EVE General Discussion

I endorse this service/product.

What if I'm rich and I pay people to splatter your POS or gank your miner. Should that be banned too?

There is a simple litmus test for multi-boxing, does CCP make money from them?

CCP probably, as most Eve players do, feel that multi-boxing is against the spirit of the game, but, money has a very loud and powerful voice for a business which needs to make decent profits to improve the game we all play.

There again, I am sure we all have things we feel are against the spirit of the game.

I think that the buying of ready skilled characters goes against the spirit of the game, (want to fly that shiny ship? train it yourself) but CCP make money from these sales so it is allowed.

I have looked at the link provided by doomlord289, I don't know if I admire the chap involved, or think he is crazy. Probably a bit of both.

Mate, CCP would make billions more than they do now if they made pvp in High Sec consensual and introduced raids and arenas and a theme park. It would attract a lot more players than the current vision. Since CCP don't turn Eve into a themepark MMO and aren't likely ever to, it is clear they're not doing everything for the mighty quid. Sometimes they do things because they think it's the right thing to do for the game, and I wish they would realise that Isboxer is not the right thing for the game.

Multiboxing with an external program like Isboxer is terribly bad for the game since Isboxer is a force multiplier. It is one thing to have one or two alts running at the same time as the main, but Isboxer allows people to go beyond mere human capability and run many more. In fact, the reason to use Isboxer is the ability to run clients beyond normal human capability. Isboxer allows a single user to duplicate the whole effort of a gang or a fleet, making the likelihood of forming resource harvesting gangs less likely.

This has been debated a lot, and I doubt things will change, so I won't bother to get involved in a discussion about it beyond making the above points. So, in relation to the OP, yes - Isboxer use should be banned. It is certainly not good for the game in any form.

Ask Star Wars: Galaxies how drastically altering your game works out for your subscriber base.

Can you cite any evidence for this at all?

should it be banned? yes absolutely.
will it be badden? no because it's used by people who pay CCP for a lot of subs.

oh look, this thread again.

like a month ago, we had 2 of these. ccp said multiboxing was fine and that was the end of it.

why hasn't this thread been locked for duplicate thread/lack of content etc?

ISD is off enjoying their weekend?

Yes. Different things. First...

http://www.alteredgamer.com/pc-gaming/35992-mmo-subscriber-populations/

http://mmodata.blogspot.se/
http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

These numbers are kind of old, and the subscriber count of one mmo doesn't neatly match the subscriber count of the next one. That goes with the territory for these things.

You will see that even MMO:s that are considered great failures, such as SWTOR have many times the subscriber count than Eve does. In SWTOR's case, in 2012, they had around 2 million subscribers. I do not know what the subscriber count for SWTOR is today.

Second...

Personal experience in trying to introduce this game to friends and coworkers over the years. If I've succeeded in getting 20 people to try it, maybe 4 stayed, the others cited varying reasons for going back to WoW - amongst others not knowing what to do.

Third...

From an indirect sort of market research assumption kind of thing, the fact that nearly all the MMO projects tend to settle on the theme park model tells me that the project researchers probably find that it makes for the easiest profitability. The numbers say that these games have the highest chance for high subscription numbers, and in addition they're not so nightmarishly technical to pull off. Case in point, the next big thing - The Elder Scrolls Online - is a sharded theme park MMO, not a same-server PVP oriented one.

Look, I like Eve the way it is. But Eve is a niche game for a reason. It's fine. I'd love if more games tried to get a niche instead of trying to break WoW's subscriber counts. But the logic and evidence just doesn't support the idea that Eve would be a massive, multi-million account MMO without so serious intervention and change that it would destroy what makes it Eve.

All that, however, is incredibly off topic, so I'll drop it, and just point out, again, that IsBoxer is bad for Eve, under the current model where player interaction and gang play should be awarded.