[MUD-Dev] Gamasutra: Online Justice Systems

[Wes Connell]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Sayeed wrote:

> Raph, I think you were referring to Ultima Online (?), so let me 
> use that as an example.  If I remember correctly, an Ultima Online
> account costs $10 per month and entitles you to 5 characters.  
> This means that players can create one character for adventuring, 
> one for item creation, one for a mobile storage, another for anti-social 
> activities, etc..  If they buy another account, they get 5 more 
> characters to play with.  Characters, therefore, are relatively 
> cheap.  That's the relationship between characters and their players.
> 
> So when a player makes a decision to buy another Ultima Online 
> account, a part of the reason he's doing it is because characters 
> are so cheap.  Five for another $10 ($2 each) and each character 
> can do the same things as every other.  (I would also propose that 
> being able to have many characters also distances a player from his
> characters.)

Although UO characters are "cheap" the current penalty system targets the
account as a whole. If I have 4 awesome characters and 1 jerk character
and the jerk character does something to get banned/deleted then the whole
account is trashed. 

This makes the character/account system act almost like a single
entity. I also heard UO has some sort of a mechanisms for linking
multiple accounts to a single person. As in when my main account gets
banned all other accounts that have the same email/name/CC# get trashed as
well. Any truth to this Raph?

Wes!
wconnell at skotos.net




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