Id like to see an alt charge go into effect in the range of 25-100k paid prior to any new alt being created.

Im a little tired of seeing newbie alts run around causing problems only to have them suicide or be blatantly used as spies during times of warfare to listen in on guild or city channels.

If you want to create a real charecter 25-100k wont be an obstacle and Im sure after paying that amount people wont be so quick to create nuisance chars. By making people save for an alt it becomes that much more valuable to them and they will be that much more reluctant to just throw it away or use it as a problem child char.

Only way to avoid the charge would be to suicide your current char prior to making the new one. If youve bought credits and cant suicide then it'll be that much easier to convert the credits to gold and pay for the new char.

Main thing would be to stop people from creating throw away chars that they couldnt care less about and are only rolled up to create problems for other players.

It'd also ruin the amount of open-experimentation you have. The spying alts are irritating, but having a restriction on alts is strictly a bad thing, the way I see it.

I've never held anything over 75k in my life.

Who would pay the fee? The 'main' char? That's hardly improving roleplay considering that alts should have no interaction with each other.

Also, could you please change your avatar?

Using an alt character to "spy" with is an abuse of HELP SECONDS. May there alt and main character go through a period of shrubbing as punishment.

I don't think it is a strict abuse of HELP SECONDS, as long as neither are on at the same time, and one isn't directly helping the other. And saying it does directly help the other because it helps the city they belong to is a bit silly, because then you wouldn't be allowed to have a character fight for a city if you had an alt in the same city, under that logic.

Nonetheless, it is irritating.

No, it is an abuse of help seconds. You are using an alternative character to gain knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have access too. It is also very poor RP.

Hmm. I always thought the deal with spies was more things like...someone on Magnagora saying, "Let's go raid Celest", the spy logging off, going on a Celestian dude, saying, "They're going to raid Celest."

Bad RP, not abuse.

Anonymous is correct. Not only is that dismal RP, it is indeed seconds abuse. Information is a valuable commodity, just like gold, herbs, or gear. Acquiring it with one character only to transfer it to another is the same as mailing your alt sovereigns or anything else.

The main difference is that tracking the transmission of intangible goods is near impossible in practice, but the effects of it on others often significantly outweigh the disruption caused by transferring material wealth.

The better way to get rid of spying novice-alts would be not make FRESH novices able to communicate over CT (CNT, anyone?) and/or read city news posts. After playing, don't know, 10 or so hours they'd be able to use such things.
Well, but that'd be too troublesome for real novices.

I don't think 10 hours would stop them anyway.

Just because you learnt one thing on a character that could potentially help another character doesn't mean it's abuse. However, when you USE that information, it is.

Indeed.

People using new chars just created to listen in on city channels and get knowledge of when a strike is going to happen or to find out who is in the group about to attack is just horrible rp and it happens alllllll the time. People are linked nine ways to sunday with aim or email or the phone and they use ic information to tell others what is about to happen.

I realized this is never going to stop about the time I realized the mental maturity level of most of the player base. People will not play fair (as in not using OOC loopholes to transfer information in real time) in this game unless forced to, thats the sad fact and a main reason I couldnt care less about village influencing anymore.

Time and again a city group gets together and decides on a target only to miraculously have an opposing group form up exactly where they are going to attack. Its just total bs.

More I think about it though I realize there isnt any way to stop this and it will always be there. Put a time ban on guild and city channels, people will just wait the X amount of hours and then still have an alt to listen in. Make people pay and they will save up for an alt and still have a listener.

Oh well, you cant force people to play fair if they are bent on being scum.

I'm not sure how Admins detect the use/abuse of alts, so correct me if I'm totally off base, but I'd guess it's mainly through IP address - meaning, it's rather hard to enforce their control..if Bill had one character that he played on his computer, and another that he played on his mother's, and used them to spy for each other, it would be hard to tell that they were actually played by the same person unless Bill did something stupid like transfer a bunch of credits from one to the other. On the other hand, say you have Bill's sister Jill who also likes to play Lusternia - if she tried to make a character on Bill's computer, and people were charged for making alts, she would likely be charged for making her character an alt to Bill's, as the two would share an IP address. To summarize my point, it seems rather hard to detect a well-hidden alt past much more than the player's word ("Do you have any other characters?" when registering, etc) without potentially being unjust to others.

Yeah. And when I did my first character, I didn't say I had any other characters. ('cause, I didn't.)

Besides which, the way I understand it the IP address is actually for the network, rather than the individual computer, so apart from messing up a family, it would screw over people playing from work/school.

Just to clarify, this is indeed seconds abuse. The Celest character can not "speak" to his own Magnagora character.

He wouldn't HAVE to speak to his Celestian character, he'd just tell the city leadership directly. Or even not HAVE a Celestian character, just tell the leadership directly from his Magnagoran character.

If he didn't, then the Magnagoran character could have no way of knowing that a raid was going to happen. The Magnagoran character can't know anything that the Celestian character knows without them interacting, which is illegal.

They can, via use of OOC knowledge. The characters don't have to communicate, the player just does it anyway. Like I said, it's not outside the rules that way, but it does badly break the IC spirit.