Ive playing for 3 months and now that im learning multiboxing i wonder if every multiboxing account that im running count as a real player in tranquility server player count?
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Player count is active server connections - so yes, multi-boxing counts as multiple players. The counter isn’t designed to report anything more sophisticated than gross volume of logged in accounts, however, CCP has been known to perform clarifying algorithms when releasing information about actual player volume over time, based on readily available metrics (shared email address across accounts, for example).
No figure will ever be perfect, as there are countless ways to be utterly anonymous on the internet.
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CCP seems to have a very good idea of which players have multiple accounts. They track these accounts carefully so that when they bad botters, they ban all their accounts. It is also clear from how CCP talks about player count that they primarily care about the number of actual unique human beings logging into Eve each day. However, the only data they make public pertain to total in-game-characters that are logged in at any moment in time - which includes multiboxers and hundreds of AFK accounts.
A few years ago, when CCP decided to ban input broadcasting, you saw a clear drop in online numbers, those were all multiboxed players (mostly miners I think) quitting.
So it means that if server status shows that there is 30,000 people connected, half of them may be multiboxing accounts?
Probably not half. But there are a lot of people in stations, doing nothing AFK.
As Xeux said, probably not half. I wouldn’t generally assume that number equals targets in space, either, since there are usually at least 3000 players docked up in Jita/Perimeter doing station trading and spamming scams in local, with smaller but still notable numbers doing the same at other major trade hubs in high sec.
The map provides us with a good indicator of targets in space. You can actually look at “average players in space in the last 30 minutes” for every system. You can also get the total number of docked players. Some programmer could probably pull the raw data out of CCP’s database and track it over time. My guess: at least half of the logged in number of players is docked.
Yeah, it wouldn’t really surprise me if at any given moment roughly half of logged in accounts are spinning in station - AFK or active. I know I spend a lot more time in dock than in space, between sorting loot for sale, buying/building ammo, waiting for my cohort to be ready to roll out, working on ship fits/skillplans, etc.
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