I agree about the multiple chars thing (see my own board, I've asked people to do this) but what Zulg says is completely right - any form of enforcing this just won't work well.

That said, I *do* keep a lookout for leader-chars who are playing other mortals and neglecting their cabals (I'm not the only one) and I'll generally do bad things to them (or suggest that others do bad things) if the cabal is becoming significantly weaker because of it.

Maybe not the best place to post this, but I hope it is read.

How about adding a ceiling to levels per character? So if that level ceiling was 75, I could have any combination of characters who in the end the levels added up to 75 and no more. That could be one char at 51 and two others at 20 and 4, or three chars at 30, 30, and 15, and so on.

To access the game, a player would need to have previously established a user account that grants a generated password or token to access the game.

So I would login with my char name, enter password, and then enter my token. This token is what tracks my level ceiling.

Sure, I could probably mask my ip and create another user account, but this would be a nuisance and somewhat trackable via ips.

Just an idea. I don't care one way or the other, but I would like to see less pendulum.

Few things of note:

1) This wouldn't affect people still using dial-up ISP's that don't lease IPs. AOL springs to mind.

2) This would adversely affect people who play out of the same house.

3) This would be difficult to explain to newbies, both its purpose and its justification.

My opinion is that it is better to reward people who obviously do not do this and punish people who obviously do than try to put in a half-assed method to mechanically prevent it. You cannot force people to play things that aren't fun (the alternative, FYI, is they would use AIM or IRC to ask someone what the balance spread is like, rather than logging in...so the dishonest still win). You can however reward them and try to make it fun for them.

Some people play more than others. Is it fair to tell someone who has lots of time on his hands to not use it try several combos at the same time?

>I for one would like to see multiple characters be done away
>with. I don't think it adds anything to the game other than
>let certain people play only when things are favorable.
>Ofcourse this will be tricky to enforce but I think just
>making it against the rules would go a long way. To be fair to
>other players at the very least something like this should be
>adopted for cabal leaders. It is just not fair for lvl 30
>something to sit around looking for a cabal leader, who logs
>on for an hour every 2-3 days because he is too busy playing
>his secondary character. Something to think about?

I agree that if everyone is playing one character solely it definitely adds to the game and the pendulum tends to swing less/slower. However that is a big adoption blocker, and I'm sure many people would leave if they could only play one (or find any number of loopholes around it). Forcing people to register, then wait to play a character sucks.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

...is that you know a lot of these people are the ones who, when their opposition logs in, they hover around for 10 or 15 minutes in a guild, or somewhere remote (so as not to look totally obvious that they are pussies), then they log out. About 10 to 15 minutes later here comes the neutral/neutral conjurer or any of the 3,000 gnome shifters who should be denied the use of the "wear" command as well as the "locate object" spell.

Oh, yeah, then Nexus goes after all of that player's buddies who had the balls to stay logged in.

To me it's like the vast majority of neutral characters are playing a different game, or want to, just so they can avoid any kind of trouble...and hey, what's to stop them from participating in the game as a whole? If they don't want to lose the shiny crap their Scion/Fortie/Outlander has on, they can just wait a while and then the range will become nice and boring and safe. Then they log back in.

C'mon, am I right or am I right?