On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Mark Smith wrote: > * As soon as we open, someone gets invite codes and registers a bunch > of accounts: harry, draco, hermione, ron, etc etc etc. They then make > a post in a community and say "I am now selling these accounts, > $15/each!" > > If someone does that - squats accounts for the purpose of selling - > then I think we should try to put a stop to that behavior. That, to > me, is an abuse of the service.
As an RP mod, I'd hope that you'd make sure it was for the purpose of selling before you did anything. FWIW, some RPG owners appear to be "squatting accounts for the purpose of selling" but actually aren't; they just want to make sure that all the accounts in the RPG have the same email address and that it's an email address that is under the RPG mods' control. We don't sell the accounts. I've never sold an account in my life. But I've registered loads for my RPG players. When a new RP starts, a mod might register 20-50 accounts in one day. When one moves from one journal site to another, several hundred accounts may be created at once. We just want to make sure that they stay in the game, so that when a player leaves, THIS doesn't happen: > * You happen to have a few accounts you've used actively for a > while as part of an RP community. Now, you're done with that > community, or no longer interested in the Batman universe, so > you trade your "alfred" account for someone else's "bart" > account so you can go do Simpson's RP. > > That I would be okay with. It's natural usage of the site. Some RPGs (mine would be one) really are NOT okay with their players doing this, because they have a consistent backstory that doesn't change when players join and leave. Lightning War has a wiki; every post that has ever been made in the game since our reboot/retcon in 2005 is linked in the recap pages, so that new people can follow from beginning to end. So, we tell players up front when they join that this is how we do things: all new accounts have a first registered email address that we control, and when someone leaves the game, we reset it and change the password. They don't have to play if they don't like this policy, of course. (We never had a paid journal owner quit. I suspect in this case we would have given them their money or paid time on another account.) There is actually a post in the OOC journal that states this and they have to comment on it before we give them a journal. I will register the account for the player and then tell them the password. They can change it if they want to, but since we use scripts to back up everything in the game, it's to their advantage not to. When someone leaves...we reset everything. When characters die, we reset passwords to something random that is only recorded in the mod spreadsheet. There are several styles of LJ RP. The scenario you're calling natural usage is only natural behaviour/site use for one of those styles. **************************************************************** Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy) ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness "I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it think we all bow down." --Christopher Fry _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
