Either make multi-computer boss multiclienting bannable, or revert the multiclienting restrictions

So I haven't gotten to hardcore bossing yet, but from a fundamental gameplay standpoint I (personally) think that multiclienting/muling is lame. It takes away from the fun and enjoyment of raising up a character from start to finish, which is half the reason I even play this game or RPGs in general. It's especially bothersome that doing so is (pretty much undeniably) the most effective and efficient way to play the game.

That said, I am willing to concede that operating multiple characters at once takes some skill, especially in a high pressure boss situation like HT. This is okay in my opinion -- not personally preferable, but okay.

When it becomes a problem is stuff like HH Mules and Dexbuccs, where you have weak, naked characters dealing significant damage or providing extreme utility. These mules are busted and need to go. I understand that a lot of you guys put significant resources into creating such mules, and that if they were axed in some way you would lose out on most of the work you put in. To that I say: Tough stuff. You're the top 0.1% of players, but this is for the good of the entire game.

 

at least give a 10k nx compensation or ap reset so can play a real buccaneer

 

Heavily agree with this, I think this is something that's overlooked by people who don't run HT a lot. For people saying just to bring actual Buccs, have you actually tried to put together a group for runs? Off the top of my head, I can count maybe like 4 or 5 active Buccs that are HT ready spread across the three main timezones (Americas, EU, Asia). SI mules were literally made out of necessity because there are basically no Buccs to run with.

Another thing I think is being overlooked are the aggro changes that came out at the same time. I haven't ran HT yet with the new changes, but it does seem to me like it's actually dangerous and detrimental to bring too many Heroes to runs now. A/M cleave was gaining some traction too and now is more questionable. Party comps are already reverting to NL+BMs only and basically needing Shads as sed mules.

If the goal was to encourage taking on new players, then the multiclienting changes are made moot by the aggro changes IMO (at least within the context of HT).

 

If you know the usual HT runners, you would also know the pathetically low number of buccs that actually run HT, and the even lower number of them who are actually competent in it (i.e hits head, can climb rope, efficient in buffing, etc). You would also know that they usually have their own runs. Why would anyone invite a bucc that does nothing by hitting wings and only reduces splits other than to "encourage party play"? You can argue "Then why don't you teach them?", but the forum itself has numerous guides and evidence to prove that hitting wings in fact does nothing, but many people still do it anyway, even after talking to them about it in-game, cause they are disillusioned into thinking they are doing something other than providing SI.

This. Knowing how the arm aggro works and having the ability to lock the aggro for the whole run (especially for Bishops/Mages) required some degree of skill. Now that the arm aggro mechanic is no more, not only are classes like DrK spending more on pots from mana drain (effectively negating the pot reduction cost from the recent sushi change), but buyers that need HB or MG are also more prone to dying.

Spoiler: Player Skill Issue

Before any clown wants to use "player skill issue" as a point for the last sentence, buyers aren't part of the attackers. There's no real need for them to know HT mechanics, and there's also no time to teach them before the run. Other than telling them "don't move when you go in, spam mg at X seconds from now, pet loot off", there isn't much else for you to tell them. A forum guide for HTP buyers also doesn't exist... yet. Furthermore, most buyers are just parrot pepegas who are pretty new to the game and either can't follow instructions or don't know what they're doing

 

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but limiting boss runs based on an IP would limit bossing with siblings, roommates, and partners. I know some players that live under the same roof, and maple together. This is probably going to be a bigger issue at zakum and scar than horntail for the time being while the new players are still climbing through levels. If we extend the ban to IP's, then players that boss with their roommates or siblings would be harmed and they were certainly not the intended targets of multiclient banning. Whitelists could be used to circumvent this, but I don't see how feasible that would be because it would infringe on privacy.

Optimized horntail squads are going to run with or without mules. 10 man horntail squads will always be around, and in my experience, are generally pretty inclusive. In the discord servers I'm in, it seems like there's a nice pool of hosts and runners that are happy to run 8-10 man horntails 3-4x a week, and do not really care for mules / levels / INTlords so long as we have a good time together.

If these bans are being made on the principle of inclusiveness, CWKPQ should've been included. If you're signing up for a CWKPQ run, one of the first questions you're going to be asked is "what signs do you have?". Unless you're a pirate or archer, good luck getting onto a run without any signs. CWKPQ is way more exclusive than horntail, and the multiclienting ban should be extended to here if you wanted to promote inclusiveness.

Seems like there's no clear answer to this and there's good points to be made by both sides. We could argue all day back and forth about whether or not it should be banned, and it would amount to nothing. This is going to have to be a decision made by Kimmy as what she envisions the server to be and the direction she wants to take it.

I agree with the original message of this thread in that admins should commit to one side, and run with it. If multiclienting is banned, there's gonna be backlash, but players will slowly adapt to it as the new norm.

 

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion about multiclienting; however, can we not derail OP’s original question.

 

IIRC you could get around this by creating multiple user accounts on your PC. At least, that's how I used to transfer equipment on one PC back in GMS. It'd just take forever.

As for the suggestion against IP banning -- you don't even have to do this. Once Kimmy makes an official announcement that muling in boss is bannable, GMs will need to police it periodically in order for it to be effective. This is preventative policymaking at work. Nobody's going to want to risk getting banned on their main attacker for the small benefits of using a mule.

Edit:
As for addressing the underlying issue of inclusion - I don't think banning multiclienting in bossing is a good policy for that purpose. Forcing anything is hardly ever a good idea as people tend to be spiteful.

The main problem still exists and stems from two conflicting ideologies. While it would be nice to have an inclusive community of bossers, some people just want to run as minimally and efficiently as possible. Forcing inclusion goes directly against this ideology.

In my personal opinion, I think this problem could have been fixed through community-run events that GMs might incentivize with Legends cash or other prizes in order to foster an organic movement of breaking out of the 'efficiency' mold.

 

I agree with that all multi-cleinting should be banned, this causes non fair play for those who do not own 2 pc's or cannot afford an extra one, HT book market has gone to shit because of the HH and dexbucc mules, The no multiclienting on same pc still did not make an impact, or yet not one hard enough, what do i have to say for those who made mules? suck it, you exploited got rich off the back of people who actually try to play the game without exploiting any loopholes, casted out members from your parties and made people not wanting to run anymore because how can a 12 man party in HT compete with 6 man that has 6 mules with prices? thats just doesent make any sense and literally fucks up people that dont have those mules, hopefully all boss multiclienting will be banned soon

 

Loop hole? o-o kekw

 

This type of disdain for others who work towards a goal to better themselves is exactly why I want multiclienting to exist. It rewards those who work for stuff and distinguishes them apart from those who would rather spend their time crying about it.

 

Completely incorrect. With the use of virtualization, whether or not your program is "running on the same machine as" another program is (virtually!) impossible to tell other than through the use of shitty hacks that will only work in certain particular configurations.

The reality is that any kind of restriction on """multi-clienting""" (never mind the use-case of more than one natural persons using the same physical machine to do independent things) is unenforceable. People with better methods of mitigating detection (through technological means, both knowledge-wise and money-wise) will consistently be able to evade detection, and people who are innocent (e.g. playing with the same WAN IP as other player(s) or even on the same machine(s)) will get needlessly caught on these flimsy restrictions. I don't know how "multi-clienting" affects the gameplay in practice, but I do know that it cannot be stopped, and therefore games must be designed with this reality in mind rather than game designers deluding themselves as we see here in this thread.

 

So are we going to ignore mules for leeching?

Anyways, back to the original post at hand. Please and thank you.

 

Just putting it as a punishable offense in the Terms of Service will be effective enough. Most top level players on this server (the kind who had the time and finances to raise mules high level enough to use in boss fights) well respect Kimmy and the rest of the staff, as well as any rule they choose to set, despite any difference in opinion they may have. The problem right now is that the staff is just... not being clear on the extent and intent of this rule they're trying to set right now, which is why this thread exists.

 

Lol right. Except it's fairly easy for a human to verify whether someone is muling on multiple clients during a boss. You could even track expedition sign ups.

 

The OP's initial post ends with

So you propose simply changing the ToS to reflect "multi-clienting" being a bannable offence. But this is neither of the options that the OP said they are OK with; it is "in this nonsensical middle ground state". It is not a "world with no multiclienting at all", since people can easily multi-client so long as they don't get caught (my point being that it is technologically impossible to catch them unless they are sufficiently stupid and/or poor). It is also not "one with unrestricted multiclienting", since the ToS attempts (ineffectively and unenforcably) to ban it wholesale. Not to mention the supposed technological mitigations put into the MapleLegends client binary, which I am also arguing are pointless at best.

 

You seem to be ignoring what I am responding to --- the technological enforcement is impossible, not "fairly easy". As far as non-technological enforcement (as you propose here) goes, I don't really see how that is trivial, anyways. Sure, you can draw as many observed correlations as you want; but at the end of the day you would have to have staff members tracking every move that every player makes and then manually making shady judgement calls about banning them... and then hoping that what they saw was indeed causation, and not just correlation between the behaviour of >1 natural persons. This is tantamount to "just put it in the ToS" (including all of the false positives that come along with such a policy). It's fine, but still means "yeah, you can multi-client as much as you want, just don't get caught", which was what the OP of this thread was complaining about in the first place.

 

You do realize that the active player base is not overwhelmingly large and that verifying infractions is not that hard of a task? Couple that with rewarding people with Legends NX for whistleblowing, and you've got yourself an easy preventative policy.

Edit: They have a way of tracing RWT and enforcing it strictly. You don't think they can implement a way to track people from multiclienting? lul

 

Again, not what I'm arguing about. (See: my original reply to this thread.)

But since you insist on arguing with me about this, you cannot "verify" this kind of thing. What do you propose? Interviews and background checks? Or perhaps you would rather just allow players to remain pseudonymous like on every other MMO videogame... All I'm saying is that you can only be varying degrees of "sure" that you are properly manually enforcing such a rule, because it is not reflected in the game-world itself.

Ah, OK, I see why you are so misguided now.

It's useful to consider that "RWT tracing" is nothing close to what you imagine here. Using the phrase "enforcing it strictly" is misleading at best; perhaps you meant "strict" in the sense of "the punishment for being (supposedly) caught is a permanent ban". In that case, it is indeed enforced strictly. In a more broad construal of this phrase: "enforcing it strictly" meaning "very low false negative rate, and hopefully also somewhat low false positive rate", this is just plain wrong. RWT is easy to get away with if you don't do it publickly --- RWTs get caught (in the sense of true positives, false positives notwithstanding) usually when they make publickly available their services. Obviously, there are other ways to get caught if you are sufficiently stupid. I can easily get away with RWTing --- a simple and obvious example is RWT with a friend, privately. That is against the ToS, obviously, but unless I am particularly stupid, I cannot get caught (false negative). In the case of multi-clienting, no public interaction is even hinted at --- multi-clienting is something that people generally do in the privacy of their own homes... often without even telling anyone.