Thursday, January 10, 2013

And let there be Banhammers!

So, Mobage is rolling through its customary monthly house cleaning, quite a bit more aggressively than previously.

I honestly have to recant my previous words that Mobage doesn't mind if it's only two or three accounts because I'm hearing horror stories galore from highly ranked players who are getting their accounts permanently banned. Now, many of these players are getting tossed for having 10+ accounts that are used purely for farming. But I am also hearing about people who CLAIM that they only had two or three accounts and are getting banned.

There does seem to be some added aspects into the formula. Mobage looks for names like Doglover1, Doglover2, Doglover3, Doglover4, etc. After seeing them, they can do a quick search to see if these are different players or if they are from the same phone/IP.

Another thing they seem to be keeping track of is large amounts of trading as always that is strange. They mostly do this because its a sign of people buying cards/items for real money.

One interesting fact about these bans by the way is that they all seem to correlate with Login bonus campaigns last day. So, in the future and present you may want to limit any trading with alt accounts for times that do not correlate with card pack days.

Now, I believe talking to people saying DON'T MAKE ALTERNATE ACCOUNTS! Is a lot like telling people not to have sex. Since I can't be sure that you won't make the accounts instead I will tell you how to make it as safe as possible.

1) Name each alternate account something unique and different.
2) Avoid doing large amounts of trading that seems inherently one sided. Instead of one rupie, you could trade 9 feeders for example.
3) Avoid doing any large activities between accounts during event reward period and especially during claim ticket periods.
4) Try to use one second dedicated device for alt accounts and never log into them on your main device. This way if they do get banned, hopefully your main will remain intact.
5) Finally, there's a reason money laundering exists. If you use each of your accounts to sell items and purchase one very expensive item using their resources, and transfer that card to your main account, it's a lot less likely to raise a red trading flag than 30 different transactions all to your main account.

An example of this would be:

Main Account - Bridge Account (This account would be legit if possible) - Main Farm Account - 29 Other farm accounts.

Your 29 accounts would sell everything to gain HP and then transfer that HP to your Main Farm Account. Main Farm account purchase the most expensive card it can afford. Main Farm account then trades the card to the bridge account for something like 5 Rares and 100,000 rupies. Bridge account waits a week and then does a similar trade with the main account.

Hopefully the 29 accounts, main farm, and bridge should be on one device and the Main account on another. This way if Mobage catches the 29 accounts, they will see the related accounts but hopefully miss the main account.

Of course the best way not to get banned for having alt accounts is to not have alt accounts. I still feel that mobage doesn't have an issue with a player with 2-3 accounts that they play actively. I think their issue is with accounts for the express purpose of farming LCP. 


18 comments:

  1. I definitely think there is an extreme unbalance to the game with some of the high echelon players, but at the same time I would assume that they money they spend allows other players to access the game for free. It's a fine line between greed and necessity.

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  2. From what I read in the robforum.com, the some of the owners of banned accounts stated that they actually login using the account in some other games to get the 100 moba coins. That probably flag the multiple accounts issue.

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    1. Hm. Interesting. It seems it was pretty much top 30 orders that were hit, but the way chatter was going off about it in line, it was probably made to seem worse than it is. One guy I heard about actually had 350 accounts he logged in with. That meant every time a login campaign finished he would get 1000HP and a bunch of HR/SR/SSR cards.

      But from what I saw of the messages, Mobage is stating in their ban emails that any use of alternate accounts is bannable. At least how the message is worded.

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  3. I think it is great if Mobage tries to suppress the use of (excessive) alt accounts. A problem i see with this however is the lack of communication. As far as i can tell most people seem to believe (/have believed till now) that alt accounts are legal as long as they are registered properly. Mobage really needs to communicate what the rules are.

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  4. Surely its fair if say you make the effort to go into an apple store for example go on one of the Iphones in store download Rob and create an account to an email you own, then go around all the I phones in that store and repeat. It should be legal as they would all be registered devices. Yes time consuming for the player but would the accounts get banned?

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    1. the problem with this is that walking into an apple store is they lock the app store from anyone downloading anything they want. Same with cell phone stores.

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    2. Nope, just did it today on one iPhone in an Apple Store. There was no acc registered on the app store so you just had to enter your own and then log out of that afterwards. Worked like a charm.

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  5. Would having a few more requirements for the login campaign help to reduce some of this exploitations? Say for example that to get the login campaign you had to have attacked a couple of players and quested a minimum number of times each day. That would make it incredibly time consuming for those with multiple accounts and might reduce it.

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  6. Great idea but the only problem is that a lot of high end players will never quest. And will log in and just use the bazaar. But I can't think of a better solution right now. Unless they just leave people to it

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  7. I dont agree with their means of banning. I have alts, its the only way my main has succeeded. All of my alts are device registered so whats the problem? Whats the difference if the devices i used to register these accounts played to level 20 and got bored and didnt play or if I keep them up and keep them active everyday? I've got at least $500 tied up into this game, real money. I dont cheat I dont use unregistered accounts, I play every day. I participate in every event, I rank top 1k in everything. My decks are SR decks not Legends. I give HR & SR cards away for free to help others out on a regular basis. Im top three donater in my Order. Treyarch and Infinity Ward dont even ban players half as much as Mobage does for pettiness. I know there are going to be people who disagree with me and they have every right to their opinion. I just feel as Mobage is becoming a greedy tyrant... they should change their name to King John.

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  8. just an addition... look at the bazaar and the ROB economy in a whole. The real money costs havent changed, the odds havent changed, the values have drop so much on everything but the high SSR/ Legend cards. I can rant for days on my aggrevations, maybe I need to get banned because I am so addicted to this game it'll save me money and time. I apologize for spelling and grammar. and Lucarda, thank you for all the time you put into this blog. You're a great blogger. Thanks again.

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  9. Thanks for the great website, and insights into the game. Mobage recently helped me get back into an account I couldn't log into. They knew it was an alt account. They didn't say boo about it. But I only have a few, and they're all active, and on registered devices. If you have 20+ alt accounts, what are the odds that they are all on devices that you actually own? Also, if you score a gazillion points, and never buy Mobicoins, you're certainly attracting attention. Why not ban you? It's not like you were making them any money. Play honestly, throw them a dime occasionally, and you'll probably be fine.

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    1. Additional note: I had to give very specific information proving that I was the phone's owner.

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  10. Just got hit... By a ban. Know anything I can do? Like what I can say? And what ever happened to your no-home website do you still make money?

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  11. I have one alt account. Just for feeders. Because enhancing is basically a pain. It's like grinding a rock with your teeth. First of all, I don't understand how people can have more than 2-3 accounts. I'm pretty stupid when it comes to this. If I'm right you can have only one account on a registered device. Or am I wrong? If not, how many phones/tablets can one have lying around? I've read stuff about people creating fake accounts on a pc by emulating multiple devices. But that would be cheating. Cheating in a single player game is already somewhat disputable, but in a game like Rage it's fraud and theft and in my opinion Mobage has every right to ban those players.

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    1. Right and wrong. Reading the Mobage ToS it is unlawful to impersonate another person creating 2 accounts can be conceived as doing just that even if it from 2 devices. question 2 You would be surprised. I have 2 devices an iPhone and an Android the replaced the iPhone after 3 years. Then you have the tech guys who buy the newest device and tablets every chance they get. I do agree banning fake accounts is a good idea. Its that gray area of multiple registered account logging on the same device that is burning a number of player.

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    2. the top players dont own like a thousand accounts they have iphones that they have jb which they use to hack and register accounts. like the answer below i hear some of the top orders have like a thousand accounts that they have scripted to auto login to farm hp.

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  12. Someone in the robforums apparently got a straight answer:

    http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x65/FrizFroz/IMG_1786.jpg

    http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x65/FrizFroz/IMG_1787.jpg

    I don't know if this is credulous information but the posters (FrizFroz and Jinshang) appear to be a long time posters in the forums.

    I guess the case is just isolated after all.

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