What else are hardcore players going to do with their ISK?
ofc plexing more accounts because that’s the only thing that makes sense to spend ISK on… sure one could buy a big capital ship, but a single alt in a Rifter is way more powerful than a singleboxed dread or carrier.
Also the truth is that relying on other people to do the content you wanna do sucks.
Having flown with a lot of newbros, It’s super annoying if they struggle to warp to the right place or they bail in the middle of the fight or whatever. Or the classic you wait 40minutes for them to fit a ship and join and then after 5 minutes they need to leave.
Alts are way more reliable than real people in many cases, that’s the sad truth.
Some playstyles don’t really benefit from having alts but a lot do. There is also the “higher tier interesting content” and if you are two people you cannot run it, but if one person has as couple alts that can fly the needed ships that content is suddenly accessible.
The problem with alts is, they are really addictive. Like driving a car… once you got it, it’s super hard to ever travel by bus again x)
I don’t multibox, but I’ve occasionally chatted with (and corped with and flown with) people who do. From what I can tell, over roughly the past 10 years, the reasons to do so have shifted from leveraging a player’s personal “game power” (eg. multiboxing 5 gankers at a gate camp, or 8 miners to increase ISK/hr), to simply wanting to get something done, sooner rather than later.
Multiple people have said they multibox because they need an extra scout, they need a cyno alt, they need someone actively trading while they do their space stuff. They need logi or extra DPS while they hit anomaly X, or they need cloaky backup while they explore or hack.
As the percentage (and raw numbers) of active players drop, it becomes easier to accomplish any of these things with an alt rather than waiting for an available player in your corp or social group.
To some extent, this is a logical continuation of the EVE backstory. Someone mentioned comparing this to the novels, but yes, in EVE we’re told our gear, our ships, even our bodies are essentially disposable tools used to get the job done, then move on to the next one.
Using alts to get more done faster is just the next logical step for some players. Especially when there are fewer actual players to get things done with. I suspect this won’t be good for the game in the long run, but for the player willing to multi-alt in the short run, it’s a clear benefit.
No-one actually has any idea how many people are multiboxing, and it always seems to me that people inflate or deflate their claimed number based on whatever agenda narrative they wish to relate. Thus the ‘Eve is doomed because of multiboxing’ crowd will naturally inflate the numbers to suit that narrative. As with so much on this forum…the cart comes before the horse.
That’s not really the issue for individual situations. They simply choose to not interact (much) with other players and/or choose to be part of a corp that isn’t active (enough) in their online time zone. There’s nothing wrong with that as such but to state that “they have no other options” is not correct, they just can’t be bothered.
Further, the thread isn’t about “EVE is doomed because multiboxing”, it’s “Why is everyone multiboxing so many accounts”. (Just scroll up to the title, I know that level of fact-checking is a struggle for you, but give it a shot anyway. You can do it!)
No…that’s not what the stats you present actually say.
In the first place, if the average Eve player has 2.6 accounts and 4.3 chars that actually means most players are not actually using all the chars available in any one account…as even with 2 accounts there should be 6 chars. This is the complete reverse of what you’d expect from large scale multiboxing, where the number of chars would be way closer to 3 times the number of accounts. So your own stats prove you wrong.
Not only that, but number of chars does not in any case have any bearing on how many are actually online at any one time. I have 18 chars…only about 10% of the time do I have more than 1 on at a time. So simply counting the number of chars does not in any case tell you how many at a time are multiboxing anyway.
Bear in mind also that a large number of accounts are Alphas that can’t multibox…so using number of chars as a guide to multiboxing is even less reliable.
The problem is that the amount of actual players is decreasing, and the majority is split between:
large scale (null) corporations with thousands of players
solo corporations - as they don’t intend to play with others or they don’t trust
If you are somewhere between those two in a corp with few players doing niche stuff such as high-sec ganking, finding new players is next to impossible. The recent nerfs (alpha, tether) didn’t help it either.
So it makes sense we replace those missing players with alts, we could not do our activity without it.
Other than that, it is profit.
With alts, you can do what you want to do anytime you want to do it. This is most significant advantage of multiboxing - you are not dependent on other players who might not be able to play everytime you are.
You don’t need to split profits. You can oppose that you kind of have to, to pay those alts, but the income scales with more alts and you can also use those accounts for skill extraction, project discovery BPO farming etc. Even when you would not be getting more iISKs than with other players, you still avoid all these annoying squabbles about ISK shares and other problems such as splitting 1 item with 2bil value for example.
And the last reason I can think of: the game is super slow and boring with just one account. I purchased my second account because of this. So I could do something other than watching my retriever to laser rocks with no input. It is sad, but it is truth. Managing few acounts doing their own stuff at the same time is not a problem at all in this game, which is main reason there are so many multiboxers - it simply can be done easily and effectively and because it is officially supported, the question isn’t why do it, but why not to do it…
Well you are in corporatation that recruit newbros, so tell us. How many of them, who are not alpha clones, are multiboxing? How many of them want to, but cannot afford it? Is your corporation/alliance leadership proposing the new players to multibox? And the older players in your corp such as yourself? How many multibox approximatelly? How many plays strictly singlebox because of reasons?
I am in my bubble and in this bubble everyone multibox, or multiboxed (and is on a break now with just one alpha or one omega because of time contraints). So naturally my opinion will be influenced with what I see around myself… Btw visiting null yesterday strenghten my opinion on this matter (“everyone” multiboxes).
I think it is fair to say that half the non-casual players, ie. players who plays daily and not just at weekend etc. are multiboxing at least 1 more account. Would you accept this statement? If this would be correct than there are 15k players online at the time, not 27. EDIT: no this is wrong math, it would be less actual players. (At a given time, naturally there are going be be tens of thousands players total who plays at any time.)
I don’t understand the logic behind this… Why is number of actual characters on account any significant? You cannot play two characters on same account simultaneously, you can’t train them simulaneously (without paying MCT - which is nonsense since it costs same as 500 PLEX which gives you another character that you can play simultaneously). So it is not shocking that some players are not using all their toons on their accounts.
I bet the actual time spent on characters on an account is at average 95% one toon, 5% the other two.
We also don’t know what metric CCP used for this. Does that mean those slots are entirely empty? Or that players didn’t even log those same acc alt-characters? Or they have perhaps some limit of hours they consider the alt characters to be “played” and “not played” ?
I can tell from how fleets build up, and other factors, that most aren’t. I often don’t multibox myself, even though I can do.
Well, that is impossible to answer. I’m potentially a very wealthy player, but I have no idea what others can afford. Also, although I ‘could’ bring large wealth into Eve…there’s the question of whether I even want to.
People are ‘asked’ to…but nobody is forced to. As one of the more skilled players in a fleet I often don’t multibox myself…and nobody has ever commented adversely. Now and then I do multibox, and get kills for multiple chars, but generally I just rotate a single char for battles so that all my chars get a nice killboard.
No. I’d certainly accept that more than half of players do multibox more than 1 char…but your ‘15K’ makes the assumption that this is all the time. Whilst it may be the case that mining fleets contain people who are multiboxing 24/7…I doubt this is the case for most PvP or PvE. Personally I only multibox about 10% of the time, and even most of that is having real time scouting.
Because in order to have average 4.3 chars per player you’d have to have average 4.3 accounts if most people are having only one char per account. But instead most people have 2.6 accounts…which means by definition that most people must have more than 1 char per account. In fact the average would be 1.65 chars per account.
And if, as you rightly say, people can only multibox one char per account then surely if there is an average 2.6 accounts per player then most people only ever could ( on average ) multibox 2 chars at a time. Which means that claims that 30K capsuleers boil down to 3K actual players have to be nonsense. There is no way that can mathematically be true.
Your figure of 15K is the lowest it could mathematically be, but even that does not take into account how many accounts are Alpha and could not multibox anyway. So I doubt if even 1/4 of the 30K online is due to multiboxing.
