I asked for this to be moved over here because this was a different topic, but I do think it's a good question.

<<If me and my roommate are both playing DR. If one of is recieves lockout would the other also be locked out? or can one do anything to result in the other being punished as well? Be it in the future or in the past. (Say a roommate introduced the other into DR but he himself got his accoutn terminated and the new one got a fresh 1st time warning)>>

The answer is, maybe. I won't say what all the tools I have to look at accounts, but I have a lot of them. When I'm dealing with a situation like the one given, I'll look at all kinds of things. I'll look at base login records, including things like time. If you and your roommate don't play at the same time a lot, I can see that. If the accounts act differently in game, I can see that too.

That said, is it possible for both accounts to get locked out anyway? Yes. I'll give a hypothetical "how" here. Let's say your roommate has had some problems before (if he hasn't odds are the first time something happens he'll get told to just knock it off, or get a warning, and if there isn't a history, he's not getting sent to me, unless he's REALLY done something wrong), he gets in a fight with someone in a way that's clear PvP, we'll say he steals from someone, they turn him in to the guards and he attacks them for it. That one is going to be a warning situation.

Except, he finds out he bit off more than he can chew. Who would have thought a 25th circle trader had the combat skills of a 50th circle barbarian! Whoops. The next thing that happens is your character, the 60th level barbarian shows up fighting the trader. We're going to look at that and go, whoa whoa whoa, back that up. It's his fight, you don't have any business getting involved, and now your guy is getting warned under the third man in rule (yes, I'm a hockey fan, have been for decades). At that point, the GM on scene is looking at this going, "This is something someone should be locked out for," and asks me to check what I know about the accounts.

So I look at it, maybe the accounts have different information, maybe you or your buddy are paying for both accounts with the other guy paying the one with the card, there are a lot of possibilities here, but bottom line, they come back as connected in some way. In this case, both accounts are going to go down because there's no question the barb shouldn't have jumped in, and there is a connection that stands up.

So, let's give a different version of this, where your barb doesn't go after the trader. There's still a lockout situation, your buddy's record is what's operative there, and he he's been a bad guy for the past few months picking up a couple other warnings and now he's going down. I look at the accounts and maybe that leads me to look at your account, and I'm looking and I'm seeing things that say to me same guy? two guys? So I look some more and find that while your buddy has been getting in all kinds of trouble, you haven't been at all. He's locked out, you're free to go.

But wait, we're not done yet. Your buddy is locked out, you're not, and he's been wheedling you for the last week because he needs his DR fix, and he swears up and down he won't get you in trouble, so you let him play on your account. Except he couldn't stay out of trouble attached to a chain in the back yard, does something really stupid, gets your guy in new trouble and now the connection comes back into play and boom, now you're both locked out because he was using your account.

What's the moral of this story? Well first, NEVER let someone else play your account. You don't know what they might do. Second, NEVER play someone else account. You don't know what they've done that can come back and bite you, sometimes hard. And third, in the real world helping your buddy out might be the thing that keeps him alive. In the virtual world, you can drag the body to the cleric guild and the only thing you're out is maybe half an hour. Getting involved in his fight can end up costing you months. Let him die and you can tell jokes for everyone to laugh at for months. It's your call.

We've had situations like this and in general, no, it's not an issue. I can track incidents like that, and the rest of the login data, and see what people were doing, and... etc etc etc. What you're looking at here is only one piece of the puzzle. Granted, it's a major one, but it's not the whole thing.

--Sanguious

Hearing some peeps talk about their other accounts made me thought of another question:

If you own two accounts and have both logged in at the same time. As long as both characters are always in the same room, and you are 100% ATK and controlling one character, while the other one is on an auto script. You don't touch the computer (or minimized window.. or whatever) for the other character but you watch it by having your primary character in the same room...

Is this AFK scripting for the second account? Does this violate policy in anway?

---

>put my head on anvil
You put your head on the iron anvil.

>awaken
You can't do that while you are asleep.

>bbs
You begin to doze off again.

it is not At The Keyboard scripting or Away From Keyboard scripting that is in policy...

It is clearly stated as unresponsive gain of exp, money, in game advantage. If you are responsive at the keyboard with 20 different account logged in at one time great for you no problem or policy violation. if one is deemed unresponsive to the game than it can be a warning.


Yamcer

---

"You know, while I understand the importance of seeing the (personal) validity in other's arguments, it's impossible for me to believe fully that others are correct. If their argument was correct, I'd change mine." - My GF

I had this a little while ago. The answer is... Use Peephole or something similar. You'd THINK my character (Who was guarding the other..) Would see the second getting kicked by a goblin in a place a goblin shouldn't be, but no, he didnt, and I almost got a warning for it.


~~Dhimani.

Okay, we've got a another good question that came up here! To paraphrase "I have two characters and we're both together so I can see what's happening, but I'm not clicking over to the other screen because I can see if anyone is interacting with him. Can I get warned?"

The answer to this is, yes. Here's why. The in-game staff doesn't have access to the things I use to see if accounts are linked to each other. We do it that way to protect your personal information. By the same token, the billing department people have access to the things in the billing system, but don't have any access to the in-game records, again, it's protecting your information. So, while you may be able to see what's going on in the room, it's entirely possible you wouldn't see the other guy being asked if he's there.

In general, those messages only go to the character being checked, not the whole room, and it's done that way to be minimally intrusive. Let's face it, if the whole room were being asked "How many ranks in <fill in the skill> do you have?" everyone would be going, "Oh that's really in character!" and when the scripting rules were first put in place in 1998, sometimes people did send things to the whole room and the whole room would start screaming about it. That doesn't happen anymore.

Getting back to the original point, the person who is doing the script check doesn't know that the other character in the room is also you, and doesn't have any tools to find out, unless for some reason the issue has come up before, and even then, with people moving characters around, sharing accounts and all kinds of other things like that, that information may be out of date. They're looking at the one guy.

So, what do you do to deal with that? Either set things up so both characters are on the screen, or when you can't see the other character, make sure they aren't doing anything. Things to watch for on that list of "anything" is the obvious, don't run scripts, but the less obvious, don't be teaching or in a class, for bards don't be singing, and for traders don't be running contracts when you've used SLEEP. You might not be gaining experience, but you're making money, and that's why it's called gains, not experience.

I'm actually looking forward to these.

--Sanguious

>I'm actually looking forward to these.

I've been looking forward to your semi-definitive answers to some of this stuff. Thanks for participating on the boards. From my point of view, it's a long overdue addition from the SIMU customer service front.

Thanks.

>>The only thing the PLAYER won't be able to respond to (after AVOID !WHISPER) would be script checks, which kinda shouldn't happen if the PLAYER can respond to both characters in some way.

Script checks happen regardless, and they don't always stem from some annoyed player putting in a REPORT.

J'Lo, no that other one
The Manipulation List -- http://symphaena.com/index.html

<<Since you already send the script check message multiple times...>>

Multiple times eventually gets to multiple groups of multiple messages (towards the middle or end of a check). Using your Gnome example, it would be more like...

A mischievious gnome is attempting to tie your shoelaces together. Maybe you should STOMP to scare him away.

A mischievious gnome is attempting to tie your shoelaces together. Maybe you should STOMP to scare him away.

A mischievious gnome is attempting to tie your shoelaces together. Maybe you should STOMP to scare him away.

A mischievious gnome is attempting to tie your shoelaces together. Maybe you should STOMP to scare him away.

A mischievious gnome is attempting to tie your shoelaces together. Maybe you should STOMP to scare him away.

...Asterisks or not, this makes the message harder to miss (and easier to distinguish from environmental messaging).

Hope that helps.

-V.


"Reject me not, sweet sounds! oh, let me live,
Till doom espy my towers and scatter them.
A city spell-bound under the aging sun,
Music my rampart, and my only one."
-Edna St. Vincent-Millay

>>Plus anything that is universal to a script check defeats the purpose. If asteriks always preceeded and followed the directions at any time during the check it wouldn't be too hard to match that in a script.

You must have missed the part where he said replace the asteriks with random letters so it cannot be matched, although I'm pretty sure you could still get around this with programs like Genie


Strangeguard

>Vaeldriil's Post

This makes me infinitely less worried about missing a script check. The way some people talk about them, they sound completely unobtrusive and something I'd be prone to ignore or not notice.

Now I can sleep better at night know that I'm not gonna' miss script checks. Seriously, this is one point of stress I regularly dealt with when playing the game. I feel guilty every time I use a script to work on my gweth stones because I think it's adding me to some script check queue and that there will be some message that I don't realize is a script check.

So do the script checks always just ask you to do some action, like that? Or are there different ones? I know Solomon said once that he does his own kind of script checks and that they almost always 'catch' someone, which makes me wonder if they're just really unobtrusive messages that people ignore or think are environmental messaging. And that freaks me out.

-Kesii's Player - SKEERED!-

>DR-VAELDRIIL

Thanks for the info. That does give me some peace of mind.

J'Lo >Bubba reserves this type of check for the problem players who've somehow managed to figure out how to get around the normal checks.

What type of special check are you talking about, exactly? I really can't think of any valid reason to launch a check that is intentionally difficult for an ATK person to detect, established problem player or not.

>I believe the game sees scripted commands and keyed commands a bit differently and this is what I think Solomon checks when he does those checks. If the only commands you've entered so far are from a script then yer busted. Of course I could very easily be completely wrong and Solomon just pings you computer and sends his goons to see if yer there typing er something.

>Calissa's player

While the wizard and stormfront may send something during a script most of the hard core scripters don't use these. So for the most part there is NO difference to the server between 'typed' commands and 'scripted' commands.

It's not a fursuit... it's a giant paper bag.

Lots more stuff coming 'Soon'!

http://www.zairius.com

Supreme Bunny Overlord Zairius

<<[...] this is what I think Solomon checks when he does those checks. If the only commands you've entered so far are from a script then yer busted.

I very much doubt this. The goal is to catch people scripting while away from the keyboard, not to catch scripters in general.

>>I find it very doubtful that Wizard or Stormfront contain spyware that can track your actual keystrokes. That would be a very serious infringement on user privacy.

I don't think it's spyware per say but instead they can tell the difference in the data being sent from Wizard and SF.


Strangeguard

>>What type of special check are you talking about, exactly?

Imagine a GM just strolling in to maybe (MAYBE!) interact with you for a few seconds before notifying you in an offhanded casual way that you're getting a warning, locked out for 30 days, or worse. He does give consideration to the environment so you can at least see what he's sending you, but he pretty much forces you to respond near-immediately. The typical process of his special check goes something like this:

SEND: you've got 10 seconds to respond.
[RT: 10 seconds]
SEND: you lose, sucka!
(cue the teleport to The Cell and subsequent announcement of a warning or lockout)

J'Lo, no that other one
The Manipulation List -- http://symphaena.com/index.html

>> I don't think it's spyware per say but instead they can tell the difference in the data being sent from Wizard and SF.

Close but not quite.

Whip out your favorite packet sniffer and you'll see that whenever a script is started in StormFront a packet is sent to the game that lets it know you just started a script and presumably flags your username. The same thing is not, however, present in the Wizard.

That said, keep in mind that this has little bearing on whether or not you're busted for AFK scripting or are even checked. It's just another tool that is there for GMs to determine who might need checking. No one is going to be locked out just for running a script.

---

Rev. Reene


You say, "Now what did you two learn."

You hear the ghostly voice of Tetsuro say, "The juice was worth the squeeze."

You hear the ghostly voice of Vharune say, "I learned not to accept gifts from women."

>>the problem is, people can get busted for teaching supposedly afk.
>>Because the game doesn't always drop you.

STOP TEACHING will solve that problem.



River

Hello, my name is xxxx and I'm here for the meeting of Scripters Anonymous.

I always say that it's best not to keep your inactivity flag set on, because if your dropped as you pointed out, you'll now be on longer. Increasing teh chance if you happen to be teaching or something of that nature of getting a warning. Though even that might not prevent it happening once if your very very unlucky.

>flag inact on
You will now stay connected while inactive for a longer period.
>flag inact off
>
You will now disconnect following the normal period of inactivity.
>


Jim

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."

Winston Churchill

>>I would like to be able to set in inactivity flag to log me off much quicker for when I go hunting. About a minute should do the trick.

Definitely.

I am --- Navak