Mass cloaky camper

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
101

He’s got 75 toons with 25 accounts. A human being has a limit to how many screens he can simultaneously manage at one time. Everyone also has a limit to how much they can play in a day (at the very least… we all have to sleep sometime).

Even if you were capable of actively playing 25 instances of Eve at once without breaking the EULA (something I cannot actually imagine… but let’s say it can happen)… that’s 25 TOONS. If you maximize your isk using 50 toons in total (switching which are logging in to manage manufacturing/PI/invention/ratting/whatever else you do to earn isk) over the 5 hours a day you play EVE… that means you have 25 toons that you do not have the capacity to use to make isk… because any time you use for them would be taking away time from another toon doing the SAME ACTIVITY.

If that activity were invention… you as a player would spend an hour on invention with one toon or an hour with another… you aren’t engaging in an alternative activity. It’s like saying the opportunity cost for watching TV shows on one TV would be not watching TV shows on a different TV.

I’m viewing the player’s time as finite.
I’m viewing the player’s “multitasking ability” as finite as well.

That means each player has a limited amount of capacity… expressed as number of sessions able to be simultaneously managed multiplied by their available game time.

AFK play is outside of that capacity. If the player is sleeping and logged in… he’s not using capacity. Any opportunity cost isn’t things he could do while actively logged in… it’s other things he could do while sleeping.

Look… for about five years I designed and coded programs to deal with product planning, cost accounting and industrial engineering for a decent sized manufacturing company. We determined the cost of various product lines to painstakingly annoying detail… allocating things like travel time between machines for employees, projecting breakdowns and mistakes and even allocating the amount of time janitors would have to clean up waste from the machines to the final product made.

Certain things were unlimited. But other things in product planning were fixed… the main thing being the floor space available for machines at the plants. When planning a product offering and looking at the various options to determine which things to create… that capacity limitation was critical to take into account.

There are two possible limits to capacity in EVE. First is the number of accounts/characters. Second is the time and attention a player has to spend on his accounts. With a small number of accounts… the first is often the limitation. With a large number it’s the second. And unlike a company who can hire new employees… you aren’t supposed to get other people to play your accounts in EVE.

102

All of this, because someone wrongly said it’s “free”.

Teckos, i feel deeply impressed. never underestimate the weakness of an ego that can’t stand being wrong.

1 Like
103

Try reading again.

If I opt for day trading then the opportunity cost is working and lending the $1 million.

Your still going on about capacity, but it is not the point. At the very least I can use at least some of those alts to earn ISK. It is even possible to use all of them to make ISK. That foregone ISK is the opportunity cost.

You are still wrong.

104

We do not know how many characters he has, so stop trying to add pseudo facts to try and help your case.

Cloaky camping 24/7 means he has lots of time to use those accounts.

Even if I use say 6 each day to do PI over the course of 4 days, and use the last one for mission running, or running anomalies all that ISK is forgone once I opt to camp 24/7.

EVEN IF he has 50 characters he has trained over time, and he trained 25 for AFK camping and 25 for say the PI/mission running above, there is still an opportunity cost because logging in the 25 alts for camping 24/7 means he cannot log in his alts for PI and mission running.

105

@yellow_parasol, yeah well opportunity cost is a tricky and counter intuitive thing. I am not surprised that there is some resistance to it in this instance. It is like a conditional probability, many people struggle with that one too and in the end they’ll just conclude that Prob(A|B) = Prob(B|A), but this is only true in the special case of when Prob(A) = Prob(B).

But the bottom line is that AFK camping is not “free” or without costs. This was a common debating point used, IMO, by the anti-AFK cloaking and/or anti-cloaking side as part of their argument that AFK cloaking and/or cloaking is somehow unbalanced. Over in the main AFK cloaking thread @Mike_Voidstar tried this approach, but dropped it when I pointed to the opportunity costs involved.

It is on par with the claims, “cloaking is an I win button”. You win what? You cloak and you get…ISK? Minerals? Nice juicy purple loot? Extra SP? If I cloak and walk away from the computer I get? Answer: nothing. I get nothing in game. I might get some subjective utility by knowing I might be having an influence on you in terms of your PvE, or I might be hoping to lure out an foolish and imprudent carebear, but even the latter is not a guarantee, and the former only works if the players effected do not find a way to continue on doing their PvE.

Anti-AFK cloaking/anti-cloaking is usually full of over-blown and ridiculous rhetoric and the mental gymnastics simple questions like “How do you know there is an AFK cloaker in system?” elicit can be rather amusing up to a point.

3 Likes
106

You’re still treating the character as if it were a real person. The player is the person. The character doesn’t suffer an opportunity cost… the player does. If an action is completely AFK and requires zero input from the player… it’s not mutually exclusive with actions that require input.

If you’re playing 5 accounts and can’t handle any more due to your ability to play multiple accounts:

Playing another account actively can’t be done while still playing the 5 you’re managing.
But AFK camping IS possible while still playing the other 5 actively.

Because of that they aren’t mutually exclusive… which eliminates them as opportunity costs for each other (but only at the point you reach capacity).

For the investment example:

Working a paying job is an opportunity cost for daytrading and vice versa.
The investment of a million dollars and daytrading with a million dollars are only opportunity costs for each other until you reach the limit of you investment capacity (by this I mean the most you can find investments for)

If there are only 24 million dollars worth of investment opportunities and you have 25 million dollars… the investment option and daytrading are not opportunity costs for each other… because they are no longer mutually exclusive. YOU CAN DO BOTH without giving up the other.

In the real world… there are usually other investment opportunities. But even there you qualify opportunity cost is the one you’d have to give up. If you had investements and the best paid 10% while the 25th paid 3%… (a million dollars each)… you don’t use the 10% investment as the cost when you decide if you want to day-trade with a million dollars or not. You use the one you’d be giving up… the 3% investment.

107

We also don’t know if he has 50 accounts and uses only 25 of them for camping.

The point is that once you hit capacity, the “extra” accounts used for camping don’t have an opportunity cost because the player is already “maxed out” with the characters he’s using to actively play the game.

The only alternatives for those accounts are AFK activities… because capacity is exhausted.

This is the reality of planning what products to run in a manufacturing plant… you have real limitations which in turn impact the maximization of projected profit. If I’ve calculated my optimal layout for my plant and I’ve got 10 sq feet of floor space left over near a wall… I may decide to put some vending machines there to earn a bit extra. The opportunity cost for those vending machines is NOT the cost of putting an entire production line in place that takes up 3000 square feet of space… because I’m already optimized on the manufacturing side and I only have 10 feet to work with. The alternatives would be stuff like a free coffee station. The 3000 square foot production line would have been an opportunity cost for the other production lines… not for the vending machines.

108

LOL I just logged in and saw this is still going…what happened to the Quafe and exotic dancers? Lena just take a deep breath. Whether you’re intending to or not you keep twisting the concept of opportunity cost to fit your argument. That only works in courtrooms for ill defined laws. Economic principals are pretty well defined and not subject to twisting.

109

It doesn’t matter. For the totalitarian mind, everything he disagrees with is an opinion.

Maybe more people should take a look at this, because it applies, at least in shades, throughout the different people. You will find similar behaviour, as written in this post, mostly - if not exclusively - from one easily identifiable group of people. I kid you not. I’m looking at this for a while now. Years, actually.

1 Like
110

i will flag my post now, to have an isd decide if the above link, which i use to explain the uselessness of these kind of discussions, is okay. scrapped it myself.

Just in case, here are the points.

111

Really, so when I write,

Even if I use say 6 each day to do PI over the course of 4 days, and use the last one for mission running, or running anomalies all that ISK is forgone once I opt to camp 24/7.

I am quite clearly referencing myself, as the player…incurring the opportunity costs…not the character. This is also the case in the post you quote. I kept using ‘I’ as in me…the player. I incur the opportunity cost. I incur an opportunity cost if I elect to log in a camping alt for the day vs. not logging him in and using another alt to earn ISK, or go roaming, or whatever.

Again, we are talking about camping 24/7 (except DT). If I am going to camp for the next 7 days it means I can’t use those accounts for anything else. So there is an opportunity cost. So lets suppose it is Sunday, just after DT and for some God forsaken reason I am up. I am looking at my alts and I go…hmmmm I could use them this next week to generate ISK, or I could go camp in XXXX Alliance because I don’t like them and I’d get a chuckle out of it.

IF I decide on camping, then the opportunity costs is the foregone ISK from that week…whatever that value is.

Now suppose I have 24 accounts and each account has 3 characters, a camper, PI alts on some accounts, invention alts on some accounts, some logistics alts (freighter/JF pilots) and anomaly runners.

Again if I chose camping for a week I cannot use the remaining characters to generate ISK. You keep banging on about “capacity”–i.e. the amount of time I have. That since I can’t do anything actively with all 25 accounts at once I am not incurring any opportunity costs.

This is still wrong. I am chosing between camping for a week.

So…

Day 1:
Log in the PI guys, do that.
Afterwards, log in the anomaly runners.

Day 2:
Log in the invention guys.
Afterwards, log in the anomaly runners.

Day 3.
Same as Day 2.

Day 4.
Same as Day 1.

Day 5.
See Day 2 or 3.

Day 6.
Don’t log in.

You get the point I hope. By camping I am precluding all or part of these options. There is an opportunity cost. That I cannot use all the accounts at once is not really relevant. Granted, maybe the opportunity cost is not 25x anomaly running on a single account…but then I never made that assertion.

Hell, some of those accounts might just be used as scouts while running anomalies–i.e. they are not used except to make it possible to view local in the surrounding systems.

I don’t care, it still entails an opportunity cost. Maybe that opportunity cost is close to zero, but the fact that he is using those accounts for one activity vs. another means there is a non-zero opportunity cost.

Look, all this means is that AFK cloaking is not “free”. That, that rhetoric is over-blown and nonsense. It doesn’t mean that AFK cloaking is awesome or not without its problems. You are not throwing out the baby with the bathwater here by saying, “Oh, hey I never considered opportunity costs, yeah AFK cloaking is not free.”

2 Likes
112

Most of the response here is from people who have obviously no clue how bad this kind of exploiting use of alt chars is for the game health.

Think about all the guys who just stop playing because of this, think about… and now tell me again its fine…

Throw away your crap arguments about using them for this kind of harassment is ok, quit your trys on telling people you are right with your minds because you are not affected by them!

Its a known fact different people have different opinions on cloaky camping in general because of their mentality, there are guys who scream “let them do what they want” and there are also the ones who scream “ban them all, afk cloak camping should be forbidden”, but still this is not the point of this thread, we still talk about mass cloaky camping!

1 Like
113

I understand what you mean very well when you talk about opportunity cost and capacity.

My point is it’s a ridiculous justification as you are trying to push it as a real detriment to a player to AFK cloak, and that’s just completely wrong.

Very rarely is a player using his time with such efficiency that your theorycrafting becomes anything other than completely negligible, so just get that argument out of here, it’s a load of rubbish.

114

It’s not that anyone is unwilling to accept an argument, it’s that the arguments are provided subjectively, based on opinion. They aren’t provided objectively, based on evidence.

If you want to claim that alts are bad for the health of the game, then make an argument to support it, that actually demonstrates it. Just declaring that as such doesn’t make it any more valid than any alternative opinion.

2 Likes
115

i just realized that we have zero proof that this person actually exists. next to all the other points, we all forgot to cover it right from the start. but it’s irrelevant in the big picture anyway, because apparently facts, evidence and rational thinking is irrelevant to them.

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116

@ISD can we get this locked now? It’s just the same, old, tired “remove afk cloakers they violate my safe spaces with psychological warfare” whining that every single one of these threads ends up at.

3 Likes
117

Asks for a discussion to be forcibly closed in a post that mocks safe spaces. :blush:

118

that’s not the same at all. linus doesn’t ask for safe space, linus asks that this thread filled with intellectual dishonesty, is to be closed. and that it simply is. plus, giving people a platform, where they abuse said platform for their intellectual dishonesty, is not a good thing at all. they only care about freedom of speech as long as it serves them and everyone else would and will get attacked when it’s the other way round.

you probably were joking, but this whole issue (not afk cloaking, but their mindsets) went way beyond a laughing matter.

119

No it didn’t mate, remember where you are. You’re discussing a video game, so there really can’t be anything going on that is beyond a laughing matter. EvE is not real. Aside from topics banned by CCP everything else is fine.

My point earlier about safe spaces was merely a small irony i noticed. He asked for the conversation to be prevented from proceeding because he did not agree with it’s content / thought it’s content had been discussed too much. Now i can only assume my passing comment has in your mind added me to “the opposition” and warrented that diatribe about intellectual dishonesty but i actually think cloaky camping is fine and have been vocal about it.

But it is a pivotal part of free speach that even idiots must be allowed to talk. It is not free if someone decides who is free and who is not.

So in closing yes i was joking, no the issue has not and will not go beyond a laughing matter. If you replace “intellectual dishonesty” with “things i disagree with” you’ll notice your post starts to make a bit more sense.

120

On the old forums ISD used to lock every single one of these threads and redirect them to their afk cloaker trash can thread.
That very same thread on these new forums is this one, so this thread really serves no purpose beyond generating more tears out of the farmbears.

Also I’m not entirely sure if you missed my " " in that post. Specifically the part you quoted was put in quotation marks for the purpose of pointing out what this thread has become.