Multiboxing and PVP

PvP Gameplay Center Warfare & Tactics
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Sometimes I’ve seen killmails with a bunch of characters with similar names. I beleive these are multiboxers because multiple people coming up with almost identical names independently would mostly end up in random places, if you pick two random players they are probably not in the same fleet nor are they in the same constellation 75% of the time one of them is online. Most, but not all, of these killmails seem to happen with high sec ganking. I’m wondering how practical this is.

If the multiboxer is going after a hauler, the execution seems simple if he knows what gate to camp. Character 1 scrams and fires, then he switches to character 2, then character 3, and so on. If you know the hull (Tydra, Occator, Crane, Ark, whatever), you can plug in the expected fit in a simulation, figure out how many shots it will take to bring it down, have that many ganking ships, if more than 10 is required maybe add 3 for extra safety. If the player for some reason used an active tank instead of a buffer one, then you overestiamted the target EHP and are pretty much guaranteed to get the kill since a hauler probably isn’t going to dodge all your shots. I believe I know how this is executed in practice.

Orcas running an Industrial core can’t move. I also can imagine how killing one is done.

But sometimes people have been scanned down and ganked while running level 4 missions. For the profit minded ganker, it’s once again “how many ships does it take to kill” vs “what’s the value of 50% of the stuff being dropped?” and for those who just want a killmail, it is only the former. One small problem I see. a lot of Level 4 mission runners use active reps. While you multibox and go from one character to another pressing F1, if it takes more than 4 accounts to bring him down, that’s probably enough for a medium armor repaier to finish a cold cycle. Won’t this throw off calculations of the ganker? I’m a solo boxer and probably will be that way indefinitely (well, maybe if I run into a windfall of ISK equivalent of 304 months of subscription I’ll make 7 alts and PLEX them ha ha ha) so I have no first hand experience, but it seems to me there isn’t an obvious way to switch between accounts fast enough to prevent this from happening.

What about low sec gate camping? Well, I don’t know how this will work. A mixture of hulls will result in differing optimal ranges. Even if all the hulls are the same, they need to spread themselves so that if someone pops out. I remember months ago at one point 8 characters (5 with almost the same name, a tackle frigate, 1 crusier, and 3 battlecruisers) tried to bust me by a gate, but 4 of the 5 similar people acted sluggishly, and once the gate gun killed the guy with scram I was able to use my MWD and get out of point range to warp away. One of the battlecruisers remembered his cloud of drones and sent them after me once the tackle frigate died while the other 3 characters with the same name had their donres idly orbit their ships. Maybe 5 people independently came up with similar names. However, I think what happened is a multiboxer tried to get me and he only had 1 ship with scram. Since he tired to be within 17 to 20 ish km from me, nothing slowed me down once the gate gun shredded the Executioner. I kind of wish I sicced my drones on him so I could end up on the killmail (and I’d be able to search it since while I don’t have the right character string for his name, I know how to spell mine making it easy to find). But even if I’m wrong and this situation I escaped from was not a multiboxer, the question remains is this practical to multibox a low sec gate camp? And if ti is practical, how would it be executed?

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That’s why you don’t run multiaccount gatecamps with frigates. You use “instalocking” battlecruisers. They can get shot for minutes by the gate before they need to warp off, and if you have logi alts, the BCs are immortal to the gate anyways.

The instalocking battlecruiser will provide the initial point, but it’s slow and has poor damage and application, for that reason you need a HIC to overtake the point. HICs have long range strength 100 scrams and can easily tank gate fire, too. They also move faster then BC. The problem with your low ISK Gnosis + Broadsword + DPS Praxises camp is that they will fail to grab frigates, and the expensive stuff is moved in travelceptors, which you’ll have even more trouble of grabbing. For that purpose, you camp in a pipe system, like Frugelur, and place a few smart bomb battleships on the gate you’re not camping. All the low tank but fast allign targets will get wrecked when they are about to jump the destination gate camped by the AFK Smartbombing Battleships, while any targets that have tank but also have large signatures will get grabbed by the at-the-keyboard Sensor Boosted Gnosis and then wrecked by classic DPS sources. You can also drop drones all over the place and abandon them to become obstacles that can decloak your prey, though blockade runners will often get away nevertheless, as there’s always some spot that doesn’t have enough decloak wrecks or drones, and the loot fairy hates you too much to give you a blockade runner.

The camp is disposed of most easily by using just that blockade runner, not-so-autopilot-warping it 15km off the destination gate and then apporaching the gate. As soon as you managed to acquire a lock and scram on one of the smartbomb BS, open a covops cyno to hotdrop black ops battleships and t3c onto the smart bombers (you can’t use bombers there because the smartbombs would wreck them before they can burn out of the smartbomb range). You can also drop on the non-afk camping part of the camp (gnosis/vigilant/exequror/praxis), but those are too cheap for the risk, the Smartbomb BS are usually more expensive killmails … and everyone hates AFK pvp-ers, which smartbomb battleship camps are an icon of.

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Assuming the 5 guys with similar names were the same guy, yeah, he didn’t execute it right. But I was less wondering “was he the same guy” and more “can someone pull off a better version of the camp I escaped?”

Can the at the keybaord part feasibly be pulled off by one person? I saw an Udema gank where the first shot fromt he first ship and the shot from the 8th ships, although I don’t know if this was due to that guy having a slow reaction time and someone else could pull off what you’re describing.

Also the system I was in was 3 jumps away from the high sec area, and not a pipe (meaning I could have gone around it). I was confident enough I set off with no tanking modules besides a DC and rep and filled the lows with IS to get a sub-5 BC to cut down on travel time (an extra IS wouldn’t bring me to sub 4) because I felt the odds of running into a camp when I don’t have fancy cargo was low. I’m not carrying 3. bill of stuff in an Occator, just a BC worth less than 100 mill, so I figured no one would bother (obviously I was wrong). Seriously, who camps a system with 3 gates not near high sec?

Sounds fun. Thanks for the advice!

I was only asking “how can this be executed by a multiboxer and if it can, how would they execute it” not “how to kill smart bomb BBs” but I appreciate the advice. If I know there are smartbombs on a gate, do you have a suggestion on how to kill them without T3Cs? Let’s be generous and say he doesn’t try to escape while nothing is on his overview despite local being visible.

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Most likely. It’s probably more interesting to know whether or not those capsuleers have a tendency to work together, though. ZKillboard can tell you. Select a few killmails, and if they’re green, check who’s also on the killmail. If the killmails are red, select “related kills” and see whether suspected alts have a tendency to be wrecked together with the main.

Sure.

First, configure an overview preset that shows only nonfriendly ships on all your toons, and setup your clients to all have the overview at the same location. It’s most easily done by shutting down the clients and then copy-pasting your main account’s config file onto the alt’s configs, and then starting eve again, to make sure the GUI possitioning is identical.

Once you’re at your gate, make the “instalock” battlecruiser the squad/wing/fleet commander so it can group warp everything off and announce targets in case that’s even needed (most times there’s only one target anyways). As soon as the gate flashes, switch to your tackle BC client, and be on attention. If anything is locked, unlock it, position your mouse on the upper side of the overview, where the first target will appear, and engage your warp disruptor module, which will enable automatic targeting mode.

As soon as the prey drops cloak, left-click it on the overview. It’s icon appeared under your cursor because there’s nothing else on the PVP preset, so it always appears at the same position, and your cursor was already there, so all you need to do is to left-click. This will issue a target-and-use-module command, which are both send to the server at the same time, not only avoiding lag, but your attention on the BC is no longer required as the BC will automatically issue the warp disruption as soon as the lock is acquired.

In the meantime, switch to your HIC client and start burning to the prey, locking it and aggressing. If you don’t have a HIC, use whatever else you have there. It’s good enough to bump the prey, so just issue all commands and then switch to the next client and repeat.

If you’re an experienced multiboxer that takes you at most 1 second per client. It’s important to use shortcuts for your modules though. So if you have points in your mids rather then the top HIC mods, re-assign them to the top module bar for F1-F8 hotkeys rather then multiple key combinations used by low or mid modules. Same goes with your prop mod and web and target painters and energy neutralizers or whatever else you have. You also want to hit keys in a specific pattern, so make sure the modules are assigned to the keys you hit in a good order, which means disrupt/scram comes early, and webs come late. Never hit web before you hit point.

You can pre-heat any module as the modules will only be engaged once a target is acquired, so you can keep the overheated disruptor in overheated mode no matter how long your prey holds stargate cloak.

Put on Tank and dual Propulsion on the ship and it should be fine. If you think the camp is too powerful for you, burn back to the stargate. You’re most likely scrammed at that point, so you need the afterburner. Everything that has aggressed on you can’t follow you through the stargate, so the camper’s numbers will be fairly limited on the other side of the stargate. Use the cloak + MWD trick to get away in case the camper could follow at all, otherwise pulse the afterburner to get off grid in 8 seconds

People with intel. On the contrary, highsec gates aren’t all that great, as even if you have the means to pursuit your pray back into the (highsec) system it came from, in high your hunt ends there. You have to give up on it or concord will come to bully you. Of cause, if the prey’s a marauder and you’re in a dozen attack battlecruisers, just yeet’em and the alliance leaders will praise you for your commitment and likely refund you for your lost BCs, too.

Siseide<->Amamake is good content, Frerstorn<->Eszur, too. Miroitem is one of the systems most infamous for gate camping, too.

Use a scram fit BR and put anything else you have into bombers with rage torpedoes. Gate everyone and cloaky warp out of the battlecruiser camp… bombers can land 30km off the smartbomb camped destination camp, which is well inside the torpedo range, and the BR 15~20km. Approach gate with the BR, grab a Battleship, decloak bombers and you’ll be surprised how quickly bombers can dispose of battleships that aren’t buffer tanked nor have active mods they could cycle or even overheat (they lack the PG to fit buffer tank if they need cap stability for afk smart bombing and afk gate gun tanking)

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I just ran across this thread and in particular the quoted response. I am recently returned and have more than one account. My question is, where can I find the config file for my main account?

Thank you!

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There’s a CCP\Eve path below your users’ LOCALAPPDATA. The fastest way to access it is by running

explorer ${env:LOCALAPPDATA}\CCP\Eve

in a powershell, or

explorer %LOCALAPPDATA%\CCP\Eve

dos command prompt to get a filesystem browser on that path. I don’t know where eve installs it’s stuff in linux, but XDG would proposes localappdata to go into ${HOME}/.local .

Inside the eve localappdata, there’s a directory called sharedcache_tq_tranquility, prefixed by an identifier of the eve installation. For most users, there’s only one such path, because there’s only one eve installation on the system.

Inside the sharedcache path, there’s a settings_default path, which contains files named core_user_${userID}.dat and core_char_${capsuleerID}.dat.

Identifying capsuleers is the easier part, as it’s the last URI element a capusleer’s zkillboard’s URL… for example core_char_2115681442.dat relates to https://zkillboard.com/character/2115681442/ . The capsuleer data records stuff like overview setting or channels you’ve joined … be careful not to copy-paste too agressively as it could get your goon intel spy / fake-intel reporting capsuleer into a horde channel where it’s seen by a goon user’s horde spy and stuff like that.

Identifying accounts is harder. The numbers are always serials, so newer accounts have greater numbers, but if you can’t remember in which order you created your alt accounts, close down everything, including the launcher, open the launcher again, start just the account you want to identify, log into your capsuleer, open the setting dialog and set window mode (if it isn’t already), then drag the window to a different position, and close the client and the launcher. You will notice that one of the core_user files has been modified because it’s modification date has been updated to the current time (storing checksums of the files before and after changing the window location of cause works, too). You can use this to identify each of your accounts. The account data stores window locations, but it also stores things like the size of your NEOCON display, which, like the eve window size, if varying, results in different locations of your GUI elements.

In most situations, you want to copy-paste both the account and the capsuleer settings, but not before making sure you aren’t in chat channels that could allow others to identify your alts.

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Wow! thanks for such a detailed answer!

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Just wrote a little script that can automagically backup and sync my eve client settings:

$mainChar = 2115681442
$mainUser = 0000000000

$altChars = @(2117266598, 2118366045)
$altUsers = @(1111111111)

$eveInstallationCaches = Get-ChildItem "${env:LOCALAPPDATA}\CCP\Eve\*_sharedcache_tq_tranquility"
forEach ($eveInstallationCache in $eveInstallationCaches) {
    echo "processing ${eveInstallationCache}"
    pushd ${eveInstallationCache}\settings_Default

    $currentDateTime = Get-Date -Format FileDateTimeUniversal
    Compress-Archive -DestinationPath core_char.${currentDateTime}.zip -Path core_char_[0-9]*.dat
    Compress-Archive -DestinationPath core_user.${currentDateTime}.zip -Path core_user_[0-9]*.dat

    forEach ($alt in $altChars) {
      cp -v core_char_${mainChar}.dat "core_char_${alt}.dat"
    }

    forEach ($alt in $altUsers) {
      cp -v core_User_${mainUser}.dat "core_user_${alt}.dat"
    }
    popd
}

If you want to run it, write your capsuleer and account numbers into the assignments at the top of the script (alts are comma separeted), store it with a .ps1 filename extension and run it in powershell. It’ll print the path to the eve config files and backup them, even if it otherwise won’t do anything or fails because the alt numbers were not modified…

I always end up accidentally dragging some gui elements around and messing up my settings so this script will be ran frequently I guess.

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Hmmm… Three toons per account, one main, one out of corp hauler (which I really should get him to a t2 cloak since the only thing keeping him safe is his occator’s EHP with no cloak), one that’s not doing anything… maybe I should try the espionage game? That’s a nice tip to avoid easily getting busted. I’d have to scrub the distinctive way I talk on voice coms though. Or I’d end up being part of something like this story (it was typing style and not talking, but same idea)

“This aussie joins, pretending to be a cute newbie and I was like - I recognise that typing style…So I PM him, and I’m like “Yo, [name redacted]” and he’s like “WTF HOW DID YOU KNOW”. He left without us even having to kick him”

I honestly didn’t think much of the 3rd guy. Some people do industry and combat on different toons, but if I get into industry, I’m going to do it on my main.

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Nice try spy but you fool no one, you already spy on several accounts. :stuck_out_tongue:

Get him boyz!

:japanese_ogre:

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