EVE General Discussion

As a former high sec multiboxing miner I would have to say that CCP has been taking steps to make multiboxing harder.

The first was the ice belt change. If you were around before the ice anomoly change over, you would have seen fleets on the scale of 100's of miners that could sit in the same spot 23.5/7 and never clear the belt. With the anomolies, it is much harder to sustain a fleet of that size in high sec, but it is still a matter of trying to mine "your share" before anyone else.

The next was the massive revamp on ISBoxer policy. Once again, you would see massive fleets chewing up everything in site. And without ISBoxer and similar apps, it is much harder to operate fleets of that size.

Lastly, for me at least, came the change to OGB. This really messed with the efficiency of my little setup. I don't think I will ever play with more than 3 miners again.

But what it comes down to is that mining is a necessary evil in Eve. There are only a select few people who can stand the monotony of grinding rocks so ships can be built. And those happy few must maintain the demand for minerals. If you remove multiboxing you will reduce the overall supply of mins, which will make everything else in Eve more expensive. In the long run it might settle, but in the short run you could create havoc.

Well, you address two very different things together: multiboxers and botters. Multiboxing is allowed, botting is not. So regarding botters I agree with you 100%.

Multiboxing, however, is different. Many - I don't have the numbers but my guess is much more than 50% - players have more than one account. Especially new players choose multiple alts as their main toon does not have all the skillpoints they want. So specializing on different accounts helps to catch up to older players. If you kill multiboxing, you'll kill eve.

There is - from your point of view - no difference if you share an asteroid belt with 20 individual players in a fleet or one multiboxer with 20 accounts. The belt will be mined in the same amount of time.

Well you might already have guessed it - I am one of the multiboxers.

I do not use any program to help me but alt-tab between accounts.

Anyway, let me explain why I do it:

I started as a solo miner last year. It was boring. It was sooooooo boring. I hated it. But I also loved it because it was quite nice after a day working to relax while mining.

So I was starting to improve my mining experience. I started another account. Let it skill up and use another retriever. While doing it my main account was ganked by CODE. So I decided maybe it is better to have another toon fly an Orca and use Procurers and later Skiffs for the miners. 3 Accounts. I started to put up an Excel sheet to calculate profit. Calculations suggested it is even more profitable per toon to have more miners. Another two accounts. Now I was mining too much to live without a hauler. So I started another toon to haul my stuff to a station. But the hauler did cost a plex per month and i needed another two miners to cover the cost..

Right now I am running a 14 account mining fleet that might look scary to a solo miner. Especially if i warp in with orca, obelisk and 12 skiffs. But for me it is fun. Mining is not boring any more but demanding. It is really complicated to get all miners running, cover all the drones, move the loot to orca and freighter.

So, at the end it is all about having fun while killing time playing a game.

I used to regularly run a mining fleet with 1 Orca, 6 Skiffs plus a freighter. I still dust the fleet off now & then.

All were operated "manually" as I am fortunate enough to have a decent PC & 3 monitors. I never ran AFK (except for maybe a quick bio occasionally).

All my accounts are subbed via SP farming & I use my mining income to replace ships lost in PvP or buy blingy stuff on my incursion ships. It took me 5 years of paying subs to get all of these characters to that level.

I know several other people who do much the same thing & I see no reason why this is a problem.

The only issues worth complaining over are people using software to multi-box or people AFK for extended periods. Competing for resources (or anything else for that matter) with other players is the very basis of EvE.

It sounds like you are a single miner competing for resources with many other people in a system. You are still generating the same per hour income as a solo miner, the only difference being belts might be depleted faster with more people in system. Simple answer - move to a quieter system. From personal experience there are some very quiet systems around where you can mine 24/7.