Something similar to that might help.
People have to select 'I have read and agree to the terms of use' *and* click a link 'I agree to the terms of use' when they sign up. Those Terms of use are brief enough, so 'too lazy to read' is *not an excuse...
That said... I don't think it would do any harm whatsoever to highlight the fact that owning or helping to operate more than one account is not allowed. There's opportunities to do that at the ToS sign-up page, Tutorial and in a similar style to the initial mentor CM the new players receive.
Most of the debate I am involved in with multis revolves around the "I didn't know" and could be solved with flashing lights and buzzers making it clear we're a one account only bunch of gamers :)
It'd certainly make my job a little easier as no-one could then reasonably claim "oops, who reads the ToS anyway?".
I do have a certain sympathy for the people who I genuinely believe were caught doing something they didn't realise was wrong because they hadn't taken the time to read the ToS. I've on occasion skipped the detail when reading these things in the past myself, bad man that I am... :)
From a usability standpoint, the ToU text is short, but it's a bit dense (at least on my browser). Just bolding the important points would help a bit:
Terms of Use:As to "why allow multis", many games that don't have CB's feature allowing multiple characters do allow multis (usually called "alts"). So someone coming from one of those games might very easily miss this, and might also not understand why they don't need a multi.
Given all that, I don't think incorporating it in the mainline UI is a great idea. After you see it that many times, it becomes background noise (that's why Jonathan ended up bolding the "Help!" link). Maybe a better idea would be to send an automated CM to a new user after 2 days to remind them of the ToS, and maybe a reinforcing CM after another week/month/whatever. So long as it's not the same text, of course, which would again reduce its impact.
Heh. Tell that to the Second Life players. Their ToS says:
Second Life "currency" is a limited license right available for purchase or free distribution at Linden Lab's discretion, and is not redeemable for monetary value from Linden Lab.
And then redefines "buy" and "sell" appropriately:
(a) the term "sell" means "to transfer for consideration to another user the licensed right to use Currency in accordance with the Terms of Service," (b) the term "buy" means "to receive for consideration from another user the licensed right to use Currency in accordance with the Terms of Service,"
Regardless, RL-to-game transactions over there are massive. Last month, Linden issued about L$40M net cash, which at the exchange rate of 300:1 means about US$133,000. About L$660,000 (US$2,200) was directly bought from Linden for real money. And they've already surpassed that this month.
On top of that, people buy virtual land there for US$, and pay US$ in monthly "land use fees" (essentially property taxes) on it. I haven't seen hard figures to back it up, but Linden claims that the total player-to-player transactions come to one million US$ per month. Kinda puts CB's economy in perspective.
That being said, there are very good reasons why Linden (and Jonathan) say up-front that you don't actually own the "virtual" property. Add up the total US$ of the virtual property in CB1. Without this ownership clause, Jonathan would have been liable to the players for that amount of cash when CB1 shut down.
There's a really good overview of these kinds of issues in the book Synthetic Worlds, by Edward Castranova. It's quite an eye-opener.