Hello everyone,
Multi accounts have been a hot topic lately (and seems like always), and the VPN post grabbed some traction but the idea has already been shutdown by Travian.
So here I come with another suggestion to potentially mitigate the multi account farming: "smaller account farming limits".
Preface: (from my point of view) the current biggest abuse of multi accounting is using the non-main-accounts as protected farms; usually presented as a smaller, different kingdom of the abuser, that "is another wing of the main kingdom" and is used to basically provide resources to the main kingdom, as multi-accounts. These act as private farms, as the abuser will protect them if other kingdoms try to raid them (even politically by making it so an attempt to farm the multi-kingdom an act of way against the main kingdom), whilst raiding them themselves.
Then how can we prevent this from happening? Well, my suggestion is to impose limits on farming smaller accounts the same way we limit raids between kingdom members/sitters/etc. Let me explain.
First of all, farming is a major part of the "non-begginer" player experience. It's a big part of the game, and using farmlists and farming smaller players is ingrained into the game, so we want to minimize the impact of the change for the regular player as much as possbile; so I'll preface this by saying that this would not affect gray players. Gray players would not have any restrictions imposed on farming them. This may affect some inactive-not-gray players, but they eventually become inactive sooner or later, and would be back to normal behaviour.
The proposed change would work as follow: A bigger account attempting to farm a "smaller" player would only be able to steal a % of the smaller player's hourly production, based on how much larger the bigger account is. For example, let's say that player AAA is 5 times bigger than player BBB; player AAA would only be able to steal up to 1/5th of player BBB's hourly resource production per hour. THIS NUMBERS OBVIOUSLY NEED TO BE ADJUSTED. I don't know exactly what rates would be fair, but I'm hopeful there's a point where this is balanced.
How would this affect multi farmers? Well, they'd need to spend a lot more time and resources getting the population of these villas up... resources that then they couldn't farm from them. They'd basically have to act as a "second player" which well, it's still bad, but evens the playing field a bit (2 players is worse than 1 mega OP player in my opinion...). Also would surely make it more annoying for them as they'd need to actually manage those accounts and not just let them sit and farm them.
How would this affect the "regular player"? Well, it'd be harder to farm properly. Numbers would need to be fine tuned to minimize impact on players just "farming regularly". Basically those random newbie players you find and that can easily farm because they don't know how to stop being bullied would give you less resources as you keep farming them. But that's not necessarily a bad thing... see next point.
How would this affect the newbies? Well, it would actually improve the new player experience slightly as you can't just have an experienced player find your lowly village that you're struggling to raise because you're still learning the game and completely bully you out, since they couldn't just constantly take your resources all the time. I think it'd make the game feel better (or actually, it'd make the game feel "less terrible" when you get bullied).
How would this affect Travian money (Because I'm not going to pretend that's not a priority)? I actually believe in a positive way. This hits multi account power WITHOUT banning the accounts. The cheaters still get to play (which still sucks, but we all know how things have been going...), just weaker. They're still paying the bucks. It shouldn't actually cut revenue in that department. But it would also make the new player experience better, and potentially make new players stick around more, more players more money, yada yada.
Well that's my long rant and suggestion. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of crucial points and there's some huge flaw on this suggestion that I'm not seeing. But it's late, I'm no game designer, and just another lowly player frustrated to see "impossible armies" ran by and just run away with the games because they don't have a moral code while we struggle to just make a dent somewhere.
( they're worse then TL weirdly
