All the folks with cyno, scouting alts, etc. won’t like this… Multiboxers with more than 3 accounts won’t like this… Skill farms won’t like this… And last but not least, CCP’s finances won’t like this.
Life isn’t fair. Neither is EVE. Some players have expendable income to support 20+ accounts, others don’t. New players will never catch up to 20-year vets who have 200 to 300+ million SP. That’s just the way it is…
Getting rid of mass multiboxing would cut CCP’s income at least in half. What’s wrong with multiboxing anyway? If someone has the ability to run 20 accounts at once, more power to them. I multibox because I don’t want to have to wait until other players are online at the exact same time and day as me in order to go fleet mine or whatever. When I have the time to do a particular activity, I want to do it now, while I have the time to do so. Multiboxing allows me to do that.
I multibox as well but I perceive it spooking off a lot of potential new players. I think it always has. That and c’mon. Everyone knows that it is an unfair advantage of an individual to increase their output 20X what the other guy is doing. It’s unfair but it’s allowed and we use it.
And yeah, I feel you about the fleets. It’s pretty convenient to be able to run my own little shipping empire or do content myself in off hours.
Even if multiboxing wasn’t allowed, EVE still isn’t going to be “fair”. Players that know more about RL market strategies and trading are going to steamroll players on the market who don’t. Some people are better at PvP and tactics than others. Some people are just plain smarter than others. And some people are just plain lazy. EVE isn’t fair, nor should it be.
Players who have literally all day every day to play are going to get far ahead of players who only have maybe an hour or two a day to play. Among many, many other examples. What are you going to do to make EVE “fair”? Limit every player to one hour a day?
I’m a single account player, so no particular dog in this hunt. The only problem I have with multiboxers is when I see Miner 1, Miner 2, Miner 3… in local. I mean, c’mon. Just give them proper names so it doesn’t kill my immersion.
Seriously, if multiboxers did that one little thing, I expect most players wouldn’t even notice or be bothered by the practice.
And yes, if you end multiboxing, I expect CCP would go bankrupt and EVE would shut down. It’s a hole CCP dug for themselves with decisions made years ago, but if you shoved them into that pit, we’ll all fall in shortly after.
The good thing about EVE is that you can still carve out your own little niche of gameplay in the cluster. Plus, knowledge, isk, shiny ships are not everything and the end all in EVE:
People should just stop being bothered by multiboxers and work around them or actively against them with friends.
These below plus the technicality of how would CCP enforce / validate that nobody is running multiple clients anymore (via VPN, additional machines, and so on).
I remember a time where player-manned fleets performed the same kind of activities: ganking, strip mining, gate camping…
The reality is that EVE isn’t the same game it was a decade ago… and neither is much of the playerbase. Revolution or devolution, you decide - but Pandora’s box was opened a long time ago.
Multiboxing generates a lot of revenue. I don’t think people realize just how much.
The long-term solution is higher recruitment and new player conversion/retention. Or we need a cheaper subscription offering - somewhere between the current Alphas and Omegas (while still being limited to a single client like Alphas).
Most of my game play revolves around trading these days so I won’t really benefit from multiboxing. But I can see why people who, for example, mine, do it.
I don’t care one way or another. Multiboxers have to pay for their extra accounts and train up alts (or inject them, as it goes), so it’s not like they get to freeload their multis on the cluster. It’s expensive to keep multiple accounts running.
Also, it’s never gonna happen. CCP would lose too much revenue if they removed multiboxing. Players who only have one account are in the minority in my experience. And EVE only has so many players who stick around long term to begin with.
Also, as much as I agree with multiboxing not being healthy for the game. (I multibox myself). This is unrealistic suggestion. As if any suggestion from this part of forum ever get implemented anyway.
I like the general idea (given that a strict non-multiboxing policy is harshly enforced**), but its simply too late for this. It should have been part of the design-concept right from the beginning, but it wasn’t. Now depending on massmultiboxers money is cruicial for CCPs economic concept and I see no way to change the course.
** don’t let anyone tell you fairytales about VPNs und VMs being undetectable. They aren’t. If CCP would want to elimate multiboxing, they could do that, easypeasy.
