Baldr wrote:
What about players who took over characters they didn’t create? Abraxas/Coolfish being played by (formally) Tatai comes to mind. Famously, the guy who got a huge number of accounts, most of which weren’t his, jailed for account sharing.
While granted, the account system has definitely seemed to resolve a lot of the issues people like the aforementioned player had relied on to succeed. It still seems as though being lax on the nuance of those rules just permits people like that to persist in spite of their overall intent. Ie., guy who got banned for account sharing, now playing on someone else’s characters— or as was implied in the OP, the use of a VPN, or hotspot to log into more than the allowed number of accounts.
Regarding people who "took over" accounts: as long as those accounts aren't being shared, then whoever bound it, owns it. If it's being shared, whoever has been sharing it and whoever it is being shared with are at risk of losing that character and all associated characters. The exact problem before this system was that it was not possible to truly say who owned what character, making it more difficult for nas to 'fairly' judge those scenarios.