For Practice. Like on your board at home.

Some of us guys have gotten special permission from Tom to have a second account to help with board development. The purpose of this account has been strictly for board creation and testing purposes. 

However, I should think that if you shot him an e-mail and got some permission, you might be able to get one. 

[email protected]

Vunsunta wrote:

For Practice. Like on your board at home.

When you say "your board" I take that to mean that you are creating a board, in which case I fell you should have a second account to test your board. Like ratsy said, Just let Tom know  ..and be careful not to enter any rated games with your "evil twin."

NOTE: these secondary accounts some have are strictly used for new board development; they're never used for learning an existing board in private play or to improve through practice. 

Yeah. I don't think he was talking about board development, but practice.

that's why i added my comment.

Dumbot...

so that made me look at him; why's he got a fogged game achievement but no games/opponents?

I'm pretty sure you won't see any games or opponents if he plays nothing but private games with friends.

ah, that's the ticket!

..which brings us to the obvious discussion..

You say people shouldn't open another account to "practice," but there's really nothing stopping someone from doing that, or even getting caught if they have a number of e-mail accounts and they never play public games on the practice accounts.

Especially with some of these more complicated dueling maps, I don't see the harm in using a second account to figure things out or work on strategies, etc.  I do it with my own boards, though more as an effort to balance game-play as the designer, but being able to do so gives me (ostensibly unfair) practice time and insight into strategy.

I do understand the rule in that it pre-empts the temptation to cheat, but it really has no teeth and it prevents what I consider to be a reasonable feature/expectation, namely that you can practice against yourself.  Come to think of it, if members were allowed to open an easily identifiable "private-only" second account that was blocked from public play (With a Premium Membership of course ;), that would be a win/win.

I also don't see the harm in playing against yourself as practice in private games - some of our boards have steep learning curves and anything to get more people playing those would only benefit us -

i can see your arguments.

if these 2ndary accounts were able to be blocked from public play i might be convinced it's ok to have one. but until that happens, i believe they should only be used by designers for that purpose.

I guess it would be impossible to enforce, but if we had a strict naming convention for a second account, you wouldn't even have to restrict it to only private games.

I'm not sure I understand why it even matters if you have 2 accounts.  As long as they are not in games/tournaments together, who cares?

(Note - I only have one account.  My wife lets me log in as her when I need to fire up a quick 1v1 test game to see if a map is broken.  I've never told Tom about this - hopefully that's ok).

I've got a second one (called devratsy) but I've only ever used it to test my boards. I have used it quite alot though... 

Being two players in the same game is cheating.

If you cheat on yourself it doesn't matter, if you cheat on someone else then it matters. 

AFAIC If you cheat and it's a private game, it doesn't matter - but suffice it to say, if second/practice accounts were easily recognizable by all players (e.g. M57->sécøñd), what's the problem? Automatically blocking seconds from public games would probably be necessary, not so much to prevent cheating as to prevent them from accidentally joining public games.  I can't think of a good reason for this, but you could also make it such that seconds can only join private games where the primary is present.

Another cool thing about having seconds is you could play (private) team games as your own partner! AFAIC, team games on most boards require much more sophisticated tactics.  Heck, now I want thirds!

Sorry, I'm dumb these days.

AFAIC means: As far as I care? ...or ??

As far as I'm concerned - Well, now you made me type it out, ruining the whole point of using an acronym in the first place.  

Sorry m57, I'll try to keep up.