Some thoughts on multiaccounting in Steem Monsters and online poker.

It's been an interesting few days for discussion of Steem Monsters, with posts on potential multi-accounting strategies by holoz0r and nealmcspadden. But what caught my attention today was a comment by rentmoney on holoz0r's post.

I agree its too easy to farm cards. I come from a poker back ground where its frowned upon to have two accounts on the same online platform. If caught you run the chance of losing both accounts and what was inside them. Once I found out its not frowned upon and to an extent expected to do in the SM game types I easily seen the loop whole you have addressed in this topic.

If I remember right from previous discussions, @rentmoney came to online poker somewhat later than I did. When I started, in 2004, multiaccounting was accepted and expected in much the same way it is on Steem Monsters now. You were expected not to play two accounts at the same time, but having more than one account on the same system was something every serious player did, in order to get maximum value from promotions.

You could think of online poker skins as much like the Steem front ends now, except that each one operated its own account system. So Party Poker and Empire Poker and Multipoker all fed players into the same set of tables, but as a serious player you would have an account on each of them. You'd do the monthly play bonuses on Party and Empire, where the ROI was ridiculous in much the same way that the above posts describe for Steem Monsters, and then you would switch over to Multi and play for a percentage of your fees back for the rest of the month.

This worked pretty well for a few years. The sites had their software set up so that you could only run one of them at a time on the same computer, and Multipoker in particular increased the cap in the number of tables you could play about as fast as players were increasing their abilities. Around the end of this period 16-tabling was becoming pretty common, but we weren't into the 60-table era yet.

But while that worked pretty well for cash game players, eventually some tournament players figured out that by using multiple computers they could enter the same tournament multiple times, thus magnifying their edge over the rest of the field and making them much more likely to win. That led to the beginning of cracking down on having multiple accounts on the same system.

Later some high-stakes players used secondary accounts to pretend they were different people and disguise their stats when playing against familiar opponents, which provoked a fairly significant amount of philosophical conflict in the industry, and led to some widely variant solutions, from attempts to aggressively police one player per account rules to offering fully anonymous tables.

Currently multi-accounting is discouraged almost everywhere by active security teams who can impose harsh punishments - account cancellation and loss of funds. One of the means for this is making cashouts difficult and requiring significant identity verification for them. Cryptocurrency sites have struggled with the balance between needing those systems and valuing privacy and anonymity, and the environment we've ended up with is one where traffic has remained on the traditional sites but they will take cryptocurrency deposits and convert them to fiat balances, often with significant fees and know your customer requirements.

So what can we learn from this about Steem Monsters?

Steem Monsters is more thoroughly based in the decentralized and anonymous value system of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and as such the solutions of poker sites aren't readily available. There's currently no mechanism to ban accounts and seize cards, or to implement know your customer methods to verify identities and limit accounts to one per person.

It's unclear whether any of this is necessarily a problem, or if it is what size of a problem it would be. But any attempt to solve it must either come from within that value system or step back and re-evaluate it wholesale.

@holoz0r's theory of sealed-deck tournaments has a lot of appeal, but runs into another problem online poker has faced: gambling regulation. Steem Monsters has so far dodged this by making sure none of their prizes come with a risk, but any tournament with both a fee and a prize is immediately a legal headache in many jurisdictions.

It's a quandary, and one for which I don't have any solutions to offer. One observation I have is that part of what makes the ROI so high is that losses are essentially meaningless; play enough times and you can get any team to ten wins for the daily quest. (As I write this my mediocre Life team is 4 and 23.) Be persistent enough with a maxed team and you'll hit the highest league rewards purely on the inflationary nature of Elo rankings. If somehow losses made the rewards less likely or less rewarding, that might go a long way to addressing at least part of the issue.

Beyond that, maybe a little perspective of poker history and how a different community has dealt with this problem, even if it's one with a very different set of core values, might be useful to someone else's thinking.