I don’t think your idea of pay to win is the same as most people’s. Winning at Eve memes aside, what multiboxing comes down to is a way for an individual to achieve some goal they set out for themselves which on their own would not be as efficient or just flat out impossible (wormhole shenanigans), and done on their own terms and at their convenience.
In an era of free to play games and micro-transactions, paying to win is generally accepted to be paying for in-game items or game states that either require a significant investment of time/effort or are superior to what is possible to achieve in game no matter the time/effort invested. Paying for multiple accounts to play at the same time without using input broadcasting does not satisfy either of those, it does not afford you an advantage that another player cannot realize of their own volition.
The problem is, you are attempting to equivocate what is attainable with 10+ accounts versus what you can achieve with only one, and saying because a person pays more they are paying for the ability to earn more money (for the sake of argument) than a person can as an individual pilot. Unfortunately this logic is incorrect, as you are not comparing the same things. If I buy subs for command bursts, 4 miners, and a hauler, I am still paying for 6 subs like I’m 6 individual people, and most importantly I’m doing the work of 6 people. That’s not paying to win, that’s paying for the privilege of doing the work of 6 people by myself, on my terms, and at my convenience.
To be quite frank, what people multibox are usually mundane tasks individuals wouldn’t want to do anyway, which is a gameplay issue that is outside the scope of the point I wanted to make here.
Of course it is. As Jumpdrive says…if there was no advantage to it, players would not be doing it. How is that advantage gained ? By paying. Under what absurd twisting of semantics can this not be ‘paying to win’ ?
How is that not paying to win…yet if the very same person scraps the 6 accounts and spends the extra $50 a month on buying PLEX and SP for one account, somehow all of a sudden he is ‘paying to win’ ? BOTH situations involve paying. BOTH involve gaining an advantage…i.e winning.
I’m not ‘complaining’ about multiboxing…I’m simply pointing out that multiboxers who protest about ‘pay to win’ are hypocrites.
So I’m someone that multiboxes 26 accounts. It’s easy to look at what can be done with this many accounts and think it’s easy, and yes killing a triple expanded freighter by myself CAN be easy, but it also comes with a slew of other challenges and considerations that a person using one account wouldn’t have to endure or consider.
So for me it’s about that next-level challenge. I’ve been multiboxing since I started playing in 2012 because I saw the absolute necessity. At first it was because I needed to be able to accomplish mundane tasks that another human would likely NOT want to waste their time doing. It then evolved into leveraging my accounts as a force multiplier to enhance the activity.
Today it’s absolutely a necessity for the various activities I engage in. Factors like my available playtime (rotating shift work), a dwindling player count, and CCP changing things to require more accounts contribute to the feeling or need to either have more humans or more accounts. Obviously more humans would be nice, it’s a social game after all, but most times it’s just not an option.
I wish I didn’t have to multibox this much to do what I want. I’d be fine with a limit of 3-5 but at this point I feel CCP relies on the $ from SP farms. Extractors and PLEX likely make them way too much money for them to shake the bank over. So I’ll continue doing what I do, and in fact I plan on scaling to 30-35 once I upgrade to 64Gb of RAM.
Personally, I don’t think there should be a limit on this. I view the people who multi box 10+ and even 20+ come with increased stress/work in the game and that should naturally limit how far people go. A real fleet of people will beat a box fleet ran by 1 person.
I enjoy my 1 account and perhaps when I can open another box for LS scouting.
And people who box Incursions make nothing compared to what people do in WH/NS. There is a very big misperception that the 1 HS incursion makes untold amounts of ISK is untrue compared to null/LS and there are more incursions down there.
I don’t believe huge multiboxers (for me it’s 10+) who say they enjoy what they do. To me it appears a lot of work to keep everything plexed or you are paying out of pocket.
Many pros and cons to multiboxing and it’s what your confrontable with. For me I been running my 1 account and I would need to work a lot harder to earn 1k plex a month.
There is no advantage. A multiboxer assumes the workload of multiple people.
If grandma had balls, she’d be grandpa.
Your vehement disregard for language makes you a hypocrite when you call it a twisting of semantics. It’s apparent that you have a narrative to push, and eschewing logic to do so is your only recourse. You have fun with that.
The recent attempts to nerf the Orca yield were going to be way for active miners to be better than afk miners. But it was met with such outrage that CCP buffed the Orcas yield instead.
I will grant you the notion of having agents at your disposal for whom you can trust completely, yourself. The issue then becomes viability of the game itself. If you couldn’t have cyno alts, and had to trust people, you could not have as many people playing the game, because no one wants to be screwed over time and again trusting real people for a cyno. That may be the game you want to play, but you would find yourself in a very empty universe. I promise you, without a shadow of a doubt, this game would not still be live if not for this system being available.
On the flip side, with the exception of bot farms for the purpose of RMT, what has multiboxing done to the game that makes it so unbearable to play, and what percentage of people who play do you think feel the same way.
Of course there’s an advantage…or people wouldn’t be doing it. Nobody would pay for 6 accounts if there wasn’t some advantage to having 6 accounts, that 1 account didn’t have.
Work doesn’t divide it multiplies. Multiboxing is the advantage of playing the workload of the extra accounts. Yes you will get an advantage of being 6 people vs the 1 solo account. But again your doing the work of about 6 people if you multibox 6 accounts… This naturally limits how far people are willing to go.
I’m not protesting features…I’m protesting double standards about features. Personally I’m fine with PLEX, buying skills points, multiboxing, yada yada. I just object when I see people using one paying method that provides an advantage…protesting about another paying method that provides an advantage.
Valid point. I think this game has become very reliant on multi-boxing over all these years. The game may suffer either way.
The cost:
1 The price we all pay is a less social game, with more players going it alone (with their alts), but it may be too late to fix that.
2 More single account players (newbies, usually) will be looking for another game.
3 Then we got these market disruptions that that current developers thought they had to fix with the unpopular Scarcity and Industry updates (a better solution IMO would have been to discourage or even prohibit newbies from doing the most inflated, low-APM activities such as mining and PI, but what’s done is done).
What we have, is a complete mess, but the multi-boxing players themselves are not to blame.
They are doing what makes logical sense for a power gamer when confronted with many low-APM activities in a time-consuming game. Time is the key factor. A player can burn out from multiplying busy-work at a higher pace, but a player can also drop out due to sustained low-APM boredom.
They screwed up small scale social groups long ago. You either join a mega alliance, and live as serfs under their totalitarian ruleset, or stay in high sec, or eat the scraps that fall off the table of those who joined the mega alliances.
Once small scale social is dead, multibox becomes the only way to be semi independent outside of high sec.
I don’t think limiting the number of Multiboxes makes any sense (and would be hard to enforce adequately anyway.)
However I do agree with the OP that there should be some kind of counter play or (biting my tongue after I say this): nerf.
Right now, what can a single player do against a Gila swarm? How would you even kill one before losing your ship? It seems like there should be some kind of counter play to a tactic that can be used by someone who is AFK.
That’s fine with me. Never had an instance where I reeealy wanted something and the only obstacle to it was how much ISK was in my wallet, but then again my toy collection consists of things from 2-50mil ISK frigs/cruisers, a dozen 80-100 mil ISK faction stuff and a handful of 200-900mil ISK FBC’s/BS’s. I have no desire to fly Capitals, I trained into a Titan on the test server and after 20 minutes I got it all out of my system basically and realized it felt same as the first time my newbro self undocked my “big bad Harbinger” except at least if TIS was interviewing me and was asked about what happened to said ship and why I didn’t bring a Vecamia Visa for mean ol’ mohawk murder milf and her bubblegum disruptor I wouldn’t start crying IRL jussayin
except at least if TIS was interviewing me and was asked about what happened to said ship and why I didn’t bring a Vecamia Visa for mean ol’ mohawk murder milf and her bubblegum disruptor I wouldn’t start crying IRL jussayin 
