"-alt" Characters

#1

When I was a new player to Wolfery I created several different profiles that had similar names so I could have the same character present in different rooms. Almost immediately after I created 3 characters of that type, I was messaged by a moderator who told me that I needed to make each character unique and different with a unique character profile, and it was hastily implied that an ultimatum would come swiftly if I didn’t act at that moment.

I couldn’t help noticing that now it’s become popular to create copy charcters with “-alt” at the end of their name, or to otherwise create copycat characters so that the person can interact in different areas at the same time; and that there’s no moderator hastily prompting these players to rename their profiles.

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#2

My personal opinion is that having alts is ridiculously dumb, it ruins the immersion, and they should be prohibited. IC, though, I consider all of them clones.

But yeah, I’d very much appreciate an official rule that says ‘no low-effort alts’.

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#3

Why is it a problem for your immersion that someone else has more than one disjoint scene ongoing simultaneously? Is a person only allowed to play one scene at a time on Wolfery? What specifically is a low-effort alt?

I am one of those people who has a “clone” alt, and it is for the simple reason that time is a limited resource in the real world and the window of opportunity for engaging with the people I play with on here tends to overlap quite often. When I have a character engaged in a scene already and someone with whom I have a longer term story ongoing comes online, I see no harm in continuing the arc (which is often played out in a private room too) on that clone character.

I personally think this kind of pointless gatekeeping on how people are allowed to enjoy interacting with others here coming from a source with at least moderate authority in the platform is ridiculously dumb.

People do plenty of things on this platform that we might not immediately understand (from certain kinks all the way to having an allergy to OOC messages or Wolfery lore), but at least in my mind it takes a quite disrupting activity to warrant calls for outright banning them. Immersion doesn’t feel like a reason alone when balanced against the utility in this specific case. Unless they’re actively harassing your scenes by coming in the room with multiple clones, just live and let live.

Now, I’d personally prefer being able to wake the same character up into multiple instances for parallel scenes, but the status quo is workable.

#4

Having alts is metagaming. I very much don’t enjoy being metagamed in my face. When I see John2 Doe who’s trying to chat me up and John Doe who has the exactly same profile picture being up and awake I don’t really get what they want. Is the ERP so boring they figured they can talk to me in the meantime? Like, if you have ten alts awake and your partners are fine with that, sure, go for it. Just don’t expect I’ll be happy with your lack of coherent replies.

I suppose I just had some bad experiences with alt-people.

On a serious note, the metagaming is only because of bad writing. There’s absolutely no reason not to have an in-universe explanation for clone accounts – in fact there was one article in the Chronicle about that previously, with same people arriving on the train over and over. It only takes a tiny bit of imagination to make the names sound a bit less John2 Doe in your face. Extra points for subtle description changes, or a quick colour scheme change for the clothes.

I know a few people who run around on several character accounts. I have zero issues with that because they are very good at juggling those, and they’ve put effort into make the characters subtly distinct. So in the end my statement boils to previous interactions with alt-people that were extremely low effort.

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#5

How is having multiple timelines of the same character being played at the same time metagaming? Especially if it’s the same character? (Just to pre-empt your response, the idea of a each character slot being a distinct and completely disjoint identity in-world is something that you are enforcing in your head on them, there’s nothing in the game system it self that would enforce that.)

That however most definitely is metagaming, and you’re just metagaming yourself to be upset. Your character would have no knowledge of the other timeline of the character being awake unless they’re in the same room with you twice.

This is exactly the kind of gatekeeping I was talking about above. You have no idea what their other instance is doing or what they have agreed with their partner about pacing etc… Again, you are metagaming yourself to be upset at that, and projecting your own internal headcanon limitations of the world on their play.

You can only have five characters awake on Wolfery at the same time.

So, you want people to jump through some arbitrary hoops because they want to have the same character in multiple timelines with different people while they’re spending their precious hours of their very real life on this platform and it bothers you that they have a different way to enjoy their time here. You want to force people to change their characters descriptions just to please you. That just sounds petty to me.

None of that response did really much to answer my questions… Or if there was an answer, I couldn’t pick it up… Just cemented my hunch that you want people to only enjoy their RL time on here in very distinct ways that doesn’t offend your own RP sensibilities due to OOC knowledge. To the point that you want to call for their way to enjoy their time to be banned.

From a builder in charge of the game environment… I’m disappointed.

Now that is perfectly fair. But, it’s also not cool to judge everyone else by that experience alone (to the point of calling for rule changes). I don’t think anything in the game is forcing you to interact with anyone. You can always just ignore the approaches that you don’t find worth engaging in. (Hell, more than half the time I’ve tried to interact with you in-world it’s gone completely ignored. And that’s perfectly fair, you don’t owe me anything.)
The way the platform works, you have no way to know how many different interactions any of the people around you are having in parallel at any given time in general… There’s no reason someone playing two clone instances should have any less coherent replies than anyone else with multiple awake characters. Other than you having a bias against them.

(To that end, if this became a rule, I would happily continue enjoying my time like I have while ignoring it and if it were to lead to some moderation actions due to me enjoying my time with people in the community without harming anyone, that would be the end of Wolfery for me.)

#6

Wolfery is built on having multiple alts per account. (Up to 60 if you’re even a supporter) I think the ‘no object rule’ was set out to curb some metagaming people find bothersome. Even alting, I do agree does present some uncomfortable metagaming sometimes, it is hard to set out hard and fast rules for ‘please write good’ hah. The mods can only hope to point… people in the right direction to that? And having no direct clone characters I feel is a reasonable ask of people. It can lead to some weird uncomfortable situations (That we aren’t accusing you in particular of creating). I think object characters could be written good without metagaming? I have roleplayed like… scenery before. o.o

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#7

You know, you keep calling me out on that and I just gonna stop you there. I reiterated several times that it’s my personal opinion and I never made those notes in official capacity. I never went to the team asking them to ban the alts, I never asked Acci directly about that. I have this discussion with you as a player and I share my experiences how I see them. I’m trying to explain why I find numbered people uncomfortable to interact.

You want my official position as a builder? I couldn’t care less about people and their alts. I only care that the accounts owning the publicly-visible rooms are stable. I care for get room owner not to be a throwaway. Otherwise having alts with the same name aren’t much different to me than instance rooms. There was a mechanic needed for room instancing and Accipiter added it. There’s no such mechanic for characters being in several places and people add numbers to their names, same as we had to do with the rooms before instancing.

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#8

I understand that these are personal opinions. If they were not personal opinions, I would be much more distraught. That being said…

I have very little illusion that most people would have a perfect capability to separate personal and “professional” opinions without any bias cross-contaminating the two. Furthermore, I have been in a similar position too, and despite big “in my personal opinion” type disclaimers, the authority of the position follows the person holding it - especially so when it’s so close to the context of the position that those opinions are expressed in. A person on a team expressing personal opinions implicitly has the weight and support of the team behind them, unless the team explicitly distances itself from those opinions.

That is the reason I bring that up.

#9

Is it really reasonable? Is it reasonable to essentially say that you’re allowed to play only one scene of a character’s story at the same time? How is it different if I write in my character’s description that “XYZ was a part of an evil wizard’s experiment that led to them being in two bodies at the same time, living through different timelines, but they’re not aware of that and bringing it up will lead to their existence ending in a world ending division by zero”? (Would it then be also reasonable to say that you can’t have the same character on in Wolfery and FM or F-List at the same time for example? I see it no different.)
Your character wouldn’t know any different unless it was somehow brought up IC. And assuming the clones never occupy the same space twice, how would it even come up IC without the ones being upset by it doing the metagaming?

#10

I have played literal deities here on wolfery, but mostly on other RP platforms. It is easy to fall into metagaming/godmodding, but it is as easy to not fall into it, it takes just a little bit of thinking.
Let me explain.

My character CAN be in multiple places for reasons, or they can be overly powerful but behave like normal people as well…one of my characters actively makes tea and runs a tea house and unless someone REALLY puts a lot (and I mean, a lot) of effort, then they can discover what they are, but unless there is nothing that proves that said character is what it is. So, even deities can be decent characters to deal with and less “edgy” or else.

To point to the right direction is a good start already. In the end anything can be source of metagaming (example: character never seen zombies, one appears and bites character’s friend. The character with 0 zombie knowledge cannot know that the other friend is about to turn into a zombie), so pointing people the right way to do things is correct, especially in places like Wolfery where you have different “biomes” and people that bring in their character, each of them with different lores and guidelines.

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#11

No one has addressed the OP’s concern, that they were told they couldn’t do this but others obviously are doing it.

Some consistency would be nice.

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#12

That and everyone keeps repeating “having alts is metagaming” like it’s a mantra, but nobody has explained what about it is inherently metagaming.

Also to the OP, might be useful to include what the moderator in question specifically said. Without that or a name, this is all just a bunch of wild speculation.

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#13

I’m curious also. I see people running around on Dude Guy and Twode Guy all the time, so I would find it strange that OP was disallowed from doing it. It’s my understanding from the current official rules of the realm that such an act is allowed, even if individual players have their own personal opinions on it. Maybe the mod in question was having a bad day?

I do think a discussion on whether or not Some Doe and Some Deux are allowed to exist simultaneously could be fruitful, but not in this thread.

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#14

Huh. I’m going to have to ask about the circumstances of this. We don’t usually go after ‘obvious alt characters’.

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#15

Although I’m pleased to see my question inspired a vigorous exchange, I was more concerned with the fact that I was chastised for doing the thing, but nobody else is. It feels strongly like selective enforcement. And it’s not the only time it’s happened to me.

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#16

Nobody? Hmm?

Gonna… Gonna just let this one go?