Multi-boxing Nerf

I did suggest curtailing and not outright eliminating it… (impractical or not)

Maybe. I only wanted to say that if they wanted, they could. Not saying they should. And for sure not from one day to another.

And as long as we have mechanics that are made with massmultiboxing in mind, making sure that a group of x real people can always outperform a multiboxer by clever cooperation, it isn’t a gamebreaking problem. If multiboxing is scaling as good as it is today, it absolutely is in my opinion.

The reason that multiboxing is so popular is because of the low player count. You ever tried to get 30+ players together at the same time to go on a mining op? Why go through all that when you can just do it yourself whenever you want. Absolutely no one is going to sit around waiting for “insert activity here” when they can just have multiple accounts and do that activity right then by themselves and not have to depend on other players to be online at the same time wanting to do the same activity.

No one is going to sit there for hours and hours helping you mine out a moon or entire asteroid belt. No one is going to web your freighter through a 90-jump round trip to Jita. There’s no incentive. That’s why players multibox.

Yes - if they focused more development efforts on making EVE better (in addition to reducing churn) - there would be more incentive.

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The problem EVE faces is systemic. Any radical change will not help. I say this because i notice lot of radical ideas, its like players are getting desperate.

But the problem EVE faces is systemic, and its because the CEO has hired a bunch of random people to work on EVE Online that have no idea what they are doing.

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That may be part of the reasons, but I really believe its a small part. We get people up do do something every day, multiple times. You don’t need 30+ people do run a mining op. Go start with 6, when more come online grow to 10 and when prime time for your little corp hits, you get 15. Have some beer and smalltalk and call it a success. Works fine for us.

No, the reason why multiboxing is so popular is because how easy it is and because how well it scales up.

Nobody said that dual or tripleboxing should be forbidden. And actually, you have 3 chars on an account, I’d find it perfectly okay if you could log in all 3 at the same time, but not have other accounts online at the same time. This way everyone can have a scout or webber or booster or tackler availabe, but the mass-multibox farmings, be it ore, ice, gas, homefronts, anomalies or whatever is over. As long as all chars have to be managed manually, there is little to no problem. But things like drone-assist, fleet warps, regroups etc… makes it way too easy to remote-control a huge amount of alts currently. As said, I don’t think it should be totally forbidden, just the excess at the top cut down a bit.

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Funny part is “way back when”, this is exactly what we did. (90 jumps :face_with_raised_eyebrow:)

Make room for small corps. Not everyone wants to be a sheep. Meh…

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Multiboxes are like a dark souls boss. Hard to beat but not impossible. Embrace it.

Multiboxing is not a real problem.

Multiboxers are already nerfed by having to control more than one characters actions. Everything is slower and less efficient than the same amount of humans controlling one character each.

Besides, pretty sure you hold a minority opinion with a minority of subscriptions behind it.

… says the multiboxer

If multiboxing is so much slower and less efficient, why do you multibox? It is most definitely a competitive advantage over using a single account.

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I multibox and I am definitely less efficient when I do. It’s primarily of benefit when mining, because high-sec mining is pretty low on the totem pole in terms of income and it’s one of those watching (and not touching) grass kind of activities.

Oh I know, I too multibox two characters sometimes, even in PvP combat, and I know it’s less efficient per character than if a single player were to command that character in a busy fight.

But multiboxing is much more efficient overall. You don’t need to gather multiple people to bash a structure, you just do it alone.

You don’t waste the time of an entire fleet of players if you decide to wait cloaked or play log-out games, just that of one person.

Multiboxing your own fleet in EVE is far too efficient and very oppressive.

Even if CCP were to add multiple nerfs targeted at multiboxing as mentioned above, multiboxing would still be a popular way to play the game.

I’m not saying CCP should fully delete multiboxing, but they should nerf it.

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I don’t disagree. Any brilliant suggestions? (sorry, would’ve given you a like but apparently I’ve used up my “quota” for the day…)

There’s not much you can do to limit the number of multi-boxed clients with VPN and virtual machines. I’m also unsure if you could really penalize multiple clients in any way (stacked or separate windows).

Alpha » Omega » Alpha/Omega MB (VPN) » Omega MB » Omega MB+ (VPN/VM)

Bring one guy in a jamming ship or have your fleet launch and spread ec-300s. Do anything that increases the multiboxers APM requirement, and watch their efficiency drop sharply.

You are asking for out of game solutions to a perceived problem that already has many counters that you as a player can employ in game to even the playing field. How many players do you think you need to bring to defeat the average 10-account multiboxer fleet, assuming both sides are using a sane fleet composition?

What good is that when the multiboxer fleet-warps off all ships, cloaks up all ships and waits until everyone is gone before they try bashing the structure again? And that all night long in different spots?

Multiple people are necessary just to deal with one person, only because multiboxing allows that person to deal such massive damage with such little risk that you barely have time to react.

It’s a plague on the game.

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How about a 0.5 second delay before you can give input to a game client that got into focus.

Barely noticable for regular players, kills multiboxer capabilities of cycling orders through 20 accounts in two seconds, yet multiboxing is still possible.

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  • disable all remote commands like ‘fleet warps’, ‘regroups’, ‘conduit/filament jumps’ and ‘drone assist’ for clients not currently in focus. Or at least add a ‘confirmation dialogue’ for such inactive clients, so the remote command is delayed until the user clicks ‘Yes!’
  • add a 3 second module auto-activation delay for minimized clients, (like the warp if they were moving on autopilot). Would greatly lower weapon DPS and RemoteRep on afk alts for example when using multiple Laserboats or Trig Ships to reinforce other ppls Stations overnight with a bunch of alts.

The river of tears would be unimaginable. :rofl:

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I think drone assist has become pure cancer and should be eliminated entirely. It’s fine with a few ships, but when you get 10, 20 or more ships all multi-boxed with drone assist, well…