Well, when EVE hat these numbers, (mass)multiboxing was pretty rare. Magnitudes lower than today.
I don’t talk about dualboxing you own Scout or Prober. That was a thing from the beginning and I think thats pretty much okay, given the mechanics of EVE that leave you simply dead if you jump into a camp without scout, it’s not that there is a proper way to fight yourself through.
But, what I meant was that I am convinced that EVE could reach by far higher numbers explicitly without massmultiboxing, if it would be limted to dual or at most tripleboxing (one could say, you have 3 pilots on your account, let us use them all at once but forbid logging in different accounts). So everyone could have his own little support alt, but nobody could control 10, 15, 20 ships at once. I personally think thats a better game environment that could lead to a higher attractivity of the game as a whole.
Whoever, I don’t have the illusion that CCP might be willing to take that risk if they can have the easy money of massmultiboxing right now.
Actually, as I remember it, back then it was estimated the average was 5 accounts. Where as it is now estimated at 3 (the 3 been highly disputed though, but also defended with the high amount of people just playing on 1 alpha account).
Then you remember wrong. The average back in 2009 way below 2 accounts, somewhat around 1.4 or 1.5. Which meant, the overwhelming number of players had 1 account, many had 2 accounts and a tiny minority had more than 2 accounts. Which reflects exactly my personal experiences during that time.
Even 2013 5 accounts wasn’t the average. It probably isn’t even now. Talking about Omegas of course that you actually can log in at the same time.
CCPs stats fool us a bit, because they don’t tell us if Alpha Accounts are inlcuded in their stats. That would be a completely worthless statistic when it comes to multiboxing, since you cannot multibox Alphas. I play the game on 2 Omegas for the last 10 years but I probably have like 10 accounts total which contain only disposable Alphas for seeding holes or scouting a remote system by just logging in there. Another thing I consider hurtful for the game, but it’s easily doable and convenient, so many people do it.
Well if it is 3 now including alphas, then it is way higher when you take the alphas out.
Found 2 posts referencing a dev blog saying 2013 had 2.6 and 2.51 (not a typo, the numbers do mismatch 2.51 = 2.5 not 2.6), sadly neither actually provided a quote or a link to the dev blog. Now this isn’t 2009, but still. The historic fact high player counts were still inclusive multiboxing, so its a fact these numbers can be reached by Eve Online without banning multiboxing.
EDIT: Accidental old double quote of the same part.
I think it’s higher than that now. I don’t recall the exact number but I seem to remember a separate thread/post in the forums that referenced an average account number in the 3-ish range (and this may have been a few years old).
If you count all accounts, means Omegas + Alphas from players that also have Omegas + Alphas only you will get a very high total account number, but since a large part of them are rarely used 1-Account-Alphas, the average might go down.
If you count in only Omegas (which are nessessary to multibox) and completely ignore Alphas, the average will also go down since you now have a lot lower number of total accounts considered.
Only if you count Omegas + Alphas of the same players that also have Omegas, you will have a large number of Accounts and still a pretty high average.
And we don’t know what it is that CCP counts. But what we know is: Alphas shouldn’t be considered when looking at a “(mass)multiboxing issue”, since they don’t contribute to it.
Since I am a Corp CEO/Leadership of smal/midsize Corps for more than 10 years now and also in Alliance Leadership of a small/midsize Alliance I get a rough estimate how many Omegas (to multibox) the average member has. And since we are talking about some hundred people I dare to believe that reflects the EVE population somewhat accurate. From this I can tell you that the absolute Majority of all those hundreds of people I know or knew over the years have somewhere between 2 and 3 Omegas subbed. Plus some Alpha Alt Accounts that can be ignored when considering a multiboxing-scenario. Some have 4-5 Omegas running (less than 20%) and very very few (below 3%) have more than 5 Omegas.
And that being said, a Multiboxing Restriction at like “3 Chars at the same time” wouldn’t even be noticable for like 95% of the players, but it would of course cut off the additional income from those 5%'s additional Omegas. No idea how many total Omega Accounts that would be, still a few thousands I would think. The big question is: Would an EVE that is designed less for multiboxing benefits be more attractive so these few thousand additional omega accounts from mass-multiboxing (above 3 chars at the same time) could be offsett in an acceptable timeframe and maybe surpassed by more below-3-Omega players that the game could gain and keep over time if the gameplay experience would be a better one?
As @Syzygium wrote already, you got this wrong. It was < 2.
And second, number of accounts doesn’t neccessarily mean that they can be logged/multiboxed at the same time.
I have 30 alpha accounts besides my omegas for various reasons, mostly the free omega event to wreak havoc in Jita with thrashers for example. But I cannot multibox them.