Only addressing the actual multi accounting issue, not about any one member. It seems simple to fix but maybe im wrong about its difficulty. If a simple log of ownership/alerts would really help put a stop to a player using multi accounts. Since passive abilities are permanent, why cant a simple planetary alert/ownership history tab exist.

eg
planet x colonized 10/10/10 by xxxxxx
planet xxxxx alerted 12/25/10 help weaken dont invade by xxxxxx
planet conquered by xxxxx on 12/25/10


the only problem could be alerts. I would think that only a very small number of planets would have more then 15 entries so i dont think it should be. I feel the alert history is necessary to show if a player is alerting planets and benefiting other/certain players instead of themselves(feeder multis)

Dan I asked for this a long time ago, I know , more logs as you said I just think that time has come for this one.

This will also help legions out in dealing with each other eg the it was mine first argument

Only one issue with this .
what if a player has a friend join the game and then alerts good planets for his friend and friend
invades and takes them .
yes I know its missing the first step of 1 player taking then another alerting for benefit of another
but the log would look almost the same
player 1 alerts planet xxx1
player 2 invades planet xxx1
player 1 alerts planet xxx2
player 2 invades planet xxx2
ad nauseum
i have atleast 9 decent planets id willingly give to a friend who joins the game to get them setup im sure others do as well

once is ok, your more looking for a pattern or if someone alerts a dyson for someone else. Not many people are giving away Dysons. I mean even if your giving some good planets if your trying to advance a friend your not alerting your best planets.

These two things would be very different. A planet object could have a passive attack/defense/cloak stat, which would be a single int, so no problem, but keeping track of the history would need to be something less simple, like an array list or something, which I think for the amount of planets could start to cause a problem.

what happens if a multi has an account in one legion and the other in a different one how would this stop that or do you consider that fine?

Still against the games TOS. So no not fine. Byteman and the subspace surfers seem to think it is but no. Not fine it is cheating.

Something needs to be done against multi account players.
If those that play against the TOS might as well be cheating.
I can see your suggestion working and getting some players kicked out of the game. However how to implement it without increasing the coding and memory usage of the game? Maybe Dan can pay for the increase memory/cpu time but what about the coding?

If Dan had the revenue/staff he could log all details of game play and just have one person work full time looking at the logs and getting rid of cheaters.

The more we say on the forums the more the cheaters know how we look for them.

Like -- I wish I knew how to set up a bot to collect my research while I sleep! BUT THAT WOULD BE CHEATING.
How many research points have I lost because I didn't log in and use them. Using a bot to do that would give you a big advantage over myself and I think the majority of players.

As i stated, i dint think the logs will be long an the vast majority or planets. When i take a planet it remembers all the structures, how would a separate tab of text be so difficult to code? m not a programmer but from what is already in-place it seems an easy extension.

It doesn't remember all the structures, only the ones that are currently on it. All of the things it tracks currently are very limited so it's not an issue. I am a programmer, and while I don't know exactly at what point storing all of these things would be an issue for the servers, I do know it would be a lot more of a problem than everything else on planets.

Wow. It's. Not hard to track. It's just another table just like every other table in the database. And 99% of the planets wouldn't have more than a single entry. Most would probably have none if you wipe the record if it's been purged off all lists. Any db should be able to handle a table with a half million tupals easy. Index it based on the planet and you're good to go.

Not aying this should be a priority or anything just saying it's far less complicated than a lot of other features that have been added

One could even use a totally seperate table for this info so its only needed to read when you access the history part.

I have no idea what 'tupals' is.

Yeah sorry it's tuple aka record. Spelling fail.

I knew it wouldn't be hard to track, I just didn't know how much load that would add to the game, as I mentioned. I was mostly pointing out that it would be very different from keeping passive stats and structures, which it would be.

Though, thinking about it more, it seems like you'd be better off keeping track of this for players, not planets, at least for stopping multi-accounting. I mean, if you did this for planets you'd need to look at a bunch of planets to figure out if one player is/is using multiple accounts, but if you kept track of the player's alert history you could just look for players who alert a bunch of good planets and see who took them (which would be easy because you'd look at the current owner). So yeah, if they can do this without it being a problem they should probably do it by player instead of planets.

I can stand people spending any amount of money they want, its what pays for the game to improve and to make it worth for the developers continued efforts. I cant abide cheating, however, and it seems that something should be done to prevent this more forcefully. It is part of the terms of services but not enforced at all. It should be enforced or removed from the terms of service entirely , right now its just so many words.