Dealing with Accounts in a Free MMO game

Hidden Asbestos · 2006-04-08T23:28:59

Hi, I'm not sure if this topic has been dealt with here before, but a design problem i'm having is that: if you make an MMO game, or any game where your account has cumulative progress, and is free to play - how can you deal with the following problems? * What stops a player registering lots of accounts in order to gain an advantage in a game where you can easily accumulate wealth by, say mining, and then coalescing the funds to one player account? * What stops a player who is banned for some offense (cheating, offensive language, whatever) re-registering a different account and doing the same thing again? You don't need any in-game achievement to start cheating! Are these problems that must be dealt with by careful moderation and vigilance? Use this thread to talk about other problems faced by MMO designers that don't charge for accounts. (Something I don't believe in, but annoyingly solve some problems)