The idea would be to introduce a mining-focused minigame that allows active, singleboxers to gain a yield advantage through engagement, while still maintaining decent base yield for those who don’t actively participate in the minigame (like multiboxers, since that would be impossible).
A minigame-based system would shift part of that advantage toward skill (maybe) and attention, giving singleboxers a way to stay competitive without needing to run multiple accounts. This would also give an advantage to players who are ready to stay attentive during mining ops rather than sit on a rock while afk for half an hour.
Though, granted, this might be a very dull and annoying change to many, since mining might be seen as a very relaxing (usually) activity and a minigame which takes much of your attention could be seen as more of a nuisance than a reward. Then again… exactly this could be the reason such an addition is useful - since players who would want to gain more yield, would have the ability to do so, yet those who don’t - won’t have to participate if they don’t want to.
Why do you think you should get more for doing less?
Multiboxing is not easy, and you’d know this if you ever tried it. Running 8 Hulks and an Orca is 9 times the effort you put in, so why do you get more?
I think optional extra yield for paying attention or more actions as miner to give attentive miners an advantage would be good for the game.
While miners can scale up and multibox their own fleet, this is not something how everyone wishes to play.
I don’t think they’re saying they should get more than someone who is running 9 accounts.
I do agree with the OP that an optional way to put in more effort for more yield per account would be an improvement that makes mining worth the time for single-account miners.
Compared to someone multiboxing 9 accounts to get 9 times as much as the single account miner such a minigame could change the balance and let the multiboxer (who skips this minigame) still a big benefit over the single account miner, but for example a 5 or 6 times advantage rather than 9.
It would make it so that bots get an even bigger edge over normal players as bots don’t lose attention, can run these minigames better than players (see exploration) and don’t miss them because they got distracted.
That is not true, because minigames can easily be designed in a way that bots have problems solving. We don’t see exploration bots that scan data/relic signatures and do the hacking games for example. I also haven’t seen missionrunning bots and even abyssal-bots are a complete myth imho. No one ever was able to deliver proof of that.
And if really someone is able to create one to solve this minigame, he could not run it on a multiboxfleet because that would instantly reveal him, since no human can click this fast.
Stalling content and ideas “because someone could make a bot for it” is a bad approach, the important part is the design and the general concept of the idea. And the idea itself is good. The design can be debated upon.
We don’t see exploration bots that scan data/relic signatures and do the hacking games for example.
I only report Heron exploration runners as bots and CCP regularly sends me Bot Ban mails. Data/Relic running is the most botted profession in EVE bar none.
It’s ridiculously easy to implement randomization for the clicks and movements.
That you don’t see mission running bots or Abyssal bots firstly does not mean they aren’t there or possible. Secondly, they are probably not there or prolific because most other activities to make ISK are far less complicated. Why make an abyssal bot when you can have cheap anom farmers or explo runners that make more ISK with far less investment and risk?
Thirdly, that means that you’d have to make this minigame experience so atrocious and convoluted to ward off bots that you punish actual players trying to engage in this activity.
Sry, your whole thinking is off. Engaging in a completely optional bonus mechanic can never be “punishing”, because everyone who doesn’t like it, simply can skip it.
And the other stuff is just chasing ghosts. “Just because no one has ever seen god doesn’t mean he isn’t there…”-niveau. Yeaah.. I have yet to see any evidence for Bots running high-tier abyssals, L4 missions or data/relic exploration. Any.
And as someone who actually knows one or two things about programming AND human psychology, it’s quite funny that you think “some randomization of clicks and movements” can fool an even halfway decently detection algorithm. Or an experienced (and somewhat trained and suspicious) GM… So in the bigger picture, allowing willing and skilled people to drive up their profits by doing a really challenging mining activity, is worth far more than those nebolous botting fears.
It’s not fears of botting, it’s simply applying the typical Min-Max-thinking that’s pervasive in EVE. It’s quite easy to even automate the notification of minigame occurrences and then run them on the char that got the crit hit. Surely, neither you nor the OP want miners to run such a minigame constantly 24/7?
As said, I typically only report these young Heron scanners and CCP regularly sends me Bot Ban Confirmations. Certainly, they do not just run around and scan sites for a player
As for Abyss running: If you search for EVE Botting, there are even whole pages that advertise Abyss bots. As for exploration: Reddit - The heart of the internet
Just because you don’t want to see evidence, doesn’t mean that God isn’t there. What’s actually funny here is that I can find botting suppliers far easier than CCP dev blogs talking about the fight against botting, which was what I was actually looking for. That says a lot about this matter.
What’s funny here is that you think that CCP trains GMs or uses sophisticated algorithms. After all the hilariously poor GM quality that got dragged into the limelight over the past years, it’s exhilerating to believe that.
To go back to the actual topic: I am not per se against minigamess (better than scatter boxes). However, I am against the notion that this is an engaging and productive way to “give single boxers a competitive edge” against a group of players that know how to massively min-max the system with legal (alt char management solutions) or illegal means.
Call it “fear” or whatever you want. By far not every massmultiboxer is also botting. Most are just massmultiboxing because it simply is extremly convenient and scales very well. Bringing in opportunities that break this scheme and allow single-account miners to rival massmultiboxers in income if they learn how to solve whatever challenge that triggers this additional income is a shift into the right direction since it will change the way many many thousands of players can play the game.
That some might create a new bot that also can solve this challenge automated doesn’t change that or make it a bad decision in the big picture. And how easy this actually is and thus how widespread such bots would become is influencable by the design and complexity of the challenge. If CCP really wanted (and I am not saying they do), they could create a “minigame” that only extremely complex bots could solve and/or that would simply require an input- and decision-frequency so high, that anyone trying to multibox it would simply reveal himself because it would be humanly-impossible to do that on more than like 2 or 3 accounts at the same time. So it cannot scale up like multiboxing today can.
As for the bots you linked: simply rare exceptions, someone will always cheat. Those few bots never were a threat to the games health at a large scale. Some are caught by players, some are reported and banned, others go through undetected. Nothing really to worry about. Still no evidence that botting is the problem EVE has so any new content is blocked because “yeah but a bot could do it!”. Yes maybe it coud. And yes, some will. So what?
I didn’t say that they do or they will. I said they could. Your argument seems to be that whatever challenge you put in front of additional profits, bots will solve it. And that statement isn’t true. At least not to a degree that would justify not to implement it anyway. Mechanics can be created almost unsolvable for bots and detection methods could be so sophisticated that botters would easily be detected. Not saying CCP really wants to kill the last special bot that hard. And it isn’t even nessessary. Because if 0.01% of the servers population successfully bots over a longer perod, it plays absolutely no role in bigger picture.
Your whole premise of multiboxers without attention is as wrong as it can be. How exactly is the game automizing itself, once you open an extra client? It now needs double the attention of a single client window.
So if anything you should reconceptionalize your proposal about the extra yield going to multiboxers, as multiboxing is a core gameplay aspect of EVE online. Multiboxers are putting more effort in the game already than single boxers. They have to invest a lot more of action and attention. And also they pay more to play the game. All that effort should be honored, by giving the extra yield to them.
Multiboxers will still have massive benefits, but with an "attention minigame’ the gap can be slightly closed.
Say an attentive miner can increase yield by 50%, while a multiboxer spends too much attention on multiboxing to benefit from such an optional boost.
The multiboxer still has X/1.5 more yield than an attentive singleboxer where X is their number of accounts, which is always going to be greater than 1 for multiboxing.
This means it’s still a big benefit to multibox, but gives solo players a reason to spend time mining.
Mining currently is so easily multiboxed that multiboxers have let the payout per account drop to very low levels compared to other activities that are less easily multiboxed. A bonus for attentive miners would bring the payout per account to more equal levels.
for the same reasons the original devs implemented mechanics like “stacking penalty” and other “diminishing returns” systems. It’s called balance. “more of the same” shouldn’t just give linear benefits.
And it’s nessessary to keep the game attractive because if a new player has to decide if he stays or leaves for another game, the idea of being able to “compete” even with crazy rich veterans at least somehow if you are willing to put more skill into it (does NOT mean: “buy more accounts!!!111!11”) is of absolute importance.
EVE absolutely struggles being attractive to basic casual players (aka people having 1 omega, playing like 6-8 hours per week). CCPs really high (and noticable) efforts to improve the NPE has somewhat compensated for that, but not nearly enough. Retention is still terrible. Real player numbers are barely stagnating and are barely countered by the ever increasing number of accounts per player. But this trend has to be reversed, else the game gets less and less interesting over time.
I know an EVE where massmultiboxing wasn’t even possible and with 3 Full accounts you alread were a nerd. Most people having 1, some a second to scout or haul stuff around while playing on the main. And that EVE was a vastly superior gaming exprience. It’s not even comparable to the multiboxenvironment we have today.
It seems i have a complete different understanding to this. If for one moment you dare not think about the term multiboxer, then the same effect arises if X=2 with two players, with two accounts, earning 2X. If one person uses two accounts, there should not be any difference to this. That person has two accounts, pays for two accounts, uses two accounts, so it should amount to earning the same 2X as two players running a single account each. The problem here is only you and the others to be envious about multiboxers, but on the base income level there should be no difference and that should be based on the accounts and not related to persons.
However i see persons paying double, triple or more to CCP for their game as having a certain effort and value to the game and income of CCP. And this is also already acknowledged and honored by CCP with special offers for multiboxers in their store. But it could be even more incentivized by bonuses ingame as the multiboxers are physically working harder on playing the game.
Don’t split hairs mate. If it is true what you say, you do know what I mean. You have to, else you are blatantly lying.
15 years ago the VAAAAAAAAAASSSSSTT majority of all EVE players were dualboxing at most. SOME had a third Capital- or JF-Alt if they lived in Nullsec. And the amount if people that were running big own mining fleets… you could fly around for months without seeing one.
The connections and computers simply didn’t allow for Joe Casual to start 10 accounts. That was possible for very very few guys with an exceptionally crazy gaming rig. In the first like 5 years of my playing (i took a first look into EVE at 2006) you could play all day long without ever running into an obvious multiboxer with more than 2 accounts. For weeks or months. Today you find them every day, in every space. Doing nearly every content with just a fleet of alts.
If you want to even remotely tell me that was the case back in like 2008, 2009, 2010 when EVE had it’s peak time we have played totally different games then. Because that is NOT what I saw when I played back then.
15 years ago I was running 5 Hulks in Vale of the Silent using ISBoxer while simultaneously having 3 AFKtars in sites. Maybe you couldn’t have done this in your third world nation, but if I could do that on DSL from Alaska, then anyone in the first world had the same capability.
Only if that one player can pay enough attention to all of their clients to obtain the minigame that two players could have.
While with two clients that likely is still possible, so small scale multiboxers will also benefit from such a mining minigame.
But a person multiboxing 10 hulks? Probably has more important things to worry about. They still get far superior yield, but not 10 times as much as the person who is able to pay full attention to theirs.
It’s not about being envious, it’s about the problem that prevalent multiboxing has dropped the value of mining per account to terribly low levels, much lower than any other activity that isn’t as easily multiboxed.
If a new single account player sees the various things they can do but see that mining pays terribly (because multiboxing exists) then mining no longer is a viable option for them.
A mining minigame makes single account mining a viable option, like exploration already is a viable choice for single account players.
It makes the game more fun for all players, and doesn’t even punish multiboxers to do so - multiboxers still earn a lot more while mining than single account miners. Just not linearly more.