Recently, I started doing a multiplayer economic game that centers on player's specialization of labor. Essentially, players have to invest into their ability to work, but if they box themselves into a corner, they can always reset their character at a financial cost.

Instead of doing that, people started making multiple accounts, and I just viewed that as an inevitability. Eve Online has a similar issue. As long as I try to curb wealth transfers between accounts, I figure it's relatively okay.

Well, one of the players took issue with it saying that people using multiple accounts is a design flaw, but, honestly, I can't think of anything I could do other than more scrutiny for new accounts. (Which is kinda pointless without a sustainable playerbase)

It brings me back to my days of Ultima Online. In that game, you gained skill for repeatedly doing an action over and over again. So players were incentivized to setup a macro program to do it for them while they were gone. UO admins responded by banning players and I always felt that was heavy-handed given that working on skills was so mind-numbingly boring.

So my question is: what is the designer's responsibility in that regard? My assumption was that players are always going to do stuff like that and there's not much point to try to stop them.