Hello. Please think objectively while reading the suggestion.
I was told to duplicate my post in CSM section by a community manager, so I post it here also.
I would like to make a proposal that one person can only play on one account. I will give my arguments. In its current state, the game is weakly similar to MMOs, since the ability for one person to run several windows makes players self-sufficient, and almost completely turns off the social component of the game.
Objectively:
I have been playing for over a year and have never seen anyone looking for pilots for an ore anomaly, or to go through an abyss or an expedition. No, they just launch 2-3 windows themselves and they are self-sufficient, but also, they remain alone in this universe. They don’t need to interact with other players. The only thing that brings the pilots together is the CTA fleets (~obligatory) and roam (voluntary). I believe that removing the ability to run multiple windows would make the gameplay healthier. Recently, in Stein, I witnessed a situation when an alliance of said 2-5 alive people launched 60-80 windows, - made a fleet and drove a whole small alliance of ~30+ real active people out of the region (on papers it has 1100+ members).
Also, I recently heard about another one flaw of current ingame opportunity of multiboxing. Some people go multiboxing farm at 5-8 motherships at once. This leads to significant ISK inflation since there is an unknown number of this kind of people.
I believe that you, as I do, think that this situation is indicative of a problem in the current state of the game. And I am sure that removing the ability to run more than one window in the game will make the game much more social, players will no longer feel lonely in the crowd, and will spend more time here, and abuse of the ability to run the game in multiple windows will be eliminated.
I don’t think that that people multiboxing supercarriers is leading to inflation. First off, there are numerous groups out there hunting ratting supers. Second, I’m pretty sure a single supercarrier ratting in a system will drop the bounty multiplier after a couple hours so if someone was multiboxing several they would need more than one system per super and then they would need to protect the ESS or they would lose a significant chunk of their isk.
I’m not sure that I’d agree to the idea that one person can only play a single account, however having said this I think there possibly is some merit in placing a celling on the number of accounts that any one person could hold (maybe three?) because after a while it does get a bit silly and the point about the lack of social interaction is well made.
Again I think this is probably a fair point in terms of having a celling on the number of accounts that any one person could hold.
The difficulty that you’re going to come up against in terms of accounts is CCP.
Fundamentally EVE Online is run as a business. If someone offers them a pile of money to get an additional game account, or two or three or more, then of course they’re going to take the money.
This comes up wat too much, its getting as bad as the AFK cloaking and remove HS ganking threads. CCP will never remove multiboxing, its a huge source of revenue.
Most folks that actually play daily have 3 or more accounts, they are needed. Eve is too slow of a game to be locked into one task.
Even though I sometimes do it myself, I do agree that multiboxing is an issue. It scales up certain activities too well, especially low effort ISK and resource gathering activities like mining and ratting, making these activities much less worthwile for players with just a single account.
I do not think that low scale multiboxing is an issue, if someone wants to separate their attention between multiple ships in fleet combat, let them. And sometimes you really need a cyno alt to move around your capital ship when other players are occupied, or an alt to scout ahead on a most likely boring trip that you would not want to bother another player with.
My solution against multiboxing is not to prohibit it, but to discourage large scale multiboxing by making those activities a lot more interactive. If someone can multibox 3 accounts with only 50% efficiency while a single player can do so at 100% efficiency, I see no issues with multiboxing at all.
Yes and no. I think the ceiling should be something limited due to task management, not a hard limit set in game. An example of this is if they removed approach/orbit/keep at range auto actions and you had to manually fly in space (not saying this is a good idea, but its a good illustration of the goal). Sure, you could still have 5 alts, but you couldn’t multibox them in space as easily. So it still allows people to have cyno alts, indy alt, trader alt etc, but for in space pvp/pve, it becomes harder to manage as easily.
Mining probably wouldn’t have any affect, you’d have to change how mining works to be more active for that to happen, and as you mentioned, CCP likes it when someone has 10 mining accounts.
I agree to that point, but what about “lamps” multiboxing? Don’t know if you heard about “AKINA family” corp, where there is a guy who calls his chars “AKINAmountain00” (numbers from 1 to…the highest i saw is 89 iirc), who uses multiboxing to drop big toys. And I even saw an ad when he was offering to drop anyone for money.
I’m not against the possibility of some corp to do that thing - nah, it’s quite okay-ish, but this should imply a big network of agents, spending their game time for this, you know, hanging in space, doing nothing…when they could have been making some activities much more well-rewarding. That would be a fair price to pay for a corp - it would meet the difficulties of encouraging their people to do this.
But…since only one nerdy guy can do this…it just comes to absurd easiness. And again self-sufficiency.
There was a quite good point from Mu_ad_Diib, about placing a ceiling.
It can actually be done by the means of current game state…like, people are allowed to have 3 alts on an account. Maybe it could be played with how many of them can be run at one time (one, two?), but it is already a nice way for players to switch between activities…feel like some mining - there you go, run your miner/planetary char.
Up for ratting/escalations - go at your second char. Wanna risk your ISKs for fun - login the PVP-character. Yeah, why not. I feel supportive of that.
Also, Mu’ad Diib above has touched the revenue topic. It’s a very essential point. I’ve been thinking about it too.
And in my initial post I wanted to say that with current level of social interactivity the game is not as attractive to players as it could have been let CCP do something against multiboxing abuse.
I’m leading to the point that the income CCP presumably loses when restricts multiboxing abuse will be compensated by the amount of new people who would actually stay in the game (or get back inspired by the news) plus, on top of that we get healthier gameplay that should make the game more attractive and lead to player base growth.
I’m not stating this as ultimate truth, I don’t have the numbers to analyze and make a prediction based on maybe some kind of machine learning. But CCP has. So all I want is them to at least consider introducing some restrictions to multiboxing abuse that makes parts of game simply ridiculous imo.
Literally the worst idea I ever seen in the past years. Its not gonna happen for sure. Imagine all those people invested time, isk, real money to their alts…
