Multiboxing on it’s own isn’t bad, in most mmo’s you will find a boxed buffer/ healer/ trade toon to sit in town, but nature of the game makes it extremely easy to box afk “activities” like mining and because it’s free-floating ships in 3d space (with targeting via overview window) input broadcasting becomes extremely powerful.
In other mmo telling all your accounts to turn left would cause most to get stuck on a tree and attacking via click for most attacks to miss since the enemy is in different place on each screen…
Yes, I remember playing Lineage II and using alts for buffs
Hey, i haven’t read it all, and first i i have to excuse my not so accurate english. I am from Germany having 8 Accounts.
It was a kind of gameplaystyle (not orientated to max ISK outcome), but about how to play the game. So i often stand in the Belt, with 1 Rorqual and 6 Exhumers and 1 Battleship (which - most of the EVE Professionals (haha)) would like to say it is ineffective.
But hey, i paid the game (and i did it nearly 85% of all the eve time) with Hard Money, because i loved that game so much.
And yes, i was happy to play that game in my Style.
I read about a guy, enganging a 40 man fleet with his 22 accounts. Well i had several approaches in PVP, being a logi and PVP pilot with 4 accounts, multiboxing at the same time, and it was hard, very hard…
Its not about having get all managed, you cant even move your mouse so fast, between the screens, even if you have 4 screens.
For my it was a “command and conquer” real-time multiple combat enhancedment, but at least, i am getting to old with 43 (younger guys, have much more better reaction times, are more effective) - but hey it was my personal freedom.
And yes sometimes i roleplay in my shizophrenic way as i am, and that was fun too. Especially if you annoying some neuts, and start a discussion, with 1 guy, talking friendly to the neut and the others hatespeech haha…
At least i hope there will be a WIS soon TM (whatever), to see all that characters in one Picture, in the right poses, like a “family picture shot”.
Not because i am not communicate to each other ( i meant other players) , its because i want to stay self-reliant in that game. I am talking to much i think (ingame)
And there are gamemechanics, where you better have a 2nd or more accounts (like hauling and mining).
Greetings.
Or did he give us what the board at CCP allowed him to show?
That graph doesn’t show anything new; at FanFest they said that on average the “Elite” EVE players has 18 accounts.
A couple things: while I don’t generally take at face value the things CCP says in blogs and AMAs and interviews - statements which I often feel are made because they make things “sound good” rather than be factually accurate - I do generally put a fair bit of trust in their published data. This is mainly because there is enough data out there from other sources that if they were publishing something significantly inaccurate, I suspect they would be publicly called on it.
The other point is that “multiboxing” and “having multiple accounts” are two different things. I have a number of accounts that I’ve started over the years for one reason or another, but even when I have 3 accounts running Omega at the same time, I’ve never multiboxed any of them.
Trash defending trash. Both still trash.
Stop embarrassing yourself? No, it’s not required that you feel embarrassed. In fact, most people who are being told to stop embarrassing themselves, are being told so *because they’re completely oblivious that they’re actually embarrassing themselves.
I totally agree with op. Multi boxing is the root of all problems in eve, the game would improve a lot , BUT I know that will never change
Bunch of nonsense. That’s like saying money is the root of all evil. Evil is just evil. Sure some use money to do evil things but that does not makes it the root of all evil.
Same goes with your comment. Problems in Eve will exist regardless of multiboxing. Can multiboxing be a problem for some… Sure, but its not the root of all problems in Eve.
Many seem to think MMOs are only for playing with others. So they always think pushing away content that allows people to play solo is a good idea. WRONG!!!
As a gamer that has been playing before online games became what they are. I played a lot of old RPG solo games, Neverwinter Nights, Baulders Gate, Might and Magic, and so on. The beauty of a lot of MMOs is they are like those old RPGs but with constant new content. It’s amazing, with the bonus of interacting with other players IF you choose.
All online games should keep in mind they will have a healthy player base that likes solo content. For Eve that often involves multiboxing. So deal with it!
The fact you have to make stuff up to further your point is telling.
Uh, that’s the entire point of the genre? MMOs sacrifice some of the story and gameplay quality of a single-player game so that you can play in a living world full of other people. If you play solo PvE then all you’re left with is a worse version of the single-player RPGs you could play instead.
Nice job cherry picking out of my post, you completely missed the point.
No, I completely got the point, it was just a stupid point. MMOs exist for multiplayer, it’s right there in the name and the entire design concept is built around that assumption. Some stubborn people will try to play them solo and PvE-only so they can avoid interacting with anyone else but those players should not be pandered to. So no, I don’t care if solo players in EVE want to multibox, EVE would be a much better place if they had to interact with other people and organize group efforts to accomplish their goals.
More its the evolution of computers. You couldnt 20 box eve on a pentium 1 on win 95 with dial up and 1 crt monitor.
Now you get 4 monitor set ups where each monitor is a different video card and fibre, and insane buckets of ram.
And far more 3rd party software to support such things.
As a result it’s easier to do so, so people do.
Multiboxing is the result of bad design, that is not following good principles. Principles in design are key to good outcomes, and when you just design stuff, spit it through development cycles then implement it in game, you come out with problems.
now with the state of eve, t here are parts that are really tricky to tackle, or not out right near impractical.
That being said looking forward, if ccp implements principles int their development cycles like “requiring the player to pay attention, or near instant death” that will fix the problem of multiboxing.
Mining is an example we can take from this. No real attention is required for it. You do have the concern of rats, but they are not serious enough t really be an issue. For this reason, and the group mining social construct, mining itself should not base its danger and attention factors around ratting as much as it should around some activity, or environmental based system.
Lets take star citizen for example. There are a few key factors in mining, but to simplify all of its mining systems i just mention two things to you, the resistance, and the consistency.
In star citizen you have to charge a beam to a rock, it has resistance, requiring more power or more consistency. The catch is the rocks heat up, and if they reach specific temps they will explode, potentially resulting in a one shot on you (this is a simplified way to explain it).
This type of mechanics requires you to pay attention when mining it, and subsequently from this makes it impossible to multibox.
Imagine if this mechanic was in eve, and you started all picking on the same rock, or multiple rocks at a time, you’d get the result of many explosions (and subsequently many deaths), or one asteroid killing many people.
As a dev, i will tell you its unpractical for us to police this out side of designing the mechanics to combat it (via the types of principles we use in our development cycles).
The good news is there is a solution to this, and it 110% hard stops the problem, along with it isk farmers. Sadly, that means removing any and all types of exchange between players (no trading, no giving, no corporate hangers, etc), and that is just not an option for most mmo’s.
This removes multiboxing but at the expense of turning the game into tedious masochism. Nobody gives a **** about monitoring some random PvE attention enforcement mechanic, it adds zero gameplay depth or player interaction and is functionally identical to a “yes I’m active” button on the screen that you have to click every 10 seconds. Can you honestly say that the trade is worth it?
(Hint: it isn’t.)
It may be interesting to start investigating the idea of “on-grid negative effects or hazards”.
Putting to many rorqs, or what ever on the same grid results in reduced income. This however becomes an issue with higher population rates.
As i mentioned recently to ccp the solution for multiboxing might be more simple then expected.
If we remove the tags from asteroids “omber, Mercoxit, etc” and just set them as “small, medium, large, huge asteroids”.
From here we apply random “ore types” internally to them, which you can both scan with an asteroid scanner, and selectively mine with scripts (now applicable to all mining beams).
You can then set the values of the asteroid, and apply a max mined value to the asteroids themselves.
For example a asteroid spawns with
1000 units of veldspar
1500 units of mercoxit
500 units of golden omber
with a max mining value of 2000 units.
This will make you pick between what you can mine there, makes the whole process of looking around for the ores you need more time and attention based, and adds a explorative and immersive aspect to the mining aspect of eve. This will improve the quality of the mining experience while removing a lot of min-maxing aspects of it and pushing that min-maxing to skills (via script specializations) instead of just picking rock with best returns.
With a cap on the asteroids you can effectively force people to make a plan path, make belts mined faster, validating the asteroid belts in systems over the ore-belts, and also forcing people to again move around as miners, effectively resulting in potential pvp action (further combating multiboxing and botting with the right timing of spies).
Nothing about that is simple. In fact, it’s a textbook example of an excessively complicated mess of a system that adds very little to the game. There’s no strategy involved in your proposal, you just mine the available ore in descending order of value and then move on to the next rock. Nor is there any strategy involved in identifying the ore or preparing to mine it compared to the current system, you just click “scan” and get information that is functionally identical to an overview label. Your proposal succeeds in adding more buttons to click and more SP to invest, but in the end mining is still just as mindless as it is now and nothing of value has been gained.
Not that any of us are surprised that a well known liar is demonstrating a lack of understanding of game design that contradicts his fraudulent credentials, that’s just a standard Naari post.
Don’t get me wrong I like pve solo too, and I don’t have issues with people multiboxing,.but FACT is that majority of people who harms the game use multiboxing as a base to their operations aka botters, rmt etc