A Player's Guide to Multiplaying

I just want to say, this is some good discussion, and I didn't think that my guide would trigger it.

If staff are trusted with 3 characters, how does that mesh with the possibility of accidentally talking about something they shouldn't know about ICly, but know OOCly? Not only do staff have up to 3 characters to track knowledge for, they have omniscience from being staff. By that logic, staff shouldn't be able to play any mortal characters at all. (I won't say whether that's a good or bad idea; it has its merits and drawbacks.) Unless they're somehow mentally superior to players, of course.

For what it's worth I agree with lyse about the fact people do act on OOC knowledge. They do it all the time. Some of them even end up on staff, which is always... fun. And for all my anecdotal evidence about Arx having a strong player culture with pretty much no OOC unfairness (it's stamped out with bans and retconned on the rare instances it comes up), there is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the extent to which Armageddon plots have been ruined by OOC knowledge. It's not that there's no right answer; rather, there are different answers for different communities. And Armageddon's players probably can't handle it after all.

The rule is there for a reason and rules can be changed. There can be more than one reason for a rule.

So let's reframe this a little. You're the head admin of Armageddon, it's now Jeshin's game. If you wanted to take away a rule or add a rule you could, no problem; its your game. What's the one thing that would stop you from changing this particular rule? It definitely wouldn't be "Because its a staff rule." That doesn't even make sense. No, no, no....its something else. That answer is....the rule is in place because the playerbase can't handle it. Obviously, when I say the playerbase, I don't mean everybody. I mean the playerbase as a whole....cannot handle multiplaying on Armageddon. So you're telling me, you agree people shouldn't multiplay on Arm....but you're not saying why. There is a reason. What other reason could it possibly be, besides the playerbase can't handle it. You already said other games can handle it. What does that leave?

Yes...you're absolutely right, its a silly rule, "You can't talk about the game outside of the game." is a rule nobody follows. Again, I'm not talking about that, I don't know why you're focused on that particular thing. I'm talking about multiplaying and why it just won't work on Armageddon in particular, you're talking about talking about the game outside of the game. Nobody ever gave a damn about that. 

Sure they do, but it was a generalization.

But wait....weren't you on an irc chat where, you talked about your characters with someone? Didn't you post logs of that somewhere on here?

My progression went a little something like this.
First year of Arm - PK everything and everybody, max my skills as quick as possible. Talk to everyone on aim/irc whatever, spread ic info to everyone.
Second year - Get banned. Same old same old
Third year - about the same..
fourth year - ...
fifth+ year - around this time I preferred playing my PCs anonymously, still talked to some people very selectively.
20+ years - Not that I have played actively for this long.. but your prioritites change when you're 14 and when you're 34.. needless to say, I don't talk to anyone about what I am doing on Arm now, ever. I have no desire to speak about anything IC, I much prefer and enjoy the game when I am completely anonymous and the same goes for not knowing who he is playing what characters. One reason I dislike the GDB clan thing is that many people maintain their handles so you know who is playing who. They really should just implement some
sort of system where you can maintain anonymity and setup RPTs that way. Also they should just put in 'who c' for every clan, it's fucking retarded that only certain clans access to it.

There are actually players out there who would be wonderful on staff. But the main reason they choose not to join staff is because they dont want the omniscience that comes with it. At the same time, those players are the very ones who can handle it. These are the players who can fall prey to an intrigue they themselves concocted with their previous character and they allowed it to play out with their next character, due to not being aware of it IG.

So please don't judge the playerbase any specific way. There are a lot of different players and some of those players are awesome.

Multiplay is a terrible idea unless you're never going to interact with your main at all. A VPN doesn't protect you from getting caught multiplaying. VPNs resell VPS bandwidth and there's a handful of VPS providers that VPNs use. What will happen is that you will log in with a VPS IP like AWS and there's about 250 active Armageddon players and I'm going to make a guess that about 10 to 20 of those active players are connecting to Armageddon through a VPS. Most likely for work. That's not a lot of accounts to check thoroughly for multiplay activity. Once you're suspected of multiplaying which you might be when you show up connecting from a VPS and twinking it up straight away you'll be snooped on until they figure out through timing and mistakes that you're multiplaying.

If you want to put this much effort into cheating just try to become staff. Or play for a year so you can get 1 karma and apply for a giant because a giant is stronger than two mundanes.

Yes.