When will something be done about account trading and people having several accounts?
It’s clearly stated in the Terms of Service (Gaijin Terms of Service):
3.4. The User shall not create multiple Accounts.
3.6. The User shall not sell (or buy), rent, exchange, or give away an Account.
Not enforcing these rules incentivizes or “allows” cheating:
Cheaters often buy new accounts after their previous one gets banned, as older accounts are harder to catch cheating (no 3+ k/d with 5 hours of playtime and such).
The vast majority of people who have several (or severalth) accounts have those because they either got banned previously (cheaters…), or want to sell the account.
I don’t think I have ever met someone who grinds a completely new account after “finishing” his main account for fun… Talked to many of them.
Grinding to sell it, or because a previous ban? Yep, all the time.
How would Gaijin do it? Hardware IP I guess, I don’t know. But an effective solution would cut back the cheater problem for sure.
Many SRE players have alt accounts, and every top squadron has many of them. Doesn’t seem to be a huge deal, as money is often spent in these accounts, and the user can only play one at a time.
Of course I know that many people do it at every level.
But I don’t think Gaijin/the players realise how important of a role it plays in the “supply chain” of cheating.
*btw if gaijin doesn’t give a f about these rules, they should just remove them from the ToS. I would easily let my new player friend try out a few rare special vehicles of mine. Not as long as those points are there.
Until it’s changed, I’ll keep reporting multiaccout users (except DOLLAR, he is a cool guy).
IP, hardware IP for example, definitely with some manual checking to avoid false positives.
And of course a form should be available to announce that several people use the same computer, that’s perfectly fine on a reasonable level (3 brothers in a household for example). The point is detecting machines with like 10+ accounts on them.
Kernel level anti-cheat could be another thing (could detect multiple accounts obviously), possibly harder to dodge too.
I understand that hardware IP can be spoofed, it’s still an extra step that would scare the less determined players away.