I should clarify my stance on ringers. I actually don't really have a problem with somebody taking his uber-geared T11 tank to DHK and helping a bunch of newer players stomp out a bunch of dragons. One of the pleasures of SoD is going back to content that used to pwn you and absolutely destroy it. I myself have killed over 10,000 orcs in eastern wastes largely because of this. For the same reason, I generally don't support the idea to scale back a ringer's power if brought into a lower tiered zone, or to engage a certain lower-tiered mob. It reduces to nothing the hard work you've put in to progress your character. This would be fine if SoD wasn't based around character progression, but that's not the case.
What I do have a problem with are old accounts that never cycle out of the game, years after the original players have left the game. Oeovoilo was an old guildmate of mine who left the game a couple of years ago. Since a few people had his account information, that info has been shared further and he's since been used for countless JBs and Emps over the years. Both of these buffs last three hours+ and give players a tremendous boost in capability. How much experience has been gained serverwide as a result of this buffbot, and how much has that additional capability for numerous years altered the relation of player progression against the game itself?
People have called the use of inactive accounts like these "victimless crimes," as though to imply that to do something about it would be to target a real person who's innocent of wrongdoing. But that person left the game ages ago, so "victim" is not a term that can apply. What remains is his soulless avatar, who is now only a tool that other players use to progress.
If there was nothing wrong with the use of these tools, then I would simply recommend that the devs set up a few NPCs in each city to give players whatever buffs they want whenever they want. At least that way, the capability to maximize a character's power would apply to everyone equally, not just the people who've lucked into still having the account information of a player long-gone.
As other posters have pointed out, my proposed solution to the issue of inactive accounts may not be technically feasible, although I wonder why GMs administer IP bans if IP identification serves no purpose.
Here is another idea to tackle the problem:
e-mail each player every six months, and ask them to confirm their account is currently active. If a player doesn't respond or responds in the negative, that account is suspected until further notice.
In any of these instances, a problem arises, it has taken some of us since Ikisith's release (almost two years ago) to get where we are today, and another 1-2 months of strictly backgearing is a nauseating thought. If we didn't have access to retired players (or "ringers" to the rest of the server) people would quit and we would fall apart. Meaning no one would be where we are today for at least 1.5 years if not more, that hardly seems like a good thing for the server.
It's true that it hadn't crossed my mind that FWF's existence is dependent on inactive accounts. That isn't true of CW (although we use lots of old buffbots, particularly for SB Emps). If FWF as a guild has devoted a lot of time into a character from an inacive account and they cannot continue without him, then it seems to me that they've assumed de-facto ownership of the account. Perhaps an exception should be made for raiding toons that a longstanding guild has essentially claimed ownership of.
