EVE General Discussion

So you're saying in order to deal with the gameplay I despise, I have to become the gameplay I despise? Sounds really fun...

Why do you despise it? Are you trying to mine? Are they stealing your ore from you?

How about not giving a frakk about how other people play the game they pay for? Admit it, you say "despise" but what you really mean is "I'm jelly".

Besides, you are just another NPC forum alt whining about people having more space pixels and making more pixel money than you do. Many done it before you and many will do it when you are gone. Words may vary but underlying reason of whine is always the same: blame others for your own pixel failures.

Bump em'.

This needs that meme with the guys from the Office on it: INCORRECT.

Multiboxers don't give CCP any money - They Plex those accounts. CCP got the cash long before those accounts where made active.

If they couldn't multibox - you'd see less demand for Plex (Reduction in PLEX prices) and an increase in the value of base minerals (Less people strip mining entire belts and flooding the market - or more players who can't afford to undercut as much as someone with 20 accounts worth of ore to sell).

How, exactly?

If players were only allowed one account active at a time, there would be a lot less ore produced. That means prices would rise as the supply drops. That makes mining more attractive to botters than it is now. Botters are always going to break rules - if they didn't, they wouldn't be botting in the first place. Whatever measure CCP used to detect multiboxing, I guarantee you botters would find a way around it - whether it's modifying the client itself, running each client on a seperate virtual machine, running them through different proxies... if the money is there, they'll find a way.

Right now, the presence of large-scale human multiboxers makes mining less attractive to actual botters than, for example, mission running, or grinding anomalies in renter space. I'm not saying there are no botters mining - I don't know either way, but it seems likely there are some - but I guarantee you'd see more if the prices rose massively, and they would rise massively if you stopped multiboxers.



First, multiboxing is not botting - botting is automation of tasks so that they don't require human input. Multiboxing multiplies the amount of required input by the number of accounts being multiboxed. ISBoxer multiplies human input across all accounts simultaneously. Neither generate input without a human present to provide it.

Second, as I've pointed out before there's already a lot of ISK to be made by mining. There's nothing that I can do as a multiboxer that a group of players couldn't do themselves - there's no way I can make my ships mine better than a solo player can. The fact that I can make plenty from locusting proves that solo miners can do so as well, if they choose to. There's already an economic incentive for other real players to take up some mining, it's just that incentive isn't strong enough to make them overcome their dislike for mining itself. As far as I'm concerned, that's working as intended - not every activity in EVE is going to be attractive to every player. The fact only a minority like mining doesn't mean it needs to be changed.



As an FYI, the Mack setup I used had 16k EHP before boosts, 19.9k with them. That's with 3 IHU IIs. Tank is a bit higher against Hybrid turrets in particular, though. For comparison, the Skiffs I use today have about 63k EHP before boosts and 79.7k with them, again higher against hybrids. The Skiff is definitely tougher, but a lot less so than you like to make it out to be. It's not over 100k EHP with 3 IHU/MLUs, that's for sure.

Also, what you're saying is "there's no downside to not using the ships designed for mining solo while you're not mining solo". Thanks for that startling insight!



Why do people buy PLEX from CCP? Because they want to exchange those PLEX for ISK. What do multiboxers do? We exchange ISK for PLEX. Multiboxers increase the demand for PLEX, which increases the price. The higher price makes more players inclined to buy PLEX from CCP, as they get more ingame ISK for their RL money. Flip that around and remove the demand coming from multiboxers, the price will plummet significantly, there'll be less people willing to spend their RL money at that exchange rate and so CCP gets less cash.



This wouldn't work, for much the same reason it doesn't work today - because there's absolutely nothing that forces a ganker to engage a defender over a miner. If players could gank without losing their ships, they'd bring better ships; instead of seeing Catalysts it would most likely be sensor-boosted artillery Tornados which would drop in, volley a miner, warp out, do whatever dance they need to shake CONCORD then come back and do it again. The presence of defenders is still basically moot because there's so little they could do to stop that. Alternately you'd see gankers in heavily tanked Tech 3s with a Falcon on call to disrupt any tackle, because there's no reason not to use the expensive-but-effective ships if you're not guaranteed to lose them.

You can't get 100k EHP vs hybrid turrets on a yield fit skiff? Must be a bad fit. With boosts, you can get close to 90% kinetic and 86-88% to thermal resists with 14k shields on a skiff. That's about 110-120k EHP against hybrid turrets already, in shields alone. Then roughly a further 15-20k from armor and hull HP. 130-140k EHP vs hybrid weapons in a max yield skiff. Such a highly tanked fit should not be possible on a max yield fit. Devs went overkill with the Skiff.

A max yield mackinkaw can get just a tenth of that tank. If you tank a mackinkaw with a damage control and tank kinetic and thermal, yield suffers, skiff becomes the better miner, and you can still hope for at most around 40k EHP vs hybrid weapons, the max yield skiff tank is still 300% stronger. That's why there is such an imbalance in the number of skiffs being used, the skiff overall, is an imbalanced ship.

I see two options, reduce skiff HP, it's ridiculous that a yield fitted skiff that has a higher yield than a tanked mackinkaw has 300% more EHP, this is the better option. The other option is a direct nerf to skiff yield, but this seems pointless when a nerf to skiff EHP would be the best of both worlds. If people want to use a max yield skiff, they can, and they'll still be the least likely to be ganked barge, gankers would rather target weaker mackinkaws, and I am sure there would be more of those in use. If they're paying attention, it will be very hard to die in a skiff even if the EHP was halved. If they truly want to be in the tanked barge and never die, they can always fit a damage control to the skiff, nobody will try to gank that.

I just see something wrong the current system where max yield fit skiffs are the only fit because the tank is so strong anyway that there's no need to fit for less than max yield.

How are you calculating the EHP? You using the true EHP or just a program that gives the average EHP? It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you have 88% vs kinetic and thermal and have 14k shield HP, then you know you have 116k EHP vs kinetic and thermal in shields alone, not counting hull and armor. 90% kinetic 86% thermal is possible with boosts, so i can average that to 88 to each.

Just wondering what the problem is here..

I mean, if I had 20 accounts, i'd need approx 16bn isk a month to break even with the costs of PLEX.

It's 4bn isk a week.. really? I mean, why bother? what's the point in managing 20 accounts, just to chuck 16bn isk a month at plexes? It's way too much work, i think about it and my brain bleeds at the prospect of 'can i be assed' to imagine waiting about for an ice field to appear then locust it..

if one procurer or whatever isn't able to fetch 800m isk a month, it's just not worth the hassle or bother. I certainly cannot be assed at all to try to get 800m isk worth of ice these days a month with a procurer. I'd quit EVE utterly in a few days burned out and stressed to hell with all the ice changes anyway.

If people want to spend their time with 20 accounts being forced to mine for 4bn isk a week before they break even, it's up to them, these people have way more staying power than i ever will.

Yet the belts are full of these types, you're lucky if one doesn't come to gobble up the belt at 2 or 3 times the rate it would have normally gone down. There's loads of guys with 10 miners about, less of the guys with 20, but they are around. Let's imagine there is for example 8 or 10 miners in a belt, this guy with 20 miners turns up, now there is 30 miners and this one guy is taking the majority of the belt for himself, making a ton of isk, at the expense of normal players, and doing it all risk free.