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RUMINATIONS ON THE ALT RESTRICTIONS

by Hazed

The cliché that you can't please all of the people all of the time is certainly true when it comes to making changes to the way things work in Fed2. The tiniest, most trivial change is quite likely to annoy somebody, no matter how many other people think it's a brilliant innovation.

The new rule which restricts the number of atls you can have logged into the game at one time certainly hasn't pleased everyone. While many people do approve of the change, and a whole chunk are indifferent, others don't like it - and not just those who have been used to logging on huge numbers of characters.

I explained some of the technical reasons why we made this change to the rules in the Star when I first announced it. When players have written to feedback grumbling about the change, I have explained some of the other reasons - the philosophical reasons - and I thought it would be worth writing about them in the Star so you could all see them.

Fed2 was designed to be a social game, where players of different ranks cooperate with each other. Once players started to use alts to "keep it in the family" that cooperation between different players was completely lost. It also left various parts of the game open to abuse when one player controlling a large number of characters at different ranks could manipulate things in such a way as to gain a huge advantage over players with just one or a few characters.

While people have always used alts in Fed, until recently they generally only had a couple of characters that they played regularly, and perhaps a couple of disposable ones to be used then discarded. But after Fed became free, a small number of players started to take the use of alts to extremes and we began to see the vast families of 40 or 50 alts all belonging to the same person. This completely unbalanced the game.

Here are two analogies that might serve to demonstrate why the use of huge alt families can be a problem. First, think of the power that a large company like Walmart in the US, or Tesco in the UK, has, compared to the guy who runs the corner shop. There is no way the single proprietor can compete against the might of the corporate giant. The best he can hope for is to survive by being a tiny bit more convenient for those that live nearby, but he cannot possibly make much of a profit or expect to expand his operations. In Fed2, the person who controls a huge family of alts is in the same position as Walmart/Tesco, and any player who sticks to running just one or two characters can't hope to compete.

Second, if the economy of Fed2 is that of capitalism, then running an alt family is more like a slave economy - there are a large number of characters who are not in control of their own destiny, whose only reason for existence is to work to make money for their owner, who have no say in what they do, and who have no life outside of that work.

An individual player without all those alts working on her behalf has to deal with real people - other players. She has to negotiate and come to agreements: agreements about where factories can be built, agreements about shareholdings in companies, and so on. Whereas the head of the alt family doesn't have to negotiate with anyone because what he says, goes!

Alan spent quite a lot of time changing the code so that it wasn't so easy to manipulate things using alts, but there is a limit to how much it can be dealt with by coding, so in the end we took the decision that we had to impose a rule. Note that we haven't stopped people from playing more than five characters - you can still have large alt families if you want - you just can't leave them all logged on all the time; you're limited to five at a time.

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