pendulum, and to make it a little easier to detect illegal or questionable activity related to that. The leaderboard and public stats for each account act as incentive to keep playing from the same account, rather than creating new e-mail address and new accounts. It also acts as a mild disincentive to play more than one character, as everyone will see how many characters each account has. This can be got around by creating multiple accounts, but this involves making new e-mail addresses, and you'd be spreading your stats across two accounts instead of just accumulating it in one. Sure, people who don't care about stats won't be bothered by this, but I feel like most people like to see how they stack up next to other players and to compete for community-based reputation.

Thoughts? What are the cons in this type of situation?

Splntrd

>Account System Proposal:
>
>Every player would create an account from an e-mail address
> with an option to receive newsletters at that address). He
>can then create as many characters as he likes from that
>account. The game keeps track of PK wins/losses, overall PK
>ratio, total hours played, how many active characters each
>account has, how many heroes that account has had, and other
>interesting/useful info, then publishes these stats to the
>website in the form of a playerlist and leaderboard. Stuff
>like specific details about current and even past characters
>such as names, races, class, cabal, etcetera, would be hidden
>from the public.

All of this basically exists with the PBF, except the leaderboard & tracking multiple characters to a single player.

>Goals:
>
>The goal for all of this is to better track those players that
>may play multiple characters, especially on either side of the
>pendulum, and to make it a little easier to detect illegal or
>questionable activity related to that.

How do you propose to do this? What's to stop me from making a thousand different email accounts through google/yahoo/hotmail/etc? There is nothing that is truly enforcable with an email account.

>The leaderboard and
>public stats for each account act as incentive to keep playing
>from the same account, rather than creating new e-mail address
>and new accounts.

Not really any incentive there.

>It also acts as a mild disincentive to play
>more than one character, as everyone will see how many
>characters each account has.

I don't see this ever happening.

>This can be got around by
>creating multiple accounts, but this involves making new
>e-mail addresses, and you'd be spreading your stats across two
>accounts instead of just accumulating it in one.

Why would we publish this data?

>Sure, people
>who don't care about stats won't be bothered by this, but I
>feel like most people like to see how they stack up next to
>other players and to compete for community-based reputation.

So get your PBF.

>Thoughts? What are the cons in this type of situation?

I don't see it happening.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

I think of it as an infrastructure expansion. It will become more useful as we get more players. Granted, if you don't think we'll ever get more players, then this isn't very useful.

>Why would we publish this data?

Community incentives are very powerful. The bigger the community, the truer this becomes. This may become more useful in the future if we ever get more players; rather than bring in more and more IMMs to keep track of them all, you'll have a tool to aid you. Sure, you're going to have oddballs that don't respond to these kinds of incentives and will go around the system, but you're not trying to enforce one character per person, just create circumstances that encourage that tendency.

>There is nothing that is truly enforceable with an email account.

Like I said above, it's not meant to enforce, only encourage one behavior and discourage the other. No, you're not going to stop the dozen guys who create a new account for every character, but they don't really matter when the rest of the playerbase will probably choose to use the system correctly. Have an auto-delete to catch the accounts that idle after a single character.

>All of this basically exists with the PBF

Not really. PBF's only cover one character. The published stats/leaderboard would be stats unique to accounts, such as total hours played (hours of every character ever played added up) and average hours/week (across all characters), not specific character stats, so there's no real overlap there, other than what can be inferred by people deeply involved in the community. The system could also collect a number of unpublishable stats, for IMPs and IMMs to use when considering discipline problems. Obviously, you wouldn't publish anything that could link a player to current characters.

>I don't see it happening.

Truthfully, neither do I, if we assume the playerbase is going to stay about the same or decline over the next five years. But what if five years from now we start hitting highs of 200? Infrastructure like this could help manage them, and even keep them longer.

Splntrd

>>I don't see it happening.
>
>Truthfully, neither do I, if we assume the playerbase is going
>to stay about the same or decline over the next five years.
>But what if five years from now we start hitting highs of 200?
>Infrastructure like this could help manage them, and even keep
>them longer.

It has nothing to do with the playerbase, it has to do with the one way that CF even comes close to paying for itself is PBF's. If we start handing that out for free, we get to go back to paying everything to keep it running which I guarantee will kill it quicker than anything else.

Keeping track of all your characters by email address is simple enough if we wanted to implement it. Creating a ladder system I could see actually doing more harm than good (and bringing in the type of people who focus on one aspect of CF, and none of the others).

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

It's not at all the same information as PBFs. They wouldn't overlap in the slightest. I'm not suggesting you show them anything that isn't already available in PBF form. Show people account-specific stats, that don't overlap with character-specific PBF-type stats. This way, to get anything specific whatsoever about an individual character, they still have to buy the PBFs. I'm not sure what I said that gave you the idea I was asking you to post PBF stuff for free.

But I understand where you're coming from when you say the ladder system may encourage the wrong type of behaviors. I'll admit I hadn't thought of that.

Splntrd

>It's not at all the same information as PBFs. They wouldn't
>overlap in the slightest. I'm not suggesting you show them
>anything that isn't already available in PBF form. Show people
>account-specific stats, that don't overlap with
>character-specific PBF-type stats. This way, to get anything
>specific whatsoever about an individual character, they still
>have to buy the PBFs. I'm not sure what I said that gave you
>the idea I was asking you to post PBF stuff for free.
>
>But I understand where you're coming from when you say the
>ladder system may encourage the wrong type of behaviors. I'll
>admit I hadn't thought of that.

Now I'm confused...what do you think is actually getting posted? The names of all the characters an email account has (sounds like a ####ty privacy statement to me). If the ladder isn't based off of the PBF stuff, what is it based off? Or are you just showing who is #1 (and what defines #1), but none of the reason why?

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

I was thinking specifically stuff like:
total hours played (over all characters)
average hours/week
total number of heroes played
number of active characters

Rather than having one leaderboard to determine who's number 1 overall, you could simply sort by each stat. It might not even be presented as a leaderboard at all, but simply as a sortable playerlist or a roster. I absolutely would not advocate publishing things like the specific names, classes, races, that the character has played. Some players like to keep that stuff private, and that borders on PBF territory. I also don't see any reason why the public should be allowed to see their e-mail address, as opposed to an account name.

After each character deletes/dies you could also update vague graphs showing the tendencies of each player if you wanted, much like reputation does now for each individual character. This player tends to play more warriors, or more goods, or more evils, and so forth. The more hours and levels the player put into a given combo, the more it will influence his tendency graphs. Or you could choose NOT to publish this info, and simply use it as a resource for IMM purposes.

I originally had also thought total number of PKs, PKs/hour, and stuff like that could be published too, but I agree with what you said earlier in that I don't think that would encourage the right kind of behaviors, and that it somewhat overlaps with PBF.

Splntrd

>I was thinking specifically stuff like:
>total hours played (over all characters)
>average hours/week
>total number of heroes played
>number of active characters

Those are pretty uninteresting stats from the account owner's perspective, they're only interesting to other players who want to gripe about someone else. Personally I'd probably go along with it out of respect for the imms, but I'll be honest and say that this would make me want multiple accounts so that people don't bitch about me playing a couple characters.

Aside from that, I think the whole community based reputation thing is pretty vapid. It just creates idiotic pissing contests and people taking great pride in their meaningless non-accomplishments. See any achievement system in any game. Sure they work wonders for convincing ocd collector types to dump hours into the game, but I don't see any net positive for the community, and a lot of potential for crap like "well I have 6000pks on my account and you only have 4000 so my opinion is clearly more right."