EVE General Discussion

It's not quite 1 keypress. It's 1 keypress per action, so with a 6 man gank it's 1 for the warp, 1 to lock, 1 to fire guns scram and web, 1 to evac, 1 to dock. Following the change it's 1 to warp, 6 to lock, 6 to fire guns scram and web, 1 to evac, 6 to dock. Multibox ganking will still be a thing, especially with round robin keybinds which will make the change almost irrelevant.

ISBoxer is really no different to how I used to have to click sell on 100 different items I'm selling, enter the prices on each, and click OK on each. Now I can select the whole lot, click sell once, put in all of the amounts, then click OK once. It's just a way of not getting RSI from the badly designed UI.

And while that's a pretty dumb defense on it's own, it's a response to the people who seem to think you just install isboxer and it's ready to go with as many clients as you want. Realistically, it takes a while to set up, and it's reduces per character efficiency. A 10 man broadcast mining fleet for example achieves a far lower actual:potential yield ratio than a manually controlled fleet as you can't reasonably take individual character circumstance into account if you are controlling via broadcast. That's why many people who use broadcasting in ISBoxer mining fleets up to ~20 characters only use it to undock and set up. After that they switch between characters as required.

I see certain players on here are still trying to put smoke screens up about the real problem.

So called multiboxing has nothing to do with why this ban was brought in, multiboxing by itself isn't an issue whether it's 3 accounts or 303 accounts.

The issue is how they are controlled in game.

When anyone has to use an outside programme to directly control multiple clients and what they are doing in the game, it's cheating..

Let's face it, how many of these fleets would exist without these programmes? Would any player actually contemplate 10,20,30+ accounts without some way of automating what happens? Or without third party help?

There's players on here already talking about how they could possibly have found a work around, if that's the case then you obviously have far too many accounts to control effectively using the tools provided by CCP, but I hope you succeed, and get hit by the ban hammer.

Because guys like you never learn, you'll just go down kicking and screaming. Bye.

'Directly control multiple clients' from a spreadsheet?

Wow I gotta learn my XML better

Nah, need SQL interacting with the right CREST endpoint for it.

Sarc aside, I missed the directly in the above. However, ISboxer doesn't directly control anything. It does not issue commands. It overrides the "this window is active and thus the only thing taking input" flag

Which is fine.

It's when it does that AND MULTIPLIES (almost limitlessly) the action that the issues begin...

Whether on the industry side of things it's having multiple miners all starting their lasers in sync: which devalues the mineral market - which then affects solo miners by slimming their margins and results in cheaper than intended ship prices = 'meh just another titan loss, it's already replaced' attitudes from the big coalitions. Industry is still pvp.

Or for the combat toons we have multiboxed bomber, catalyst and dreadnaught fleets all requiring pretty much the same attention and direction as a single pilot, yet arguably being more effective than a corresponding number of individuals; which obviously imbalances the pvp side of things as well as the multiboxing incursion fleets causing inflation from the isk rewards and devalued LP exchange rates from the pve side of things - which also affects the pvp side of things because these pilots/alts can replace their losses far more quickly and easily than solo pilots.

Personally I multibox just 2 clients without any external software and just a single (24") screen and as a result I have to be very passive with one account whilst the other is actively doing stuff.

Wrong. You don't like it, that doesn't make it cheating. Even with broadcasting removed, there will still be other allowed methods and tools for assisting in the control of multiple accounts.

Most of them. Most multiboxing vets were multiboxing long before we were using ISBoxer. ISBoxer simply trades a loss in per character efficiency for a reduction in effort.

Wrong again. There are many players who improve their ability to play with out of game tools, like James Baboli pointed out. People seem to have no issue using eve-market data, EFT, dotlan, Elinor, Eve-praisal, etc.

And the workarounds being discussed are allowed and valid methods of using ISBoxer without broadcasting. ISBoxer itself isn't banned. CCP won't (or at least shouldn;t, legitimate players are very likely to get banned in error) swing the ban hammer at people who are following the rules.

Solo miners will never have high margins. Even if ISboxer were banned completely, they would still fall behind multiboxing miners. And their income wouldn't go up that much under any circumstances, because there will always be someone willing to do the same job for less. As for null groups, they don't get the bulk of their income from multibox mining. Most of their income comes from moon goo and rental income. Again, removing multibox mining would not affect this at all.

And all of these things happen without ISBoxer as well. And if you look at per-character efficiency, multiboxers are below individual pilots. Your issue is entirely that one physical player is getting the reward. If you didn't know it was one player, it wouldn't be a problem. Therefore it seems your issue is envy rather than a balance issue.

That's your choice. You are allowed to play the way you want to. Why should other people be force to play your way, just because you prefer it?

Correct, solo miners would still be less efficient than unreplicated multiboxers, but replication makes the multiboxing even easier to do. Same amount of effort for ever increasing gains...just start a new mining fleet in a new system and they can be pretty much perfectly replicated.

The fact that instead of 20, only 1 player has to spend manhours doing something which affects the markets and safety of other players? I think that's a pretty big deal in an MMO where some of the alliances have thousands of players and where attrition is a big part of the warfare metagame.

It is partially a decision, but also I don't choose to spend $50/year on software to do it for me, is this pay2win that you require such software (or laughably bad free competitors) to compete in this game as a solo player?

No one is saying you need it to be a decent solo player, and it is almost entirely useless to you as a solo player, multiboxing being by definition not solo. The fact that there exist configurable tools which reduce effort to do something (usually with a strong loss of precision or efficiency) just means that people are not shoehorned into only playing a single character.

Well you can automate input without round robin too. Automation is not allowed regardless, since that's botting. Round robin just means you don't need to go alt-tabbing between clients all the time, the button itself just diverts to the next client when it's pressed.


That really depends on what you mean when you say "efficient". For most, efficiency is measure at Actual Yield/Potential Yield on a per-character basis. So if you can pull 1000m3/min and you pull 950/min, you are 95% efficient. In this regard, a solo player will *always* be able to achieve higher efficiency than a multiboxer, as it's simple to keep track of ore amount in rocks and do partial cycles. A "normal" multiboxer will be better off than a braodcaster because they will be able to do the same, albeit with less precision than a solo player. Again I think you confuse efficiency with total amount a players (not character) can pull, which will always be more with more characters regardless of how they are controlled.

Which happens with or without isboxer. The game is designed to support multiboxing as a key feature. Power of two is there for that exact reason.

So yes, it's a choice. And I don't "require" any software. I choose to pay for helpful software, just as a choose to have multiple monitors and decent PC. Don't mistake luxury for necessity. I've multiboxed without isboxer in the past, and up until this thread I wasn't subscribed to isboxer since I would down multiboxing a while back.