The End of Cheating in Utopia
	Cheating runs rampant throughout Utopia. However, cheating can be stopped. It's just a matter of understanding what type of cheating is occurring and how to stop it. Below is a list of ways people are cheating at Utopia and how each of these cheats can be stopped cold. Making the game fair for honest players is a necessity for the continued success of Utopia.
Make multiple accounts - make multiple accounts and attack with them. Have a main account and 5 or 6 secondary accounts you use to run attacks from. Too time consuming to really build these way up but you can do tremendous damage to an opponent by just attacking him from several accounts with multiple raze accounts.
Solution: Utopia should give players an address to report multis too. The player should send the provinces he's accusing of being a multi along with evidence (an html page with the attacks, theft, or spells from multiple provinces should do). Echelon takes a look at the evidence and if it appears to be valid they check the account's IP addresses. If they are the same, the provinces will be deleted. This allows for families to play Utopia from the same computer as long as they don't attack the same targets.
Thief provinces - Make a province to use as a spy province. It saves you stealth and can scout targets for you. Also used to arson homes of your enemies. No large player can keep up with the thieves of a small elf province who does nothing but build elf lords and thieves every day. Thief provinces are very easy to build and maintain and some players make dozens of these small thief accounts to destroy their enemies with arson.
Solution: See above. If you catch a thief province and then the main province comes through and land grabs you, you should be able to report it. Furthermore, if you get burned by several thief accounts, one after the other, you should be able to report and have them deleted if they are multis. Also the base ratio for thief operations should be 750 acres. So if you have 200 acres and 3000 thieves your ratio is 4 to 1, not 15 to 1. On the other hand if you have 7500 thieves and 750 acres, you still have a 10 to 1 ratio. This will make it too time consuming for people to make tons of multi thief provinces to burn people down, however it will allow thief specialists to still thrive.
Land farms - At the beginning of the game, make an account, explore like crazy, when the game starts, take the acres from your main account. You can also build account with defense and release troops at some point and then take the land. This really isn't much of a good tactic any more because of diminished returns make it useful only at the start of the game. Plus, there are so many of them at the start of the game, they are easy to find.
Solution: Diminished returns makes land farms useless beyond the early part of the game. If exploring was not permitted while provinces were under protection that would further reduce the number of land farms although it wouldn't eliminate them.
Cash farms - Build a province. Max out on mines and make sure you have a ton of employed peasants. Build enough defense to discourage people from attacking. You can even build up thieves and release them when you want to rob banks. Build several of them and switch to different targets each day. This can be a little time consuming at first and the provinces will eventually run dry as others discover them, but they are relatively low maintenance and can get you far out ahead of the pack.
Solution: Drop rob banks. That will prevent cash farming. There are several ways to make up the income. Building costs can be lowered, mines can be made more effective, elite costs can be dropped, etc.
Feeders - Build 70 or 80 accounts. All you need to remember is a user name and a password. Put in a name and a bogus email address (they'll give you the option to change it). This is somewhat time consuming, it can take 2 or 3 hours to make all those accounts. But, you can get as many as 2 or 3 accounts on the same kingdom. I had some friends who did this in an effort to all get on the same kingdom and they managed to get 4 accounts on the same kingdom. But let's say you get 2 or 3 on the same kingdom. Basically make the other two into large cash, large population factories for you. You have your main account and then these other accounts send tons of soldiers and gold to you every day. You end up becoming a huge province and they up being two small to mid-size provinces on your kingdom. As a twist on this, I've heard of a single province used as a cash storehouse. The other provinces pump cash into that one province and then it's stolen by an off island multi or ally.
Solution: Put aid sent in the paper. Then these anonymous donations from province A to province B will be exposed not only to the cheaters kingdom but to anyone who reads their paper. If this occurs too frequently the accounts can be reported as multis and if Echelon finds that they have the same IP address they can be deleted.
Trading accounts and making huge numbers of accounts - In an effort to get on their friend's kingdoms many people are trading accounts and making dozens, even hundreds of accounts in an attempt to get on the same kingdom as a friend. Some would argue (including me) that you should be able to pick the people you want to play with anyway. But, this is still a violation of the rules. Solution: Expand the registration process. Ask for 3 or 4 times more information. That will increase the time it takes to create new accounts from 2 minutes to 10 to 15 minutes. That will make it much more impractical to create huge numbers of accounts. Require that much more information be given at the start of the next round to validate the account. Even if you simply asked for the customer's real name to validate the account at the start of the next round, that would make a big difference. On the other hand, you could just allow people to play where they want and this problem would go away as well.
Most people assume that we just have to live with cheating. But as you can see, that's not true. If Echelon is willing to make a few changes they can cut the cheating down to a minimum.
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