Information Multiclienting explained once and for all

Note: this was originally meant to be a section in the "End of the year" thread, but it became too long, so I just make it one single thread instead.
--------------------
Something I feel was bought up this year a lot is multiclienting.

So in this thread I try answer most of the common things about multiclienting, why blocking multiclienting (in any server) is flawed, and why I ultimately think there's genuinely NO solution to it that is fair, unless you completely change the core gameplay.

General info + History

For those not aware, multiclienting is the act of opening two clients at the very same time on the very same machine. In the official servers, you were unable to do that by default. There's client blocks intact, as well as GameGuard unable to run twice at the same time.

When it comes to unofficial servers, the former is also intact, but there are client modifications that can remove the check, making running multiple clients at the same time possible.

For the very Old School MapleLegends players, they may know we had both the vanilla block and a custom Sandboxie block intact. Sandboxie is a program that allows you to virtualize a program, kind of like a Virtual Machine.

This was an attempt to block "multiclienting" back at release in 2015 until the maintenance of February 12, 2017. During this period, some concerned players came to us, because some people had an advantage because they were able to bypass the restrictions. Furthermore, concerns were bought up that some people had multiple physical machines (ex: Laptop + PC), and were able to multiclient that way.

During that time, we had way less experience than we do have now, and we were unable to fairly moderate nor find a flawless solution to this problem.

After discussion back in January 2017, we decided to completely remove the blocks, and enable to multiclient by default. This is something an other server, MapleRoyals, already allowed. In some way, these blocks made us stand out and be different compared to them, but because of the flaws, it was not very positive, and it contributed to the server having 50~ online at peak during the summer of 2016, and even less before the blocks got removed. I still stand by if this decision to remove the blocks wasn't done this server wouldn't have existed anymore now.

The problems with attempts to fight multiclienting. Here, and in clean slate servers

There's many problems that come to fighting mutliclienting. In this soon to be 10 years old server, but also in completely clean ones. I will specify here numerous methods blocks can be implemented, as well as how they are flawed.

- Custom blocks

Some servers have custom blocks in place (through client modding). All I can tell is that those get bypassed if wanted, and are getting disclosed in some Discords I lurk in in how to do so.

I can't go into much details because this falls into hacking. Just believe me that when a server adds a custom block that it can be bypassed.

- Virtualization blocks

An other method is blocking virtualization. A lot of Malware does this too, where Malware does not activate in a virtual machine because 99% of the time Malware ran on virtualization is done by researchers. Researchers (and other) have long found methods that make virtualization act 100% identical as a real machine, and bypass said blocks, and thus again allows people to multiclient anyway if we were to implement such block.

- Remote tools

Free remote tools allows users to take control of an other PC/Network. You run one client on your own machine and the other on the remote controlled machine, once again bypassing multiclient restrictions

- Multiple machines

Even if the world was perfect, and all the things above could be accounted for, one could simply also just have a second machine and multiclient that way. Unless you completely block siblings (ex: family members) from playing together, this literally cannot be accounted for, and is often also seen as Pay2win, because someone can have a multiclient advantage by having the money for it to own two machines that can run the game.

Conclusions

There's actually even more methods out there, but I think this says enough. While ((technically)) this could be moderated, its as flawed as moderating vote abuse rules. You just catch a sample of them, and the other run away freely and abuse it. This is also the reason why we changed how voting works many years ago, and removed the vote abuse rule completely. We acknowledged it was beyond flawed, and didn't caught enough people where it was fair at all.

Multiclient is in this very same position, and I am extremely convinced that not a single server truly blocked it, unless its a very small server where everyone knows each other, which is different from a server like this that has a lot of unique and concurrent users playing at all times.

We also disclosed a few months ago our unique user count through this (Click) video, and that even though we have multiclienting without restrictions we still have a very big and great community playing the game, and we cannot be happier doing so already for almost 10 years, for FREE.

At the end of the day we can't make everyone happy, but hopefully now people have a global thread people can link to when they ask about multiclienting, why it exists, why it doesn't exist to "boost our user count", and why blocking it is unrealistic, unmoderatable, or otherwise just unfair to pay2win. We have it like this because its the most fair, it allows everyone to do it, and gives everyone the same ability to do it without using 3rd party software to do so.

Other servers that seek fighting this problem shouldn't fight multiclienting itself, but instead should figure out WHY people multiclient, WHY people have to do it, WHY min-maxing The Game (especially pre-bb) requires multiple classes and accounts to do so, and NOT fight multiclienting itself. That's the only advice I can give, and the only way I can see to solve this problem. Adding blocks does NOT fix the core problem, and you just end with a server where some can abuse it, while other are at a (major) disadvantage.

Feel free to link this thread if someone is asking about it.