We're in the middle of revising, updating, clarifying and modernizing a lot of our policies.

There are a lot of different reasons for this, but a big motivator is changing regulations (new laws).

Another intent is to shore up the game's defenses against behaviour that happens with increased popularity: masses of bot-driven farmers, attacks by disgruntled banned people, and general administrative chaos we've been ill-equipped to deal with in the past.

The policies all kind of inter-operate together, like a big set of meshed gears: You have to have X limit to legally justify that you're in compliance with "New Mandate Y" and so on.

Most of these changes will have little impact on our long-term and veteran players. But I am interested in feedback on the following:

* Possible Policy: Any given person may only connect with two accounts to the game at any given time.

This doesn't prevent someone from having four accounts, or whatever. It just means they can only play with two of them at any given time.

(We might have a special carve-out for administratively approved player-run "shops", at least until we can build an in-game shop system to effectively replace the need for them to be run with connected clients).

* Why would we do this?

Objectively, this is bad for us (Guild Software) monetarily. EVE famously allows you to multi-box as many accounts as you want, as long as they're all subscribed. They have individual players who operate dozens of concurrent accounts, sometimes over a hundred separate accounts will be orchestrated to roll in and mass-mine all the resources available in a particular location. Regular players are effectively pushed aside. But, these huge multi-boxers pay for the privilege and EVE gains a lot of revenue from it.

Some other recent Asian freemium MMORPGs have huge bot groups working actively on acquiring resources as effectively as possible, so they can then sell them into the in-game economy and achieve valuable items that can be sold in some way for real-world funds. The scale of these operations is difficult to convey, but it has a massive negative impact on the feel of these games (as borne out by the reviews), and these kinds of systems are going to become more common with the availability of Large Language Models (AI) and agentic assistance.

To be clear, this is not a new topic with our own community, as this old "alt abuse" thread from 2019 illustrates. That and other large discussions have been driven, in part, by the proliferation of "spybot" networks in the game, and other automated systems intended to give specific individuals or groups an advantage over the general "playing public" of VO.

We've always known that if our "profile" were to be elevated substantially again, this kind of issue would come back, and probably worse. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this subject, and I'd like to set a specific goal of two-connected-accounts-per-person.

* I know we have plenty of people with many accounts.

Some of them have had several accounts subbed for years. Decades. I certainly value this.

But, I also want to define a clear set of policies that make it apparent that we are not a pay-to-win title, we are not advocating for people to do orchestration with automated clients, and we're here to make games for people to play.

* But can you even enforce such a policy?

People inevitably raise the prospect of VPNs and Virtual Machines and so on. But, that's part of why this policy is being considered. I've previously written about upcoming changes to VPN policy. We have to be cautious about this, because there are people who have to use VPNs to circumvent oppressive government regimes, as I mentioned in that thread.

But policy and enforcement are really two different things. A policy states what is permitted, allowed. Once that is clearly defined, then there's an open-ended process of detection and enforcement, which may be on-going forever. The policy still allows generalized operational clarity for everyone involved (the devs, the players, etc).

* We actually have a lot of different mitigation solutions.

Without going into great detail: I don't ever have a goal of "perfectly solving" unsolvable problems. I only have a goal of mitigating them by making them sufficiently arduous that they aren't really worthwhile.

For example, the upcoming Mining System Changes have nothing to do with account limits, but inherently would make the entire mining mechanic substantially more challenging to automate.

So, I'm not following just one strategy here, I'm aiming to implement a lot of them, with a long-term goal of having Vendetta Online be a fun and reasonably-fair game that you can play online with other people.

* Why two accounts?

It's challenging for us to adapt the game client to control more than one character at the same time, there's just a lot of code assumptions in there. And I know there are valid reasons to use concurrent accounts for gameplay, like capship + fighter control (even if, perhaps, that's been a bit mitigated by our built-in capship automation).

I feel like "reasonability" is a good guide here: It's reasonable for one person to be playing two accounts. They can do a lot of stuff. Any more than that and you're really getting into complex multi-box automation just to "keep up" with all the clients, which is just not really "a person playing the game" anymore, it's something else entirely.

* Why feedback?

I'm just looking to hear from our users, to see if there are cases or conditions I'm overlooking, and to let people voice opinions.

None of the above is cast-in-stone or certain, and there's potential leeway in how policies are implemented. Little about this game ever really is cast-in-stone, we try to adapt over time.

My obsession with making everything about game mechanics fit neatly within a lore explainable box dictates that I must call this phenomenon, "one legal android per pilot" :]

all looks good for me

I don't know how to feel about this as a veteran player with too many alts and multiple accounts though I usually stick to my main account and one other do to reasons I won't get into for rp reasons. But from my experience vo has always allowed for many accounts and many alts to be active. Gonna assume this is for how many can be online at a time but there's too much uncertainty in this. So I don't have opinions I defer to those vets who were playing long before I became a veteran player. I feel we should listen to them. Though I now many who been doing other things like real life stuffs and things. I just don't know how to what my input would do. As probably one of the younger vets of this game.¯⁠\⁠_⁠ʘ⁠‿⁠ʘ⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Gonna assume this is for how many can be online at a time but there's too much uncertainty in this.

I'm not sure how much clearer I could have been? I wrote:

This doesn't prevent someone from having four accounts, or whatever. It just means they can only play with two of them at any given time.

This proposal is NOT about limiting your total number of alt accounts; it's specifically about limiting how many of them you use at the same time.

We're trying to avoid the game being full of weird "bots" down the road, because of people running large automation operations with a lot of different accounts.

Great news! Should also add another restriction, just like in Albion Online, that these two concurrent accounts should not assist each other in combat or scout for each other, or tackle, or whatever. Second account, in above scenarios, is equivalent to cheating the system and gaining advantage, especially versus a solo player with a single account.

Eve online is the worst offender with MMO multi boxing/input broadcasting. There is a running joke that 30k players are actually multibox fleets of a dozen unique players.

MMO should remain limited to parties of individuals communicating and playing with each other rather than an RTS-like one-man army game.

Thank you so much Incarnate for standing up against the losers/cheaters who multibox and input-broadcast in MMOs. A lot of respect for you guys!

I think a huge portion of the potential issues with multi boxing is already reduced due to the unique nature of this game. The removal of programmatic flight control and ship position based nav was a big deal. The killing of turret hopping by making programmatic fire control unusable in a turret seat also made a big difference.

I played a game called Anarchy Online when I was younger, and multi boxing killed that game because it was too easy to do. You would go to a pvp zone to take control of an area and some guy operating eight characters all chained to one control setup, all standing in one spot overlapping each other would all fire at you and instakill you.

VO has always been different, multi boxers have a disadvantage because they can't programmatically control several alts, they have to do a huge amount of terminal switching, and the other accounts all go dead in the water, I've seen it happen and learned to counter it. It's not easy to manage more than two characters and there are serious downsides to trying.

The fact that robots/squadrons don't follow you if you're in the hold of your ship, and can't be sortied while grouped is another major mitigating factor.

I'm not aware of any automated or linked guise systems in use today which don't require substantial terminal switching.

Operating more than two accounts at once is already prohibitively troublesome, and five human pilots beats a multi boxer with ten accounts every time.

My guild had a prolonged encounter against a prolific multi boxer over control of the stations, he fielded four capships and spread them out to be able to respond quickly and deploy bombers/defenders at each station.

The truth is, it didn't work out for him, he can only be fully present at one location at any given time, so all it takes is two pilots to beat that.

You never see the multi boxers bring it all out in one sector because of how immediately vulnerable the whole contraption becomes. At least for PVP

The effects of multi boxing are so mild by nature of the game that we just treat it as a lore accurate deployment of guise systems and have protocols for exploiting the gaps in control as terminal switching occurs.

Now a fully automated bot that flies itself, makes decisions, navigates, shoots and all that? That would be game breaking to deploy a few of, so it all depends on what is really being used, but I've not seen that occur in any meaningful way

Should also add another restriction, just like in Albion Online, that these two concurrent accounts should not assist each other in combat or scout for each other, or tackle, or whatever.

I don't really know how to meaningfully express that, in a coherent policy? It's very subjective, which basically opens the door for an infinity of angsty support tickets where people claim that someone was violating the rules. Albion Online is a very different kind of game.

I would say, if we're going to allow two connected accounts/clients, then the clients can do.. whatever. Because otherwise we go down a road to "madness", where using a fighter to defend their capship from Hive during a mining-run is considered "assisting each other in combat". It's just way too vague?

But, I'm open to further feedback.

The only concern I have regarding the two-concurrent account thing is with households or dormitories. How would this affect a house or dormitory where there could be more than one person playing and at least one of them could be multi-boxing?

The only concern I have regarding the two-concurrent account thing is with households or dormitories.

That's really an enforcement thing versus a policy issue.

This is not a "per-IP-address" issue, I'm not going to do any simplistic limitation like that. A lot of large cellular telecoms are gating huge numbers of users through a relatively small set of IPs. Plus there's ipv6-to-ipv4 and other considerations.

If there's a dorm behind a single IP with RFC1918 address translation, and 100 individual people playing the game, I have no problem with that.

Conversely, if there's a guy running 100 unique bot clients on his wacky home-bot-farm setup, well, detecting said person is my problem; the details of which is a much more complicated technical discussion that's out of scope for any public venue.

The important point here is just to establish what the policy is. Once everyone "knows where they stand" then those who choose to try bot-farming anyway will not be surprised by the consequences.

two is definitely better than one. (wait for it)

though id feel strongly about saying where and what we can do with them aside from fully automating them. standing still not playing gathering intel isnt playing the game of course, though some might disagree hehe

assisting ourselves is really the whole point and some of us cant find people who play at our level..

id love to have a whole guild of capships going, and be able to count on others.. but as anyone who builds, knows.. handing out capships in the current vo never works out. those players vanish almost instantly. we pour vast resources into them for no reason. building them for ourselves has become the way.

resources, while not scarce, are definitely more time consuming to acquire than they have been, historically.. and in the current state of things, it only takes a small handful of players to completely control the stations along with critical resource areas.. locking us out of even playing. a few people multiboxing can be an equalizer, despite comments to the contrary. though it can certainly work both ways..

could the universe band together? sure. will they.. absolutely not. that question has already been answered in recent history.

TL;DR: Multiboxing is a difficult subject; beyond that two logged in accounts is per head is plenty for uhhh "normal gameplay"

The line between strategy and "cheating" can get blurry really fast...

That said there's three conq stations so maybe set the limit to three?

Banning it altogether seems extreme but at the same time makes plenty of sense to me despite this I don't think that'd be the way to go.

As far as "edge cases" multiboxing is particularly useful for conq station shenanigans (spotters are another can of worms) logging a rag/capship directly in front of the docking bay once the turrets are down essentially guarantees a take when it's just two players duking it out, and in that scenario the game turns into who's got more chars in position than the other guy.

Hard to argue that it's cheating but getting railed by a capship/spamrag that materializes in front of you is a bit cheezy... technically this doesn't require mutiple accounts either why the hell did I bother bringing it up i don't know...

That said you're probably well aware of this already, wish I had more useful input.

Lore explainability OCD levels rising... I'm going to call that phenomenon "cloaked ships" lol

and in the current state of things, it only takes a small handful of players to completely control the stations along with critical resource areas.. locking us out of even playing.

Well, then the answer is to change the intentional game mechanics of station conquest to mitigate that problem? Not to tell everyone to multi-box to overcome a design limitation.

I mean, that fundamentally goes to the fairness argument. Multi-boxing is something only a subset of the game population can even do. We have a lot of people on mobile, and in the developing world. They don't even have a PC, their phone is literally their only device. So, multi-boxing is effectively impossible for them, given mobile hardware constraints.

Anyway, I understand if there are particular historical situations that currently benefit from multi-boxing, but I would rather change those than "grandfather in" such a problematic game activity.

could the universe band together? sure. will they.. absolutely not. that question has already been answered in recent history.

Recent history isn't meaningful, as a design target. I mean, we're shipping around one Newsletter per year, of late. We're doing no marketing, no outreach on socials, nothing. We're intentionally keeping a "low profile", because we don't want the game to be "re-reviewed" by a press outlet at the moment, and because we don't yet have the administrative mechanics to handle a lot of players "acting out" (which always happens with population increases, and makes development come to a screeching halt).

The whole reason why we're talking about this now, and why I'm redoing our policies, is to prepare for a future where we potentially see orders of magnitude more players (some may not believe that's "possible", but, for the sake of discussion, let's just assume I'm not completely crazy).

That kind of increased audience changes all the mechanics around station conquest, changes a lot of things. And it adds further reason to why we shouldn't based our game around the "idea" of small numbers of people controlling large quantities of bots.

On-going discussion is welcome, I'm not trying to shut-down pushback or feedback with my points above, just stating my own perspective.