Assembly Hall

While large multibox fleets are not currently a real issue due to the seldom nature of their occurrence, in theory a game filled with these sorts of players could in fact be a problem.

The solution is not to ban them, as it would be virtually impossible to do so. One person using 4 computers with 4 clients each would be indistinguishable from a few roommates playing the game each with alts logged in. Let alone internet cafes.

The solution in fact comes from reviewing the problems associated with running multiboxed characters. If you watch the Youtube videos of these fleets in action, you will notice that many times commands do not go through to all the clients. You will also notice that moving around in sub-warp speeds is extremely difficult. Lastly, it is overwhelming to manage the fleet when people mess with key components of it; the anchor for instance.

This means multibox fleets are largely reserved to mining, incursions, suicide ganking, smartbombing, and quick bombing runs. To a lesser extent, capital ship warfare. Even trying to multibox an L4 is very difficult due to the necessity to travel to jump gates and get in range of rats 100km away. Incursions are warp in, blap, warp out, which is why the multibox fleets are effective there.

Most importantly, large scale industrial fleets of this size are extremely difficult to protect without CONCORD intervention. This is why they tend to dock up immediately when outside high-sec, instead of staying and fighting despite their superior numbers.

And so, the solution is as follows:
- Redesign mining to be less static and for changes to occur on a per-client basis, forcing the fleets to have to move around more often and micromanage each client too.
- Redesign incursions so they can never be completed by just warping in, locking targets as they approach, and blapping them.
- Redesign rewards in low-sec to be significantly more valuable, and/or nerf rewards in high-sec. This will allow non-multibox users to reap the benefits of engaging in industry in low sec, where most multiboxers dare not go.

There is plenty wrong with it.

Considering the stuff I mentioned DOES cut it, but everyone is in denial, I shall not.

Throughout the not-so-vast time that players have been discussing multiboxing in various mmos, there is a typical trend that always seems to appear. You'll have a side that provides actual arguments and reasoning behind their position, and the other side will just say "nuh uh, its cheating cause (insert refuted argument here)." This thread is a prime example of just that, and a search will yield you more of the same.

All in all, a good laugh

Could not read a lot fo the stuff here so i skimmed most of it or skipped pages past page 3.

Not sure about PVP........
But consider the atitude of ganking and ice fields...(since i believe that is the actual problem/insult being felt)

I dont mine Ice so lets make a hypthetical ice field like the anoms.....
12 ice rocks....maybe 400 pieces of Ice each.

Now lets say each procurer can get 5 pieces per cycle.........

40 ISboxer fleet = 200 pieces per cycle
1 non Isboxer = 5 pieces per cycle

the 1 non ISboxer will get his 5....in the time it takes the Isboxer fleet to get its 195 per rock

so 195x12 = 2,340 pieces of ice for the Isboxer fleet
and
The non isboxer will get 60 pieces of ice.

then have to wait another 4 hrs for the ice field to spawn again..............

I see a problem with this as the non Isboxers are gaining ice/isk much more slowly to the ISboxer fleet idea. Eventually they are forced to give up to find other ways to plex or run their industry....as in fuel block production...or collecting fuel for Jump drives.
This i believe it the heart of the matter for those that truly wish to ban ISboxer.....because it is an unfair advantage.

Please dont quote me and try to interject something into my mouth that i did not say....it was just a theory upon why some might want to ban ISboxer.

but anyway heres go....lets expan on this theory and then after this take your simply mind pull out a calculator and do the work yourself.

spawn = every 4 hrs.
DT-DT = roughly 24 hrs expect on major patch days...then its more like 23.5 to23.75 hrs

So 6 spawns per day x 2,340 = 14,040 (ISboxer)
6 Spawns per day x 60 = 360 (the single guy)
both assuming this all they do every day all day long

14,040x30 days = 421,200
360 x 30 = 10,800

now lets say avg price is 275,000 isk per piece
421,200x275,000= 115,830,000,000 ISK or 147.55 plex (figured at 785 million isk per plex)
10,800 x 275,000 = 2,970,000,000 or 3.783 plex

now lets take a 3 month(yearly qtr) into account
147.55 x 3 = 442.65 - (40x3) = 322.65
3.783x3 = 11.349 - 3 = 8.349

at this rate you can see the difference is astounding in terms of wealth....
now expand on the problem even more......

Maybe like most of them the single pilot doesnt have all day nor every day to mine the ice......
so on avg its probably more like 5-15 pieces of ice per day 3 times a week because competing with the ISboxer fleet is too difficult.
so lets take 10x3 = 30 x 10 = 300 pieces of ice
275,000 x 300 = 82,500,000..........oh wow not even enough to plex......the first month is a bust....2 weeks into the 2nd month the non-ISboxer says screw this i have to do something else because i can no longer make ISK or keep my business operating this way.

Botting and RMT was the measure of having botting fleets mining all day every day..........allowing ISboxer gives the Botters a different and legit way to do the same thing without really having to change how they conduct RMT bussiness. They still push the little guy whom is the one that wants to play a game.....not trying to make RL money off it.

sigh...im sorry Par'gellen.......

But again like i said to the last guy at one point............

what i wrote......IS A THEORY BASED SCENARIO ON WHY THE REASONING BEHIND THOSE THAT WISH ISBOXER TO BE BANNED.

and thats it............

I mean FFS people, i dont care about your ice, i dont care about your pvp(other than the fact it makes me ISK every time you blow stuff up). At one point i saw an underlying question to explain the reasons for banning ISboxer.....

So i answered the question by pointing out how the pro-banners are thinking. Other than that...it means squat.
And if your point out the fact of being apart from fleet ops....not being part of a corp or at least a community thing and just wanking off in the corner by yourself..........well you deserve to be blown up, you deserve to have no friends in EvE, you deserve to be ganked.....maybe you should go back to WoW or whatever other game you came from because this is not the place for you.

And i have FC'd before, and your explanation of that is pretty apt....up till the point you start kicking your mewling peeps out or shooting them yourself for being a carebear too much.

Wasn't an apology....as what i got from this part of your reply was that you do not like playing as fully valued member of the community but would rather simply supercede others that may or may not be able to compete with you.

it seems you were saying....'i dont a corp', 'i dont need an alliance', and 'have no reason to be concerned with overall health of the game in general'

and so my response was not an apology.....but the parts directed at you....were basically yeah STFU your not worth much more than the KM someone gets for taking out your ships....not because you ISbox...but because your attitude with it is indifferent to the long term health of the community

Personally I don't like or use isboxer.

Would be hard to implement a fair, accurate and consistent mechanism to ban people using it.

An attempt might cause more angst than its worth.

tl;dr: If ISBoxer does not give an advantage to players that use it, why do they use it?



It isn't about the single pilot/character. Of course any single pilot/character is no better than another. Its about the single player at a computer that is controlling the accounts. The single player multiboxing 20 accounts with ISBoxer is gaining resources at 20x the rate of a single player with 1 account.

Let us suppose that that second player also has 20 accounts; all equally skilled. But he is not using ISBoxer. Can he/she manage all 20 accounts as efficiently as the person using ISBoxer? Theoretically, yes. Realistically? Hell, no. When an actual player has to manually input every action 20x, he or she will make more mistakes than the ISBoxer. It will also take 20x the time to make all those inputs. If the activity is of a short enough duration, it becomes mechanically impossible to do so.

This kind of scenario comes into play when you get into pvp. There is no way in hell one player can manually pilot a squad of bombers effectively without ISBoxer. It requires simultaneous coordination across the entire fleet that cannot be attained with only one player across several accounts.

ISBoxer multiplies a single player's inputs. It reduces fatigue and the opportunity for mistakes by doing for the player what he otherwise could not do. It is the difference between 1 guy running back and forth between 20 machine gun positions, or 1 guy remotely controlling 20 machine guns. When used for resource gathering, it allows one player to gain an in-game advantage over other players that are not using it. If it didn't, there would be no reason to use it.

As for whether or not CCP could write code to detect ISBoxer, of course they can. They already have and use it to detect bots.

When you have 20 guys in local and 18 of them are named BorgCube[XXX], where XXX is a 3-digit numeric sequence starting at 000 and ending at 020, all of them are in Mackinaws, all the ships are named the same, and all of them are mining ice at the same anom from the same location in space, or sitting at POS inactive because waiting for the ice anom to respawn, its not hard to figure out what is going on.

CCP already has detection algorithms for easily predictable botting methods (ie: specific actions being taken at specific intervals, inhumanly long gaming sessions, etc). I see no reason they cannot do something similar for ISBoxer. All it does is multiply one player's inputs by however many accounts they have set up. So the inputs should all arrive at the same time. If they aren't then either its not ISBoxer, or they have another layer of automated input modificaton running to disguise or alter their inputs.

I've seen the picture of some dude that tied 8 mice together with rubber bands and pencils as an illustration of how one could multibox in order to circumvent any multiboxing restrictions CCP might put in place. Of course, I dare anyone to actually try something that obviously shoddy and facetious. Even if it mechanically and electrically worked, good luck getting it to work consistently. At that point, you'd be better off just buying PLEX and selling them on the market for all the RL effort being put into it.

This is the unfortunate nature of sandbox gaming. There will always be players that are so desperate to be "better" than the next player that they will take any advantage they can get.

Imo, ISBoxer provides an in-game advantage to a single player over other single players that do not use it. As such, it is my opinion that it should be banned.