So I'll toss some things out:
- Your stats don't update until you land. That means you can use .score <playername> and determine whether or not they're still in the air.
- If you know the plane's last altitude, you can usually and fairly accurately determine whether they'll climb or cruise to their next destination.
- Using each plane's approximate cruise speed and climb speeds (which, coincidentally, most planes climb at the same ground speed track), you can create a search area. If you know the vector the aircraft is most likely headed on, you can reduce this search area by approximately 75-85%.
- Couple the above with knowing the aircraft type, and you can VERY easily locate most players.
- You can make this even more effective by using actual search patterns within a grid.
- This was also achievable prior to the system kill messages update by simply having a computer or phone pulled up with the player's stats. Refreshing the page would let you know who they killed and what plane they were in.
It's VERY easy to locate players without other accounts. I've said it once and I'll say it again: none of us have concurrent multiple accounts logged on. There's no need. It's super easy to locate anyone using the above. Why risk bannable behavior when you can pinpoint with > 95% probability where someone is, if you wished, with a single account?
Am I saying we target players? Nope. I'm simply saying that ignorance creates more ignorance. People thinking you need multiple accounts to track someone are paranoid as hell. We commonly have running bets on comms if we can ID who a player is or where they'll pop out at and we're more often than not spot-on, because it's super easy to allow the above to become second nature and part of SA once you get the hang of it.
I've named my accounts all "Skyyr/SkyyrII/SkyyrIII" so it's both obvious who I am and it's obvious that I'm not logging them on concurrently. Almost everyone else in our squad with multiple accounts uses the same naming convention, so it's easily to show we're not logging on concurrently.
The multiple accounts were made, ironically, because of complaints and accusations from players like Violator. We switch sides constantly for fights and so we were getting stuck on different countries. Players like Simon and Violator constantly screamed "cheat" when they would die because we were on different teams and accused us of reporting their position, despite the fact we weren't. So multiple accounts let us dedicate one account to each country and switch at will, together.
So before the multiple accounts, we had constant cheating allegation. Now after the multiple accounts, we have less, yet more outlandish, cheating allegations. It would be VERY obvious if we were logging them on concurrently (we're not).
I've asked Hitech to drop the timer to 1 hour or so, so that multiple accounts weren't needed. His response was: "no"
So unless Hitech says using accounts for side switches is against the rules, I'll be using them purely for that purpose.
