There's been all kinds of crazy speculation about us suspending accounts which sign in from the same IP address or accounts created by the same person to play two separate characters. This is just crazy speculation: we have not done this, we have no plans to ever do it and it doesn't make any sense at all.
(I know there was a player who claimed they had two accounts, one of which was deleted an the other suspended, because it was the same person playing both: this is simply false. We don't publicly explain the private details of account suspensions or deletions but we always communicate the details explicitly to the player involved. And we almost never take any permanent action without warning the player and trying to work with them to improve the situation. If they then make up a story there's not much we can do … other than write a post like this ;)
Creating more than one character to play the game in a different way (e.g., another kind of persona, a different combination of skills, whatever) is totally fine with us. It can be fun! And, of course, playing with friends, family, roommates or whoever you like is encouraged. We do not use IP addresses for much more than diagnosing network problems: those who are saying that we will ban accounts which originate from the same IP address are just making it up. Ignore them.
However, we don't want people creating secondary accounts simply for the purpose of giving the real character an advantage they would not otherwise have or doing something which would otherwise be impossible.
So, to be explicit, this is not allowed: creating a secondary account, using the first character to give the new character the money to buy a house, having the second character buy a house and give a key to the main character and then just continuing to play the new character as one who effectively owns two houses.
I don't know all the details, but I understand that at some point last week, some guide or staff member (guides are player volunteers) said that it was ok to create a second account for the sole purpose of giving your primary account two houses. I apologize for the miscommunication and inconsistency: there's a lot going on all the time and sometimes we'll get out of sync and either not communicate everything internally or not communicate everything properly to the guides. We're always trying to improve and build better processes to discuss the ramifications of new features, but we will sometimes fail. When that happens, it's our fault and no player is going to be punished for it.
Indeed, we're not out to punish people for anything (other than the obvious: griefing, harassing and generally just trying to make life miserable for other players). And we do not just go around arbitrarily banning/suspending/deleting accounts — when we think someone is doing something they oughtn't, we proactively get in touch with them (with a question or a warning or a clarification of our policies, depending on the situation).
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All feedback is welcome, but a time-saving bit of forewarning: if you are the type inclined to make arguments of the form "A is like B and B is like C and C is like D so you can see that A and D are really just exactly the same thing …" when A and D are obviously different, you'll be wasting your time.
(I went to grad school for philosophy and *literally* spent several months —months I will never get back, mind— thinking about how if you have a heap of sand and you remove just one grain, you still have a heap of sand … and yet at some point you'll get to the last grain of sand and obviously that's not a heap. It's kind of intellectually interesting for a while, but you're not going to convince us that creating a secondary account for the sole purpose of giving your main character another house is the same thing as playing Glitch with your spouse or friend.)