Official News page 1

CHANGE TO THE RULE ON ALTS

by Hazed

We are making a change to the rules on alts, to restrict how many characters you can have logged in at the same time.

Here's why.

Up to now, we've never much bothered to keep track of who is an alt of whom, nor have we minded that people regularly use alts. The only time we care is that if someone gets banned from the game for appalling behavior, we'll ban all their alts as well.

But this laid-back policy was formulated when people had two or three alts, or maybe five or six - not forty or fifty!

Even now, that many alts are only a problem when they are all logged on at the same time. But when they are, they can be very disruptive. For a start, if all of the alts are running scripts, firing out commands as fast as they can, it hits the processing power of the server the game runs on.

In addition, the scroll when forty characters all log in or out at the same time and are reported by SpyNet Notice is considerable, and is very disruptive to other players.

So we are changing our policy, and from today, we are only going to allow a player to have five characters in the game at a time.

We are not going to be fanatical about enforcing this. We'll use the honor system, and trust our players to abide by this rule. However, if it becomes clear that someone does have more characters in at one time - for example, if we spot batches all logging on or off together - we'll investigate, and if it turns out that a player is breaking the rule, we'll take action.

Now, before you all scream about how oppressive this is, it's worth pointing out that many games have similar policies - some even ban the use of alts completely! We're not going that far, we're just introducing a limit that we think is reasonable.

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