Games ending before they begin

I don't see the problem with it at all and can't imagine why anyone else should. I've been using this account since May 2015 and my Horror/Apocalypse account since April 2017. There's never been an overlap between games I'm running/playing. I've never signed up for anyone's game using multiple accounts. I simply like to compartmentalize by gaming activities. and I can't imagine what efforts the Admins would have to undertake to even try preventing multiple accounts but I guarantee it would be an uphill battle and not worth the effort.

Agreed!

:thumbsup: or :like: or :10:

I think it's less of an issue with you personally, and more of an issue that someone could abuse alt accounts very easily. In addition, there isn't much that could be done about it.

I also like the # of posts suggestion. I think breaking it up into weeks like Qralloq suggested would provide a good amount of information to make a decision off of, provided it's presented in a organized way.

Again, I'm not saying that anyone here is doing anything bad with their multiple accounts, but I don't see the utility of it. You don't need different accounts to maintain test games or run different genres, and the fact that it can be done innocently doesn't remove the potential for abuse.

An argument of "I'm not doing anything bad" with multiple accounts doesn't have much to do with the possibility that someone could. Sure, someone could spend a bunch of time gaming the system to get around it, but that's not an argument against it. I sit here now wondering how many multiple account site members I've seen that I thought were multiple people. Who am I really gaming with now?

There's no compelling need I can see right now to need to have multiple accounts. Everything I've seen so far can be accomplished with a single account.

I think some of this is probably not worth the implementation. More detailed info on player profiles would help. I think I good indicator that could be reasonably tracked is # of games withdrawn and # of games kicked from. If I see someone with 10 characters with 7 kicks and 2 withdraws, that's a red flag. But that doesn't stop them from just making a new account if that account has too many red flags though.

How do you tell if someone has multiple accounts? Anyone can create unlimited email addresses. How do you propose that Keleth enforce your one account per one human being policy?

How can any rule on this site be enforced if someone can simply switch to a different account?

I think the real problem, which we've gotten completely away from, is that there is someone who has made multiple accounts on this site who has made dozens of games, most of which never even reached roleplay.

Being ghosted by a player sucks, but it doesn't usually wreck the entire game. It's a lot easier to find more players than it is to find a new GM. When you start a game and multiple players spend time, creative energy and (sometimes) money on rulebooks for new systems, only to ghost it, and then boldly post THE SAME GAME a little bit later:

https://gamersplane.com/forums/thread/19905/

https://gamersplane.com/forums/thread/19193/

How many people out there have been screwed over by this guy? The evidence is pretty significant that they've been doing it for a long time.

The bottom line, as I see it, boils down to this:

1) There's no actual need for anyone to have more than one account, functionally. Everything anyone needs to do can be accomplished with a single account.

2) We have a person who has been posting fake games under at least 17 different sockpuppets and ghosting them for over a year. Having multiple accounts has made that a lot harder to track.

3) A policy requiring one account per person is a common sense policy, especially in light of 1) and 2).

4) We don't need to come up with the details of enforcement before making that policy, and the fact that there are challenges to coming up with the enforcement mechanism isn't a good reason not to enact the policy. If it were policy, then when the person trips themselves up (which they've already done a few times, discovered retroactively), then the violation of the policy makes banning them a no-brainer act.

It's a real problem. But it's not so overwhelming that we can't find ways around it. A friendly post into IC threads about new GMs, much like bowlofspinach does in Introduction threads would do far more good than an untenable rabbit hole about controlling multiple accounts.

Here's the thing. It's not like you can make multiple accounts on the same email; you have to have a new email to make a new account. My two accounts are on different emails. These users that are abusing the system by ghosting games, then making a new email and making a new account, turn around, ghost their game, then make a new email and make a new account. Rinse and repeat.
Unless you're tracking IP adresses, there's no way you're going to prevent people from making multiple accounts, regardless of whether they're using them in good faith or abusing them to troll the website, and frankly plenty of users can hide their IP addresses in this day and age that I seriously doubt Admins are going to invest the effort to bypass that. So preventing multiple accounts from being a thing is pretty much a moot point and shouldn't even be on the table. You're never going to get rid of it. Not in any internet forum, let alone this one.

We need to focus on ideas that hold individual usernames accountable regardless of who the username belongs to on the other side of the screen. If one user has ten usernames and they've been mostly playing off one and rarely use the others, players should be able to see, "Oh this username is active and engaged; I'd play with that person," while the other nine might reflect usernames that aren't active much, and we can decide not to play with that username because it might not be relaible.

As I said, there's one person who has been using a series of different accounts, pretending that each other is a unique person, and posting fake games. They've done it at least 17 different times - quite probably more. Some of them are brand new accounts, and some are old ones.

We can't hold these individual usernames accountable. They don't actually exist. This is a guy churning out phantoms for the purpose of making real users of this site look and feel like fools, and the thing is, he's not breaking any actual rules. I think that sockpuppeting is something that should be against the rules, for the many reasons already given, whether or not anyone here thinks it's "enforceable." It's just plain common sense to say "sockpuppeting is bad" when someone is using an incomprehensible number of sockpuppets to take advantage of good-faith members of the community.

I'm aware of the user you're speaking of. I've been burned twice by joining games they started and abandoned, and it's irritating. They recently tried to join a B/X game I'm running and I at least recognised one of the patterns they use in their usernames and denied their application. So I agree that the problem exists.

But, again, you're not going to get rid of users making multiple accounts. It's never going to happen. It's not even worth discussing here. You can join the opinion that the multi-users are bad, and they should feel bad, but there's no point in making a rule that you can't enforce, because it's a waste of time and doesn't fix the problem.

No offense, but nobody saying "We should ban multiple accounts," is contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way. They're not doing anything to help solve the underlying issue.

I'll respectfully disagree. I think I'm contributing as much to the discussion as anyone else here. I also have yet to hear one credible argument for why anyone needs more than one username on GP.

I mean, I agree that malicious alt accounts should be against the rules, but when there's no real way to enforce that, it's a bit pointless to just say "no alts pls". I guess technically there are currently no rules against alts, but I think that when it's found that alts are used in such a malicious manner, it's enforced. I don't think saying, "no alts pls" adds anything substantial to actually solving the problem, although the clarification may be of interest for some. The main problem is finding out these malicious alts so that they can be dealt with.

With that said, I think that a better way to address the issue would be to provide information so that users can determine if a certain account is untrustworthy, such as with the # of posts suggestion brought up in this thread. The stats could be spoofed, but that would take more effort, meaning less alts for the same amount of effort put in by the creator of said alts, which is an improvement in and of itself.

It doesn't matter. Nobody needs to give a reason and it's not a discussion that's going to go anywhere here. It's a dead issue.

As to the suggestion of the number of posts data, that seems like a start, but doesn't really tell much about the username. I think one person suggested breaking it down to the number of posts per week, but that can be misleading too. One player might make 1 post per week and only join games that run on a "1 post per week" rule. That would be a good, reliable player. Another player might average 2 posts per week, and they would seem like a better/more active player, but if they're constantly joining games that have a "1 post per day" rule, they're actually a pretty lousy player, because they tend to hold the games they play up, which often kills the game.

Maybe a solution to this would be, instead of keeping tabs on how many total posts a player has made, or what their posts per week numbers are, there could be a metric which says how close the player's posting frequency matches the "posts per week" guidelines of the games they join. Do they post about the same number of times per week as the games they join? Do they post more frequently than the "post per week" rules of the games they join? Do they post less that the post per week expectations? Because I'm personally less interested with a players total posting frequency than I am about if they're reliable, based on the expectations of the game.

I'm more interested in people who create games that never were meant to actually exist, personally.

Not quite as dead as you seem to believe.

Here are two reason for multiple accounts:

I did this on another site. I had 2 accounts, the one I played on and the other I let my children use. It was my account and I had the password for it. I wanted to keep on eye on what they were playing and what was happening in their games. Now I will say that this is probably rare but it is a reason for them.

I also did this once for a game I was playing years ago in that it was a spy game and there was a double agent in the party. They figured out there was a leak but it took a while for them to realize a "PC" was the mole in the game as they first examined all the NPC in the game before looking at each other. The final showdown with the PC once they figured it out was a highlight of the game for them. I needed two accounts make it work.