Care to elaborate why not?

It's only cheating if more than one account is used in the same game. How would it be cheating otherwise?

Well it encourages lesser play. A common problem before the point system was that people would play too many games at a time and tend to abandon the ones in which they didn't have any initial success.

It has been asked before by a well known player of this site some weeks before and answer was clearly no...

I don't think there will be place for argument in this issue.

oh, we can still argue about it!

Jacob: You can argue about anything. Why you'd bother, I don't know. Personally, I'm still trying to get everyone on this site to revert to cannibalism, but they're not listening to my arguments (I think they're just jealous because they lost the debate).

@goldfinger (yes I'm too lazy to type it in 1337): It's technically allowed, but you're not supposed to.

Actually, it is NOT technically allowed. If found out, one of the accounts will be banned. Chrisp lays it out. It prevents inexperienced players from getting in too many games and reducing play quality further than it already is by having players who haven't even bothered to read all the rules.

It isnt exactly "cheating", but it will still get you in deep shit and give you a bad rep.

Yea what drag said.

@aoe - No its not allowed.
1< Number of accounts = cheating = BAN

Still No.

We just cannot allow it- the motive behind it is shady, and the process being allowed would me we would have to log all legitimate multis and then keep on checking etc.etc. All of which is not something that is reasonable to do when people could be improving the site for everyone.

why not allow a user to have multiple "player accounts"
would be a new feature, though i am not sure if it is really needed

So, one pool of points ad the system could automatically restrict to only one player account in a given game... Interesting idea. Of course, for the stabber versus loyal ally approach to hold up, you'd have to keep them from being connected together via an account screen. Probably too much work for right now, but it is an interesting concept.

@goldfinger, playing some games as a rock solid ally and others as a crazy fool whilst using one account will get you a reputation as being hard to judge, never a terrible thing to have. Particularly if you play poker. Also people will rarely remember how each and every player in their games played so building a rep is hard anyway.

I think the easier solution is anonymous games.

"I think the easier solution is anonymous games."

QFT. I wonder why we don't have that.

On another note, I know that this argument will never win, but I disagree with the rule. I did this about 6 months ago (The other account is John.Galt if you want to ban it.) when I was just starting on this site and did not know that it was illegal. I wanted to play more games, and didn't have enough points to join them. So I created a new account. I also didn't particularly care for the fact that I used my real name in my account name.

But I'm digressing. My point is that I have never gone CD, except for one game (I went to my grandmother's house, who, unbeknownst to me, no longer has internet, so I couldn't ask for a pause. I also had 16 SCs at the time I went CD and the person who took over went on to win it. So all in all not that bad. Although I wish I had the win on my record.) was experienced with the game before I came to this site, and just wanted to play more games. This may or may not be the exception rather than the rule, but I don't think that we should assume that people new to the site are new to diplomacy. Or that they will go CD.

In clarification, I finished all my games (5, including a failed live one) on that account and quit when I figured out it was illegal. (About 5 months ago)

Whoops. That's me up there. I logged on to my old account to make sure that I had the name right still. I guess it messed up the cookie.

Suspicion of multiaccounting:

http://phpdiplomacy.net/profile.php?userID=16172
http://phpdiplomacy.net/profile.php?userID=15067

uups, was meant as a separate thread

I agree. Something smells about SoroSuub1

To do anonymous games we'd need a perfect, constantly running meta-gaming and multi-accounting detector.

Many multi's and meta's are still discovered much earlier by the players than the mods, so anonymous games would make it harder (if not impossible) to track down.

I suppose that's true. I can't really think of a way of solving that problem. :-(