I got banned because CIR Perp guys were gifting accounts to CIR guys that never played Perp. That's why only 1 account was banned and not all those supposedly "shared" miner accounts.

None of that is relevant, whats relevant is what Obi Wan posted:

"I like the idea of account gifting, why waste a good alt & you get to support the game.

But doing it / handling it in a "you can do it but its still not legal & we can change our mind at any time with no warning" kind of manner is bad bad bad baaad."

Why is it relevant to me? Because there's obviously still accounts to be gifted and I'd prefer my guys didn't waste money and time on a game only to get banned when Zoom & co. change their minds again.

Black & white. No grey.

The DEVs have no loss through account trading/gifting - since it doesn't matter if someone pays for a fresh new account, or continues to pay an old account.

account sharing at the other hand, is a loss because a shared account replaces alt-account of several players at the same time. each of them would need to pay extra money to the DEVs to do the same thing as they do with the shared one.
to more player share same account - the more loss for the DEVs.

the whole thing is, that account trading makes your agent name meaningless. TBH, DEVs should make account trading LEGAL, but only if they drop some anonymity that comes with the current game mechanics, and punish any violations against the trading rules without exception:

1. a traded account will change email permanently. since it was traded through official channels, the previous owner should have no easy option to get back access to the account via support

2. force agent rename upon account trade - but keep a public visible history in agent profile of former names

3. previous names or emails cannot be used ever again on that account

4. auto-revoke all ingame standings and corp access levels of the agents on traded accounts

5. ban every accoun't that was traded without using the official method.

Changing the research tree to include corp based research eliminates about the only valid 'reason' to share an account. Combat and miner sharing is obviously an unfair advantage, even if the sharing party has a paid 'low-ep' agent.

High-EP accounts have acutal value. Each of those EP was purchased with game time, there's no other way to gain them. If AC doesn't allow accounts to be traded/gifted/sold, then they become worthless.

Perp and Eve use a lot of meta-gaming, forming alliances, breaking alliances, trading ect ect. These are things the game doesn't control directly. Perp is more enticing to play if the accounts have 'value', and face it, this game needs active players too, not accounts sitting around gathering EP.

Sharing is bad. Having more player controlled robots in the game is good. We can't be talking about a large number of accounts, maybe 100 (from all corps), it only seems large when the game's active base is less than 200.

Why should they? Because to put it bluntly, if Merkle didn't ICE/sub those accounts they would lose money because the actual owners either don't want to play Perp or are too busy IRL to play. There's nothing wrong with gifting accounts, there's a LOT of things wrong with Zoom's attitude of "its forbidden but we won't punish it unless we decide to".

It's a grey area that typically means - based on player-dev history stuff in Perp - that Merkle will get his buttcheeks banhammered the second it becomes more practical to throw him under a bus to preserve existing subs threatening to ragequit.

Thats why it needs to be black & white and crystal clear, no ambiguous grey areas based on who's on his period on that day.

EVE does it better. Just saying.

*waits for incoming cash shop

edit-*rant*Cassius i would pay to play if i was playing knowing i was abiding by the same rules everyone else was to the same extent and anyone violating was being punished properly. On top of that i need more population, there is no one to fight even if went all red i wouldnt have a fight be it game design or population.

I wonder if subbed all my accounts (9) and started spamming racial slurs in chat, is 80$ enough to keep me safe.

I wonder if 50 people in a corp spammed racial slurs, is  449.5 enough to keep me safe

I wonder how *** it is for that guy who sees these *** running free and insulting him daily.

^not a game i am going to play.

Dont do what necessary to keep the game alive do what is necessary to create a great game so it may live.

TL:DR If you cant afford to enforce one section of the EULA, how is any section enforced?

*grabs popcorn* i mean if this gifted account thing is made legal i know plenty of cookie cutter accounts waiting to be gifted to create a fun Isboxer fleet to keep me entertained, but i do miss playing my 1 account and going toe-to-toe with anything that came at me with the occasional support tackle follow bot. My 3+ Synched mesmers/seths is more point-click-win and boring.

i missed the part where anyone having access to accounts makes them better at the game or somehow gives them an advantage... it seems like this is an attempt to waste time which it is getting through with flying colors. woopdie doo a new player gets an account with 1 mil ep yay its a new player with 1 mil ep that sucks, beyond that one person can only run so many accounts at one time, and as we all know when you run too many u die. I can fire up 5 accounts as an example and run at 2 guys, if these people are the least bit competent in pvp they will kill every one.

So your saying by your logic someone with a 200K EP account is just as good as a 1.2 Million EP account doing the same thing?

Or how about having access to 1.2 Million EP mining accounts?

Just to be clear, I was talking about charging $1 for each 10k that a character resets, not buying EP which is sort of what it looks like standing alone.

This would be a micro-store transaction, you select which skills you want to unlearn, and you get charged $1 for each 10k EP. This is new player friendly, since even resetting complexity 9 skill with 5 points or less would only be $1, but a complexity 9, lvl 10 skill could cost $13 (EP is rounded up).

If you're worried about too much FOTM, put a token on each skill when it's reset. Each token multiples the reset cost by 2x, for every 2 months your account is subscribed you can remove 1 token.

I would also be infavor of this without the cost, but the cost would be a better decentive.