Wait a second, that happens these days?
Back when I started this wasn’t the case and peoples would happily pay 1b/month to be left alone by the sov holders in some corner of their nullsec region. But that was all there was in the deal. That was pre ESS but, I am still surprised that the sov holders would defend the rentee.
Not for daily business security of course. Or better: it depends. If the Sovholder has nothing better to do and the staging fleet is bored, they can come over if it’s convenient and bust some ESS robbers. But thats mostly to get some kills and content. I have seen 60 man from a staging fleet appear in less than 5 minutes to drive off 12 robbers. More often than not.
Or if there is big value at risk, if we find a Rorqual + Exhumers mining and attack them, the big guys always show up before the PANIC timer runs out.
Mainly the “defense obligation” means the sovholder allows the Rentee to live on a Citadel there. Which nobody can remove, as the timer system allows the SovHolder to always repel these reinforcements - either directly because reinforcing a Citadel takes a bit of time, so they can come over directly, or at the timer, because that is very convenient.
But the moment all that long-range movement is made very inconvenient, constant harassment becomes a tool. And either the people living there begin to defend locally, or the burden for the sovholder becomes immense, because he has endless travel time back and forth just to end timers that are easly re-shot the next day. And the next. And 2 days later. Which is entirely the point, the area of “convenient defense” need to shrink, a lot. And then the area that can be rented out effectively has shrunk all by itself.
I think you need to read again. I never wrote anything about “multiboxing”, but mentioned “massmultiboxing” specifically.
No i understood that just fine, i’ve seen it in incursion fleets, there is no fix for it, because anything that can be run by 1 guy with 15 ships is functionally to the server no different than 15 people running it with 15 ships, and you can’t ban fleets
but limiting how many accounts can be effectively played at the same time for the same content.
Which incursions already do, but that won’t stop people from just running the content with the maximum allowed in multiple fleets
Oh I could, rest assured. And I honestly wouldn’t care if a part of the players would quit over the nerf of their personal 10-account-armies. Let them.
And its a large chunk of the playerbase that generates income for the game you’re now running, so yeah while you “could” do that, it would be an extremely dumb thing to do in regards to actually keeping the game as a viable product
The goal is to make the game more attractive for the casual player and smaller groups, to enalbe grassroot growh again. You simply need to cut off the most foul branches so the tree can grow again. Massmultiboxing - not multiboxing! - is one of those branches
Yeah that won’t actually happen, small gang warfare only works because there are big targets to hunt, if you’ve killed off all the null blocs there is nothing interesting to hunt as nobody will be using capitals and null becomes basically dead
Like i get it, its hard to see the flaws in your own plans, which is why we are here to help 
And rest assured, especially stuff like “renting empires” can be very easily prevented by limiting force projection.
Sure and when you have kileld the ability for literally anyone to defend their own space they stop playing and you lose a large source of income, like i don’t think you quite appreciate how many paying accounts you would lose to this
Maybe the multiboxers are just lonely…
See, here our opinion simply differs vastly.
First, there are fixes for it, even pretty easy ones.
Variant 1 is simply forbid it via the ingame rules and hard-limiting the Client to 3 (example) instances plus limiting the server acceptance to 3 (example) incoming connections from the same PC.
Yeah people could try all kind of shenanigans like building a super-rig of multiple physical machines, try to run a system of VMs and try to mask them with all kind of stuff against detection, using VPNs and all that. But it’s intirely not the goal to catch a 100%. If the constant threat is to lose all of your known accounts to a ban if you mess up a single time and get caught, already 95%+ of the players simply would’t do it, just on their own.
Variant 2 is to re-design existing content and create all new content slowly but steadily to require a constant, more and more pressuring stream of input-commands to survive it. Make the game fast, demanding, requiring high APM-rates but on the other hand really providing entertaining action. A bit like Shooters or RTS-games. Have you tried to play 2 or 3 Starcraft Matches or 2 CoD Sessions on 2 Monitors at once? Do it and tell me how far you come and how entertaining that is.
And lastly, I absolutely don’t share your opinion that mass multiboxers make a large chunk of the income EVE generates. In all larger groups I have ever been, people regulary using more than like 5 accounts at a time were in the lower 1-digit percentages. 95% of the members were playing “regulary”, with 1-3 accounts and basically using 1-2 for content and maybe a third one for support or some semi-afk task. The guys who really grinded content with 10, 15 accs like mass-harvesting gas clouds, icebelts, farming PVE were very very rare. Even more so in PVP, the absolutely overwhelming majority of players doesn’t massmultibox in PvP.
The point is, they are very visible because they actively drain away stuff that is meant to be group-content and are extremely opressive in PvP scenarios.
And now going back: If I have to restrict like 2-3% of the players that abuse the multiboxing to the max, to create a better environment for 97-98% of the casual players, I’d absolutely do that. Yes, there would be a loss in income short-term, but imho it’s the only way to even create the chance for a higher future player count (real players) than we have now.
You are wrong with that one too, on all levels.
First: Small gangs don’t need “big targets”, they need and want targets of similar size which can be splinters (aka a roaming gang or local residents) of a larger group, but don’t have to be. If it is just another small gang or a medium entity thats just fine.
I lived in LS before it became HotdropLand™ and it was thriving of small outlaw-gangs. All of which fought each other, baited and busted their camps, hunted ratters or miners or whatever. And you know who they didn’t fought? The “big targets” like Shadow Cartel and Snuff, because everyone knew they would blob and escalate anyway.
But to achieve this, what do we need? Yes, more small- and medium groups and for these to thrive you need to limit the ability of large groups to simply hold them down via opressive instant-force-projection.
Second: Nobody wants to “kill off all the null blocs”. They can still exist, just their sphere of fast-response-influence has to shrink significantly. Which means, they can keep their heartlands, they can keep their top-end-power when it comes to defending their space or invading other peoples space, but they cannot jump back and forth on the same evening with large fleets protecting many hundreds of systems. If they want to grow larger, they HAVE to find a system of shared defense, so instead of having 400 people in their main-staging which is today sufficient to protect “their space”, they would have to create multiple regional- or border-stagings which each 100 people in it. And only in case of a full-scale attack they ping and bring the big fleets. But the daily border-defense business has to be done locally with the other fleets being so far away (logistically) that they can’t interfere in a spontaneous fight. Neither with Ansis, nor with Cynos. If your alliance is clever and begins to map WHs, well, then maybe you can use these as a remaining shortcut, as long as the other side doesn’t intentionally collapse them because they are mapping too.
That doesn’t mean you can’t “defend your space” any more, it just means that there is a game-mechanical force to “thin out daily defense forces” the more area you want to claim. And also a higher travel-logistic to reach distant border-systems for timers. Which means: You have to re-evaluate how much space you really want to hold, so the idea isn’t that you aren’t “unable to defend your space” but to make “your space” smaller to the degree you “can defend” that with the level of convenience you are willing to accept as a group. Alliances/Blocs today simply occupy too many systems which then are pretty much empty all day long and not really challangeble for someone else to settle, because the defense of these systems, despite being far away from the blocs heartlands is still so easy and convenient.
Compare my idea to somewhat more realistic roman empire: They hadn’t 2 million legionnaires stationed in Rome, teleporting them to every border skirmish. No, they needed to create local defense concepts and fortresses manned with a lot of activity directly at the borders. And Legion V couldn’t simpy meet up with Legion XI within 20 minutes because they were hundreds or even thousands of miles away from each other. So they could combine for a big assault or in case another big empire dared to wage war on Rome - but they had to solve their own problems locally on a daily basis. And the same - in a sci-fi setting - has to become true for EVE.
limit the game to 1 account online at a time. Allow all 3 charcters on that account to log in at once if they have a multi pilot training active on them.
yeah I proposed that a long time ago. It’s a very elegant solution for the massmultibox problem.
You’d probalby need to combine this with a 1-time offer per account to transfer either chars or SP to that new “main” account without fees or penalties, because people have trained for years explicitly not using the 3 chars on 1 account but 3 accounts with 1 main-purpose char each to use them simultaneously.
plus limiting the server acceptance to 3 (example) incoming connections from the same PC.
So firstly, the server can’t really see a “PC” it can see an IP address, and you can’t limit it like that because internet cafes exist, universities exist etc, the client can currently limit how many instances of it can run based on alpha vs omega but thats easily bypassed if you really wanted to so that just doesn’t actually work
There is also, literally zero incentive for CCP to even want to limit people to a single account, they literally make more money the more accounts you have, so not only is your “method” not going to work, at all, its going to massively reduce the income you have to the point where you’re going to get removed from the role
Variant 2 is to re-design existing content and create all new content slowly but steadily to require a constant, more and more pressuring stream of input-commands to survive it.
Yeah that isn’t going to work either, you seem to think everyone plays at the same level with regards to reaction times, so the people who are fine dealing with high APM activities will continue to farm it while the more casual players are pushed away from content that is getting too stressful for them to want to run
And lastly, I absolutely don’t share your opinion that mass multiboxers make a large chunk of the income EVE generates.
Thats fine you’re allowed to not share that, but mass multiboxers aren’t your only multiboxers and anything you do to hurt the multis will hurt the more casual multiple account owners as well, especially based on your terrible attempt to restrict the number of logged in accounts by IP address above
So the reality is your “idea” only results in a net drop in players and a net drop in income for CCP, so its never going to happen
And now going back: If I have to restrict like 2-3% of the players that abuse the multiboxing to the max, to create a better environment for 97-98% of the casual players
Except you won’t, mass multiboxers don’t impact anywhere near that number of players, especially not by your numbers, 98% of players aren’t out in null or running incursions or running basically anything that really gets boxed these days, you’re trying to find a solution to a problem that quite frankly doesn’t actually exist by your own numbers
First: Small gangs don’t need “big targets”, they need and want targets of similar size
No they want easy kills and they want juicy kills, i mean you’re again welcome to your opinion but the majority of small gang warfare is killing something that can’t fight back, why would i take an even fight when i can take a fight i’m more guaranteed to win? yes there will be a number of people who want an even fight, but that isn’t the majority of players, 22 years of experience have shown me that
Second: Nobody wants to “kill off all the null blocs”. They can still exist, just their sphere of fast-response-influence has to shrink significantly.
Yeah you seem to think thats going to happen, it won’t, people will fight to control anything they can and if you think a null bloc is going to be happy with being told they can now only have a small number of systems you’re sorely mistaken, and CCP wouldn’t really want to limit them that badly anyway, because again, customers aren’t paying to play if they are not having fun the way they want to play, and with a niche product like EVE you need those subs
VM’s can bypass that easily meaning people will still be able to multibox, but now they get 3 characters for 1 subscription instead of having to pay for each, so they get to condense down their total number of accounts while still having the same number of active characters which then reduces the amount of money CCP makes per player
In this case by a solid 2/3rds as now instead of 6 accounts they only need to pay for 2
Just correcting 1 oversight: she did say ‘multi pilot training licence active’. That would make it 3 subscriptions per 3 characters online per account. Assuming MCT will cost the same as 1 sub by that point.
Which would be pointless, as if i’m paying for 3 subs i would rather have the option of 9 total characters than just those 3 at the same price, that way it would be financially unappealing to players and you end up with the same loss of income
Yeah, I would do.
1990 has called, it wants it’s hardware knowledge back. Jesus christ…
The EVE client is a program running on a PC, it can absolutely uniquely identify that machine. Hardware fingerprinting combined with kernel-access (which could be easily enforced) makes this non-circumventable for 99.9% of the playerbase.
And as always: the overwhelming majority would simply stop doing it because it would be forbidden and you risk losing all of your accounts if you get caught.
I am totally open about the fact that this change would short-term of course cost money by losing subs of massmultiboxers. The goal is to increase the currently awful reputation of the product EVE Online on the competitive gaming market to a degree that this will be offset long-term by a higher acceptance and growing unique player numbers. CCP/FC has lost it’s vision to make a really good game, thats why the number of unique players has gone down dramatically and the login numbers are only kept somewhat stable by lesser people creating more and more alts. But that concept has no future.
The balance has to be found that the APM required for basic activities is achievable for a casual player doing it solo conveniently, but becoming stressful once you add more accounts. Which means, each account you add requires you to more and more split your attention, creating a natural break-even point when adding more simply won’t scale higher since you can’t control the other ones well enough. So every player can really chose how much stress he can take, but above 3 you will have extreme stress with very noticable diminishing returns in effectivity.
Absolutely not, you simply lack creativity.
Let me correct you: that was your idea not mine. I never said anything about IP adresses.
Mass multiboxing ruins the reputation of the game, simple as that. So by proxy, it affects everyone by preventing effective unique player growth. EVE was a much better game when the personal alt-fleets weren’t literally seen at every corner. Because a lot less people had mass-alts to play, they needed to cooperate, socialize, solving problems together and sharing the rewards.
Allowing personal fleets to solve group content and putting all the rewards into one guys pockets, was the wrong move and made the game effectively a worse environment for everyone else.
Try to surround yourself with different people then. For the entirety of my playtime the people I played with would be more entertained by a nice fight than to blob a Vexor with ten Battlecruisers. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t snack the Vexor if he can catch it. But if it had been 5 Battleships, that would have been even nicer.
Oh yeah sure, if the game mechanics dictate it, it is going to happen. The point is, CCP/FC has to offer them fun to play the game without needing to hold hundreds of systems that then barely anyone uses, but which are denied to others via instatravel force projection. The changes that are coming are a clear sign that the devs have at least recognized that there is a problem and as I have heard, even most of the CSM agrees with it. Time will tell if they are willing to push the buttons hard enough.
Why? What exactly is the problem?
There is a diminishing margin of return from each alt, the cost of PLEX is a limiting factor, and nobody can run infinite accounts with maximal efficiency, so what’s wrong with letting people scale up as high as they can?
That the game makes it too convienient and easy. Literally every other competitive game has some kind of built-in limits to ensure long term playability. At least the successful ones.
Even in Adventure Games where you can create your own little Party, the slots are limited. You can run aroundwith 4 or 6 heroes, but not with 32, 78 or 232. Because that would make any content stupidly easy. Even moreso in a competitive environment.
Every Team-Shooter has limits: Team size, weapon slots, ammo capacity, items you can carry. You can’t “grow indefinitely” just because you play more or pay more.
Even fast-paced strategy games like Starcraft have maximum unit limits which prevent one side from growing so big that challenging that army is becoming totally pointless.
All this has a reason: One side should be prevented to become so dominant, that the other side sees no reason in keep playing the game any more.
We can view the problem in EVE now from the PvE and the PvP perspective: In PvE massmultiboxers simply grind masses in resources that a) deplete local reservoirs to a degree that no group or regular players can live there any more. Because there simply isn’t anything to farm any more. Jeff with his 16 Exhumers grinds it into his own pockets as soon as it spawns. And b) because so much stuff is harvested and thus sold, the prices are kept down and payment for a regular 1-account guy simply sucks. The acitivity becomes more and more unlucrative for regular players.
In the PvP scenario it’s even worse. A single Massmultiboxer with ~20 accounts can easily pressure a whole corporation of 20 real people to death. He can log in and form on demand and has 20 ships awailable in the fleet setup of his choice. Anytime he attacks, the regular guys have to form. They will have to deal with 20x RL issues, 20 different skill and/or experience levels and in most cases not be able to field 100% of their manpower. But lets saythey can form a fleet that can repel the attack. No problem, the Massmultiboxer retreats and comes back 4 hours later. Or 8 hours. Or the next day. And 2 days after. He always can bring the firepower of 20. Chances that a regular group of normal people can match at is literally zero. Because you simply can’t coordinate 20 human lifes in a way that a single guy can coordinate 20 accounts. It’s literally impossible.
Such experiences (and they did happen, I have witnessed them often enough) drive people away from the game. Stories about such happenings prevent others from even joining. The game needs limits of power that a single person can control, like any other successful competitive title has to remain playable. And the very first step would be to remove all massmultibox-convenience options to make sure every additional char means a hefty toll in stress and attention that results in noticable diminishing returns, up to a point where it simply makes no sense to do it.
How is the game too easy? Running multiple accounts does not give you infinite power, you should try it and you will see. There are significant costs, and there is a diminishing margin of return for each account you add, until there is no benefit. It is a fallacy to think that people can just run infinite accounts.
Costs absolutely don’t matter if the number of accounts allow you to grind much more than the maintenance of the accounts does cost. Quite the opposite, with 10 Omegas it isn’t more complex to PLEX all of them, it’s by far easier as you can solve content you couldn’t even try with just one or two accounts.
Nobody said anything about infinite power, but too much power than is healthy for a competitive gaming environment.
Nobody said that.
I don’t see the problem, sorry.
If you think having many accounts is an easy ticket to win, then run that many accounts and show us how it’s done. Otherwise, it’s just complaining.
I have no interest to do something I deeply believe is wrong, just to prove whatever to people I neither want or need to convince. If you disagree with my point of view, absolutely fine.
