Proposal: Revamped Site Mechanics to Reduce Multiboxing and Promote Cooperation (FW)

Communications Center General Discussion
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83

Well, I was in the game before 2010 and you’re basically comparing apples to oranges. Especially since the kind of group content we’re talking about (Homefront, Pochven, Abyssals etc.) didn’t exist back then. Heck, wormholes were brand new at that time.

As for “exceptionally rare”, here’s a dev post from 2014:

First sentence:
" Playing with multiple accounts at the same time has a long history within EVE Online, and has always been permitted.

Or from 2010:
https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/282729/multiboxing-in-eve

Or any other of dozens of “exceptionally rare” multiboxing discussions from 2010-2014. Plus of course, back in 2010 we had 4 or 5 times the actual players in the game. So yeah you could form a group easier if you wanted to. These days of the 27,500 accounts logged in right now, I’d be extremely surprised if even 10,000 of those represented actually unique, active players. Now spread those across 7,000 system and dozens of activities and try to put a group of 10 people together to run specific content in your area. Good luck.

Obviously, you have strong emotions about multiboxing, and obviously you’re not about to change that. But trying to gloss it over with “Oh trust me I know why all the multiboxers do things” doesn’t really jive with the known facts.

EVE features multiboxing, always has and always will. It’s like PvP… adapt and deal with it. We’d all be much better off if CCP added things to EVE which enable more playstyles, multi and solo both, than demanding CCP remove other peoples playstyle.

84

CCP has always removed things that were hurtful. In all the discussions you linked people running more than 2-3 accs were the absolute exception. Most ppl. back then had one account and some had a second for their scout, trader or capital ship. And that made it somewhat acceptable, because the chances you ran into someone like that were exceptionally low, you could play for years and not even notice. Even now, nobody argues against logging in like 2-3 characters at once. It’s the mass accounting that becomes a problem.
And for the laugh: EVE going down to the current unique player numbers has to do with it’s reputation on the gaming market. Massmultiboxing has it’s fair share here, among other horrible design decision that made players leave in packs.

It is a bit like with drugs. And (mass)multiboxing simply is a drug. An addiction to wealth and power that favors and rewards antisocial behavior. There is no problem if one person out of 5.000 does it, we can ignore that dude. But if it becomes so obvious like today and it becomes widespread, it does become a problem. And problems should be adressed. Not “banned”. But designs changed to make this “playstile” (lol) less rewarding and less appealing but instead reward cooperation and group play more than just adding x more accounts.

85

Meh. The only ‘addiction’ I see is to whining about it and exaggerating a so-called ‘problem’ out of all proportion.

Why do you even care about it ? In what conceivable way does it personally affect you ? It is yet another of those manufactured ‘problems’ that is grossly overstated. The number of people who obviously have 20 accounts or more running, which you can only really tell from the similar names, is actually miniscule.

And why should anyone have to ‘co-operate’ if they don’t want to ? Other people are unreliable, not always logged in, can be deceitful, and so on. For a small fleet…what’s more reliable than it all being oneself ? And again…nowhere do you state why this is a ‘problem’.

In the end, it always seems to me that multibox whining is solely down to envy…’ that person can afford to run 15 accounts and I can’t ’ .

86

Ill just quote this for reference as youve highlighted it in other posts as well.

Greed? Addiction? I hardly think this is a multiboxer issue and to state it as such is a disingenuous argument. Market manipulation is straight up greed, making isk is the same. Forming large alliances and mega corporations to “own” space and to withhold said space from others is also flat out greed by these standards, and ‘power’ is one of the most addicting things in this world. Combat and PvP? As Arnold puts it in Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. Is this not greed? Isnt ‘winning’ also addictive?

This entire argument is built on the fact that some people dont like this activity and see it as “bad” and are creating a mountain to die upon in the hopes it will change and their arguments will fall on approving CCP ears. As Kezrai has put it the entire subscription model and CCPs marketing strategies over the last 20 years have always been to increase subs and one of the main ways to do this to create more accounts, either through current players having more than one or to garner new ones. I have often stated that many aspects of CCPs policies are the main reasons for the games success and the very aspects that will keep it niche and proverbially shoot itself in the foot. Multiboxing is one of those aspects imo. Once you have opened Pandora’s box it can never be closed again.

As I have argued previously one of the ways forward isnt to change content solely for one sides benefit over the other but to leverage the fact that both playstyles are very much needed, financially to CCP and to increase the playerbase. Everything CCP creates WILL be used and abused and gamed to all hell. That is the Eve way tbh. And to think other professions arent greedy, or that even yourself isnt greedy for wanting the content for yourself and your “group”, is just silly as an argument on the whole.

The main three reason for multiboxing, imo, are that Eve can run on a well oiled potato and gaming rigs have seriously given that ability to players to create more accounts and play more characters at once, and the fact that players who stick around will always, and I mean ALWAYS, look for competitive advantages in any aspects, modes of gameplay or even weaponizing out of game sources, websites, tools, etc. The third is CCPs need to keep the lights on and profit to flow to shareholders, devs, owners, etc. The second issue is how the ideas of “adapt or die” have taken Eve where it stands atm.

So to say one side is “greedy” while yourself or the other side isnt is blatantly false. Please dont use this argument.

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87

I only corrected the argument “Multiboxers do multibox because it is so hard to do anything”. Because that isn’t true. You can find groups for literally any content you want if you like, even today. They do it because it’s convenient, it concentrates power, control and wealth into their own hands without the need to share anything. That is antisocial greed. It excludes others.

Greed itself can be a motor of prosperation, people founding alliances, claiming space, offering opportunities, participation, wealth and content for others - nice things.
EVE was a better place without mass-multiboxing (again: I don’t bother if people have multiple chars for multiple purposes, harvesting, producing, fighting, scouting, scanning whatever). I don’t even want to forbid multiboxing itself. I am just convinced that **mass-**multiboxing entire fleets is harmful because it leads to scenarios that would otherwise simply not happen.

Now you can argue “yeah but thats all just your feelings” - well, I seem to be not the only one. I watch many streams of popular EVE streamers, from economists to fleet commanders and many of them / the people in their chats actually tend to say “it’s just too much” and it hurts the game what we see right now. I also see other games on the MMO market and nowhere this kind of mass-accounting is allowed, for good reasons I believe.

Don’t get me wrong: If people are mechanically able to control 3 ships at once, okay, let them. But the game shouldn’t make it easy. I am not for banning multiboxing, I am for re-designing content so a casual single player is challenged doing it with one ship and the difficulty and stress puts a natural limit to using mass-alts in there, most experienced players might be able to control two, some exceptionally good players maybe 3 or 4. But thats it. There shouldn’t be a convenient 10-ship-solo fleet, basically remote-controlled by a single Anchor. And that goes for PvE grinding, Mining or MassDPS. Stuff like DroneAssist, Regrouping, Fleetwarps… I’d question if that has actually made EVE better or just more dull. Because honestly: People making mistakes the opponent could benefit from were small cuts that could decide over loss or victory. Today people barely need to know how to anchor up and press F1. I sometimes do small Lowsec roams with people who know what they do on an individual level and I enjoy it if there are no fleetwarps, the FC “commands” but everyone is a 100% responsible for the control of his own ship. And if someone messes up and warps wrong? Missing the anchor? Didn’t warp out fast enough? Well so be it, it spices up the whole thing. Can’t see anything wrong with that.

88

Well, well, well. My thread prediction came true. How about that?

89

Depends whether by ‘true’ you mean it was wrong then and still wrong now, I guess.

Multiboxing is effective in certain tasks, like mining or ganking or running some fixed scenario sites. And there’s a certain portion of any player base that’s willing to go to the lengths of multiboxing (as Syzygium said, let’s call this more than 2-3 accounts) in order to maximize rewards.

That portion of the player base will never be more than about 10-20% simply because most gamers can’t be arsed to put that much effort into their games. And it won’t become ‘dominant’ or be unbeatable for the same reason that large corps and fleets never became dominant or unbeatable. Too much of the game is still basically soloed. And CCP could/should modify content to become less box-friendly, they just don’t want to cut into their income.

And the whole “paying players are subsidizing multiboxers” trip you tried to go down was just nonsense.

But yeah, sure, for negative values of ‘true’, your prediction came true.

90

Lest CCP hears ye …

Multiboxing and its selfish abusers are straight-up cancer.

91

Neither is having to filter through hoarding fleets 24/7.

92

Multiboxer detected… XD

93

This is the reality though, it’s a business model.

Short-sighted one, but one to keep Eve on life support, as not enough real players populate the game anymore.

For how long, who knows …

94

right, because people with neurological issues play Eve …

95

How to identify a manufactured ‘problem’.

  1. Advocates of the ‘problem’ will always use emotive language without ever actually telling you specifically what the ‘problem’ actually is.

  2. Advocates of the ‘problem’ are never able to specifically tell you how the ‘problem’ affects them, or indeed anyone else. Theorycrafted ‘examples’ will be used…rather than ever a single actual real world example of anyone facing the ‘problem’ or its effects.

  3. The ‘problem’ will be greatly exaggerated. Every system will have the ‘problem’ 100 times over. There’ll be made up reports of ‘30 multiboxers’ in one system after another. Never mind that earlier I flew all the way from Jita to Amarr and back and only in one system did I even encounter 5 similar names.

  4. The ‘problem’ will be alleged to be ‘ruining the game’…without any explanation of how this is so. The usual ‘think of the noobs’ type semantics without any specific mention of who is affected or how.

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96

Im just gonna reply to this entirely, instead of picking things part.

Multiboxing has always been the response from the player base to game design by CCP. When you realize early on in the game that you could bypass camps, interdictions of play styles, etc by creating more accounts, nevermind the PvE grinding aspects of mining fleets or manufacturing fleets, it started to creep into the arena. For me I think this was somewhere in the 2004-2006 era. Gameplay was still designed to all be played on one account still though and CCP hadnt introduced much gameplay that was designed with multiboxing in mind, think cyno ships. Then with the advent of PLEX CCP really monetized multi-accounts at least if not multiboxing entirely.

This was my first introduction into someone weaponizing Multiboxing on a hard core level in 2010ish. Zhek Kromtor’s multiboxing rig
While back then I had 4 man mining or manufacturing operations going on it wasnt commonplace at all. But it was beginning even a decade and a half ago if not slightly longer. But remember computers werent nearly as powerful in terms of computing power so only more top of the line computers could do these things. Nowadays with how Eve is programmed even cheap computers can multibox with ease as hardware has far outstripped software in Eve.

I think you hit the nail on the head and honestly CCP already knew it was a problem and changed it in 2020 when they broke Drone assist for fleet fights as it was deemed to easy for FCs and leaders to use and became, ironically, a drag on CCPs hardware as it led to massive TiDi due to computational issues as well as being to simple and effective a tactic. For me this aspect is what needs to be rethought by CCP and I think you echoed it as well in your allusion to the “ease” by which one can multibox.

Atm and in the past there were/are the old mining fleets, both ice and ore, there are FW fleets, Manufacturing fleets, Incursion fleets and some PvP fleets, namely ganking but various other types as well. All have weaponized multiboxed fleets in some way shape and form to gain advantage, and now with homefronts and the FW “adv” sites its even more apparent that CCP is creating content for these types of players, or “whales” as Ronnie Rose states in the next post.

So if breaking drone assist would mean youd have to control all your accounts, locking all targets, pressing buttons to engage targets on multiple accounts it would in effect achieve what you are asking for at least in some areas, but not all areas. Making things so monumentally boring and grindy for all, using things like captchas or other tools, mini games, etc, I dont think is the right way around the problem. The question is if CCP can develop content for both parties involved or even design a system that pits multiboxers against one another using some say “incursion” style ‘DPS’, ‘mined ore amount’, or some other metric to create avenues for competition while keeping content for other groups would be the way forward to add this in rather than replacing content and ostracizing the financial power of those who do help pay for the lights to be kept on at CCP might be a step in the right direction.

So ultimately can game design be created so that both can compete, play, enjoy and not where one must die in light of the other?

PS- FW pick up fleets a decade or so ago where of the nature where everyone did their own thing while still acting towards a common goal, be it O-, or D-PLEXing or eradication of enemies. I was a part of FW back then as well and this was certainly a good way to play imo.

97

Thanks for your response, well written and mostly correct as far as I can tell.

I believe it can. By designing content in a way that basically anyone can achieve basic results with low effort (which can be multiboxed conveniently), but offering options to greatly increase the effectivity when willing to put way more attention and personal skill into them, which naturally limits the amount of chars people can manage when doing it that way.

This way those wanting to push their progess with money (aka using multiple accounts) can do the basic content, convenient just like now. But they won’t be able to do the higher-tier content, that would offer comparable results for much lesser accounts if the players are willing to learn what it takes to solve this content and are willing to fight the difficulties under high pressure (danger, time limits etc…).

A good example is the Abyssal PvE design. It can be even multiboxed, but only in the lowest-paying tiers. Lets say T3/T4 in very tanky drone-cruisers. I can imagine people doing that simultaneously on 2-4 clients. But not very much more, since there are steps remaining that you have to do manually. However, above that it becomes almost impossible. Some people might be able to dual or triplebox T5. Almost no one will be able to do that in T6. And to bring that to absurd levels: Absolutely no one will be able to manage 9 Frigs in 3x T6 Abyssal at the same time. It’s humanly impossible.

Similar concepts could be made for Missions, for Anomalies, for Combat Sites, for Mining. It isn’t that hard. It simply needs creativity and the will to endure some complaints of those who feel entitled to run all that content without sharing if they just bring enough ships.

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98

This poster feels that a recent rework has made the Homefront “Emergency Aid” site less of a multibox cakewalk and more of an ‘actual player fleet’ challenge. Also that it may be a good training option for new players in fleet operations:

I haven’t checked it myself but it might be worth seeing if this is the kind of change CCP should be looking at.

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99

Thanx for the conversation. Let us see if CCP is willing to listen and to make the changes necessary for the long run good of the game of Eve Online. :wink: :smiling_imp:

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100

Lay off the commercial lanes a bit and go take a peak at FW space.

Look at Fraternity’s use of multiboxing especially.

I can’t say this will make you take that head out of the sand to notice the “problem”,

But it just might, as you appear to be intelligent person …

101

But you haven’t actually answered any of my 4 points. There’s a reason they were worded as they were. The issue is not specifically if this or that is happening…but why it is a ‘problem’.

102

Thank you for your thoughtful response, Gloria. Let me focus specifically on Faction Warfare, as it’s one of the clearest examples of how multiboxing impacts gameplay in a way that diminishes the experience for many players.

In FW space, the issue with multiboxing is particularly pronounced. Large multiboxing fleets can effortlessly dominate plexes and objectives, creating an environment where solo players and small groups find it nearly impossible to compete. The problem is not just theoretical—it’s a daily reality for many FW participants. When one person can effectively take over a system with a fleet of alts, it removes the competitive spirit and collaboration FW is designed to foster.

Additionally, the current FW mechanics exacerbate the problem by allowing awoxing (friendly fire on faction members) without meaningful penalties. This is because the standings system averages out across the corporation, meaning that a single player can stack a corp with alpha accounts or alt characters to artificially balance out standings and avoid repercussions. This loophole makes it easier for bad actors to exploit FW for personal gain while undermining trust and cooperation within the system.

These factors create a cycle where FW participation dwindles because casual players or smaller groups are discouraged from engaging, knowing they cannot realistically compete against someone controlling a dozen ships or gaming the standings system. Instead of the back-and-forth tug-of-war FW is meant to encourage, we see stagnation as a single multiboxer farms systems and awoxers go unpunished.

By addressing these mechanics, we can restore FW to what it should be: an accessible, engaging environment that rewards cooperation and strategy rather than sheer account volume or exploitation of loopholes. The goal isn’t to punish multiboxers or alts but to make FW fairer and more appealing to a broader audience—ensuring that more players can enjoy it and contribute to the ecosystem.

I hope this clarifies how multiboxing and current mechanics disproportionately affect FW specifically. Let’s keep working toward solutions that make FW space dynamic, competitive, and rewarding for everyone!

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