+/- 90 % of players are probably using Alts so please no. I use one to scout when moving something expensive. I also use one to remote sebo at gate camps.
There’s nothing more exciting than jumping thru a gate and find yourself in a bubble surrounded by red flashy things.
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The question is why @Beast_of_Revelations and @Abaris_Fagimasad do you think that you are entitled to solo content in either lowsec, null, or WH space? I think this is really a question that you feel entitled to that content and the fact that you have to 1.) get friends or 2.) get alts to do it makes you want to come whine about it.
CCP is adding some PVE content that can be run solo and in a short amount of time, that doesn’t mean the game is, was or is becoming a game that is for solo players. I challenge you to join a lowsec group that accepts newbies/alphas (I’ve seen several on r/evejobs) and learn how lowsec works and maybe even camp a gate. Then come back and update us on how you feel about gatecamps.
It would be nice if you actually read what I wrote. If you did, you would see that my point (or one of them) was that alts CIRCUMVENT AND BREAK non-solo play, and do it ‘for free.’ It’s an exploit.
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Alts aren’t free and clearly aren’t an exploit…you clearly have no idea about this game or its mechanics as evidenced by your posts here and your thoughts on dreads in that post you made in general discussion. Please stop posting about stuff you don’t know about.
If it makes you feel superior to come on to the forums attacking people unprovoked, and hurling around insults, without even having fully-read or fully-understood the posts you are referring to, go right ahead.
As for having no idea about the game or its mechanics, neither one is rocket science. I’m not the one who has homework to do in that department.
Alts aren’t exploits in a technical sense (because CCP allows them), and anyone with a modicum of reading-comprehension ability knew I didn’t mean it in a technical sense. But yes, I maintain they are an exploit. Jumping into an alt to easily bypass a consequence of the game is an exploit, even if it is not an exploit in a technical sense.
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Does this mean that using skill injectors is an exploit too in your opinion? 
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Since you mention people complaining about gate camping, and as best I can recall the only time I hear complaining about this is for HS to LS gate camps… my responses are going to regard that particular area.
Yes, there are camps that just sit and try to hit anyone going thru and there are camps that have spotters looking for particular kinds of targets. The latter is much harder to deal with than the former as they tend to not have all pilots at the gate.
Avoiding these camps is not all that difficult as these are almost always on specific gates. Once you learn where these occur and how they operate avoiding them or breaking thru them is far simpler… no alts required.
The people that I have seen complain about them just do not understand, care to understand, or wish to acknowledge camps for what they are… wonderful content machines.
I remember a time when the Amamake gate was camped nearly 24/7, anyone paying half attention was made aware of it, the locals all were aware of it… and people still complained endlessly about it. Because going a few jumps more to get around it was just not acceptable.
No, multiboxing is a poor stand in for actual pilots; provided you have fleet-mates that can follow orders.
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Im not bragging… but I love multi boxing. Its new to me, as was Eve and the type pf game this is as well. I rarely play video games, outside of bf4 and a few sims for training.
I just stepped up to 8 accounts which Im starting to plex so Its a huge breakthru for me, Even though most days I can sit there for hours and play, I have a life outside of Eve… so its been a challenge to find the balance.
Alts help me TONS and is my way of SEEING whats ahead, lol when I use one. I still get lazy sometimes and will get SB’d on a gate but I dont care… lol its just a shuttle.
If you couldnt use Alt accounts, I would find it more difficult to grasp the different angles Eve has to offer. Setting up miners, haulers, spies, mission runners or ratters, and a few pvp capable chars, for me, is ideal. Everyone does pi, so all my chars make me isk, which contribute overall. Sure I can plex from one account, IF I did certain things, and HAD the skills and other investments in place.
Gate camping with alts… is pretty fun. Ive recently been debating on setting up a high sec sting with gankers, and a hauler. Without alts, I maybe, wouldnt STILL be playing Eve actually. With SC taking off, its pretty difficult to dedicate to Eve only now… Though I rarely play SC, Its something I already invested in.
I couldnt say having alts would or should be a requirement, but its a QOL thing if you ask me. Its makes its faster, easier, and a lil more safe when you have 6 alts cloaked, watching… watching everyday.
Nice thing is you can watch a gate, x 6, and have a video recorder running all day and get back from work and watch it all to note the traffic taking place. just one random example, maybe useless to some… but to me, its invaluable to have alt accounts. To make it easy to manage, I made them their own corps and thru them all in there just so they can easily trade, share isk wallets, corp hangers. etc.
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There’s a workaround for most things, which adds an element of discovery and thoughtfulness to what would otherwise be a very repetitive game.
Anything that adds a ‘restriction’ but affords an opportunity for invention can only add value. It’s all down to how the player wants to percieve it, whether it’s a brick wall or a challenge.
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IMHO Gate camps in this game are a sort of necessary thing. As far as their PvP value goes its kinda “meh” at best.
In my past I lived in LS for quite a long while very close to one of the more popular pipelines so we gate camped quite a bit. This taught me quite a lot about both sides of the coin. It is indeed very easy to get baited and wiped while gate camping due to its nature. It also taught me how to fly through gate camps and pass right by them. The only ones that still get me are the smartbomb ones where my angle of approach is within smartbomb range or there are multiple smartbombers, and I never fly straight gate to gate or station to gate.
Back to topic of gate camp pvp value. The reason I think its unfortunately kinda necessary here is because this game has very limited actual PvP tactics and strategies. There are either limited or nonexistent LOS mechanics for example where they should be. Limited or nonexistant collisions, for another example you can shoot your turrets right through your fleet to hit opponents while flying in a blob, etc.
The reason always given for this is that this will bring up too many calculations and the mass pvp battles will not be possible. Which is true. If you have over 1k players/ships fighting in same system, same part of the system, things do bog down.
However, I am not so sure this this the right approach. Dumbing down the game, automating functions, limiting mechanics, tactics and strategies for the sake of these huge blobs, large parts of which is possible only cause of NS botting or cheese of one sort or another, is not a good thing.
We need more advanced, active play and skill mechanics, not less of them.
So unfortunately, gate camps happen to be one of the few available tactics here due to lack of them in other areas of combat.
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@Black_Pedro, @Beast_of_Revelations, @Estuary_Algaert, @Imustbecomfused, @Mortlake, and @Fluffy_Moe:
Thank you all for your thoughtful replies. I underestimated the importance of gates as essentially the only real choke points in all of New Eden, making combat around them both inevitable and required in one form or another.
I understand that EVE is specifically designed to encourage people to play together in fleets and corporations, but CCP has unequivocally and repeatedly stated that solo players make up a not-insignificant portion of the community and that the developers explicitly want to make sure that those players continue to play the gamd in whatever way they see fit. Now, if you’d like to fly to Iceland and tell CCP in person that they are liars, I would support you in that, but otherwise you probably shouldn’t take up your misunderstanding of the official developers’ position on the game with me.
I think there are too many people on these forums who for one reason or another get extremely defensive and instantly assume anyone whose opinion on a massively complex and multi-faceted sandbox game differs from theirs is simply entitled or stupid. It definitely seems to be the de facto response to every single post in the forums, no matter what the opinion may be, so it’s hard to take your comments as anything more than the generic calling-card of the salty forum poster.
From what I’ve read elsewhere in the forums, a big reason CCP integrated the ability to extract and sell skills as well as trade characters for ISK was simply to cut down on the amount of illegal real-world trading going in these areas by creating a legitimate option. So there are certainly some features which maybe in CCP’s perfect world wouldn’t exist but which are inevitable in one form or another.
But skill injectors, unlike multiboxing, can work completely using only a single account or even a single character simply exchanging their skill time for ISK or vice versa on the open market. Does it add a layer of asymmetrical pay-to-win possibilities? Of course. But only in the way that a player-run economy based on real-world time and real-world money is fundamentally going to carry over all the systemic inequalities of capitalism.
Gate-camping and multiboxing, on the other hand, are not unregulated economic factors and are rather specific methods of playing the game which CCP could completely alter or tweak any time they see fit.
The reality of it is, you have stated that you have no personal experience with gate camps (reading a bunch of threads by entitled kids who ragequit does not qualify you to discuss this subject with any degree of competence), and none of your posts in this thread have actually offered any concrete suggestions as to how you would envision improvements around gate camp mechanics. I think you need to first address both of these points - the first, by going out and getting a few dozen ships blown up; the second, by providing concrete ideas based on your experience with the first. Only then is any serious discussion with you possible. Before that, it’s just a whole lot of vapor.
Fact is, gate camps are not a show stopper for most solo players. There are many ships in this game that are exceedingly good at avoiding gate camp mechanics (for instance cov ops, blockade runners, strategic cruisers, and interceptors, to name a few). You most emphatically do not need alts to avoid gate camps.
And they do add tremendous value (I’m speaking here as someone who has gotten caught in gate camps plenty of times but hasn’t camped anyone ever) - controlling choke points is a natural and desirable phenomenon in warfare, whether in games or in real life. Even the ancient Greeks knew this - think back all the way to Thermopylae.
See I think this is your mistake. The developers do want to provide content to solo players, but that doesn’t mean that playing with friends/alts can always be replaced with solo play. My salty, bitter attitude to this stuff comes from my experience, I have pvp’d in all areas of space and am quiet familiar with these mechanics that you have just read about and deemed unfair. If you look me up on zkill about 25% of my kills are solo, so I know about flying solo.
^This, so much this.
One aspect of gate camping and the solo player no one has touched on, OP, is how the gate camp (a regularly run gate camp) can be used to the advantage of a solo player, in the “know”.
When I lived in null a while ago, I was with a corp that ran a regular gate camp, to defend the system we lived in. We had scouts out, “eyes” watching for enemies, and we would prepare accordingly, sometimes either docking up or reshipping or the pve contingent would be called upon to supplement the gate crew, depending upon the intel provided by the “eyes”.
Now, if you are a solo player, being chased by “baddies” wanting to “splode” your ship, and you know of a regularly run gate camp not affiliated with “your” baddies, nearby, you can take a chance on running that camp, in the hope the campers will hold fire on you to engage whatever you got following you.
You have to make a judgement call, just like the the camp crew. But, they might let you go, and save their resources for the ships following you.
This is where the phrase situational awareness is expanded on. Most times situational awareness refers to what is in system with you; but sometimes, it can refer to out of system as well.
Regular analysis of the ingame map statistics and zkill can enhance your understanding of the nuances of travelling as a solo player.
Some of my favorite memories of EVE are of being chased, and getting away. Telling stories of gate camps you survived is, to my mind, one of the better aspects of EVE.
And, in all my years of playing EVE, I have only once used an alt to scout a route to nullsec. Using an alt to scout is a choice, it’s not the only choice.
Frankly, flying blind provides a ton of thrills, and surviving gate camps are some of my fondest memories of EVE.
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I thought of a topic to write about and started it but never finished it, it was a series of writings following the life of a female cadet in the Caldari Navy who was a gate operator. I should pick that back up again…
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Come to think of it …
Gate camping adds more value to the game …
… in a single session …
… than 99.9% of all miners and mission runners throughout their entire EVE time.
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Hardly. Who would we gank/hunt? 
Correct me if I’m wrong, but :-
No miners = no ores, ices or gasses (i.e. raw materials),
No raw materials = no ships,
No ships = no gankers and nothing for them to gank anyway.
Final result of the above-quoted attitude = no game to which value can be added in the first place.
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Sure, that is true. Changes nothing, though.
Most miners are not PvPers. They are, at best, also PvErs. Sure, PvPing miners exist as well, there is no doubt about that, but the vast majority are pretty useless for adding actual value to the game.
They mine ore.
They sell it, or maybe build stuff.
Someone else takes it and actually does something with it, adding actual value to the game.
Now, the thing is, if suddenly every miner left the game we would at first not even notice. There is enough stock out there to last for a while and, except maybe gankers, barely anyone would notice the absense of these people, because they never really play anyway. With the exception of a few smart ones, of course.
The current crop of miners are a waste of energy. If CCP manages to introduce proper scarcity, they will hopefully eventually be replaced by people who actually want to play this game, instead of watching porn or netflix while waiting for the hold to fill.
The miners, as we have now, add nothing to this game at all. They are only slaves/sitting ducks providing minerals for others to actually make something noteworthy.
And please avoid the mistake of thinking that PvPers would not mine.
We do everything, unlike PvErs, who only ever PvE.
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Do you want to mine ? Or is it a chore that you’d rather have done by others, so you can get on with your PvP life ?
Basically, I just don’t understand the depth of your hatred for those who don’t PvP - what are they doing that hurts you so much personally
?