A Player's Guide to Multiplaying

Of course it's easy to detect VPN use. The whole point of a VPN is to cover your real IP address. The staff will see that they are covering your real IP address. They are not going to see anything else.

Depends on the complexity of the VPN or proxy. It doesn't necessarily have to be a VPN, you could easily multiplay by using friends IPs, going to the library etc. I think using a VPN is just the easiest way to do it within your own home.

I would argue that the staff probably could care less about catching you, it is quite honestly an exhausting effort to attempt to stop someone from playing if they are going through the efforts to do so. The reason bans don't work if because they are IP based. My problem with playing was I hated the idea of being somewhere that I wasn't wanted and had been shunned to great effect. I felt a lot of shame about my past at Arm and the way people talked about me so I stayed away for a long time just for that reason alone.

Right, but that's yet another example of staff creating unnecessary work for themselves, and then complaining about said work. I would go further than labeling this unnecessary, I would say unhelpful. Staff aren't adding value here, they're subtracting value. I say that considering that I really believe you to be one of the good ones. I consider most of the current staff to be not only decent people, but competent administrators.

But staff should not interject themselves into this sort of decision making process. It should be fairly transparent what players are playing which sponsored roles. It should be fairly trivial for me to message these players and find out whom if any are interested in me playing one of their slaves. While Staff may see themselves as martyrs, this is one of those situations where they're only in the way.




Backstory? What backstory? I want to play a slave. Here is the backstory for every slave.


Again, I'm not looking for the staff's intercession on this. I don't want staff's permission for my character to like cats. Slaves have less freedom, ergot they are less responsibility than a normal character.



Which in practice never happens. I've had cooperation on staff projects where staff told me they would support what I'd be doing, as well as staff projects where staff said upfront that I'd be pretty much on my own. In both cases it amounts to nothing. I'm not raising this as an issue with the game because it's a known issue. Staff are too busy to support what characters do on a day to day basis so in my role as a slave my assumption I'd receive the same or less level of support than any particular character. Which is moot because other than wishes there is no staff support. This is another thing that y'all build up in y'alls heads but doesn't actually impact what players do.



Right, but we're all bored anyway. There is not correlation between being bored as a slave or bored in any other role in the game. I get along with the staff. The current crop of players are actually decent. My entire reason for not playing the game is boredom. It's a fine game it's just boring. This is not your fault, but using complaints as a reason to bar me from playing a slave is illogical. Here I am, not playing a slave and complaining anyway. I'm bored.



As opposed to rolling up a freeman ranger with low stats and then requesting storage/suiciding within less than a month? Non issue.



Yes. We're players. That's how this works. We pick the characters that we want to play and then staff undertakes the repetitive task of fulfilling administrative requests and mediating problems. It's repetitive on purpose.

I hope that I don't seem like I'm mansplaining to you and I would like to think that if we were having this conversation IRL I would shake your hand at the end. The game's fine, it's just boring and blocking characters out of roles for reasons that haven't made sense for at least a decade is stifling.



Thank you for your input Sir however there is nothing to set up. If two people decide that they exist in a slave relationship, then one is other's slave. If both of them decide that the slave is to be freed, then it is to be freed. If one of them decides that that the slave has run away, then the slave has run away. This gives the templarate and/or various bounty hunters something to do. This isn't a problem, it's a feature.

That's basically the thing. It's important to create a role that's fun, without completely massacring the theme. Which means the slave role that Ibusoe described cant be played. The character described would never leave the compound. Would never go to the tavern, would never even speak to anyone, unless spoken to. They will be 100% reliant on the direction of their Master. And maybe the Master doesnt want them. Maybe the Master feels burdened by the sudden need to have their slaves entertained, since their entertainment depends 'entirely' on the master's initiative. And the master cant just tell the slave to go forth and bring back something juicy, because that is not something a non-favored slave would do.

The roleplay of a slave that desires freedom and wants to raise a slave rebellion is so overdone that majority of low level slave concept are about that very thing. And while fun in a sense, if truly persuid to a successful direction, the entire Zalanthas would soon become a free state democracy. That is not the zalanthan theme.

The 'favored' roles are better, since they offer greater freedom. They are basically an equivalent of a bastard role. Both of those require set ups and a seamless introduction into the noble house.

Gladiators are a good example of a good direction and they're persuing it. But just chargenning a slave with all the freedom to do things that players tend to like to do, would invalidate the concept of a slave, or invalidate the concept of Zalanthan slavery.

Yes. Some gradual changes in the 'theme' of slavery are a way to solve it. And the gladiators are a step towards it. But overall, it's just not worth the effort. At the end of the day, in the game where clans have difficulties keeping their numbers up, just because everyone prefers to indie around, the problem of slavery is rather moot.

There is a lot of ludonarrative dissonance between a player's options in character creation and what the game world is supposed to contain. Part of that can be blamed on the fact that the game was created by a bunch of kids, part of that can be blamed on staff who by and large fail to introduce consistency in their game world (or get run out of town when they try), and part of that can be blamed on the players who see the game as an opportunity to play out a power fantasy.