On Another additional multi-accounting query. (NOTE I AM NOT DOING THIS AS RULES ARE THERE FOR A REASON)

Why is Multi Accounting any different to Alliances. If you have 2 Accounts in the same game why is this any different to Two Players agreeing at the start of the game to work together?

The reason I asked this question was because I can remember years ago playing (board based) where 3 players played two nations each or where 2 palyers playerd 3 Nations and a more experienced player played 1 to see how good they where.

Because in an alliance, the allied parties both have self-interest, and is therefore liable to diplomatic influence, which is kind of a point to the game.

The issues you are touching upon relate to Identity and the agreed social contract of playing here.

1, Alliances: when people sit down to play a board game at a friend's house and they each agree to play two countries, that is not an alliance that is a game variant which all parties have agreed to. When a multiple is created and by deception you are inflicting it on the other players in violation of the social contract of one person one country.

2. As for multiple accounts playing in different games, in this community you are allowed to hide your real identity behind various nicknames or handles such as MonkeyBrain91201 or whatever. However, herein begins the ethics of this community in that they want you to have only ONE identity regardless of what you may call it. Here, there is a point system that depends on its function there being only one account for the player and there is no option to elect not to participate in that point system.
Furthermore, while people here have strong attachments to their non-real world identity, they also use it to establish a reputation for that new identity either intentionally: you will see people say look at my games I keep my alliances, or unintentionally such as look at his posts in the forum he is an idiot.
For some it may seem like a contradiction: to allow people to hide behind identities as choosen while at the sametime allowing them only ONE identity. But as you parents may have told you, life is not fair, it is not consistent and the rules are not documented in detail for every situation...as opposed to Diplomacy which is.

For some, and for many of the youth here, it might be good and reasonable to have one identity for a while and then after an absence come back with a new identity so that the destruction that they may have caused to themselves can be more easily relegated to the past and left behind. However, that is not something that has been codified here but may come down the road either as a natural issue of being unable to enforce it, or as a matter of a policy to support the alien concepts in life of restitution/reconciliation and redemption.

Thanks for the replies.

As I said I wouldnt Multi Account as that was part of the T&Cs but just wanted to understand the rationale behind not allowing it.

Yes, one of the aims of the points system was to limit the number of games people played in at once, the rationale being that if you were more experienced you would have grasped how many games you could cope with and were thus able to choose for yourself. Before this there was a limit set in the code that stopped you playing more than a certain number of games at once (I think it was 10?).

Gods. Before the point system people used to play upwards of forty games at a time! This meant the bulk of their time was simply playing Gunboat and putting in orders and neglecting the diplomatic area of the game. This meant terrible level of play and people would just drop the games they weren't immediately doing well in.

Having just one account curbs this greatly and leaves you tied and invested to your games, so you might as well make the best of them, even in adverse situations. There have been quite a few games in which a player reduced to one centre has come back to win or draw.