Warfare & Tactics

Oh boy, it's one of these threads again...

Look, this has been run into the ground over and over again. I multibox, and I also fly with my friends. I have had success when multiboxing and I have failed hard. I've had much more success with flying with my mates than my alts and I am a very compentent multiboxer. There is no advantage that isn't mitigated by the simple fact that as most of you have stated, it is one person that must divide their attention over multiple clients. Take the average boxer with his alts vs a corp with the same number of pilots with comparable skills and corp beats boxer more often than not. Sure broadcasting can ensure a better alphastrike from the boxer but that tactic will still be countered the same. A Force Recon or 6 would be a boxers nightmare. ECM's, a few pilgrims bumping,neuting, and tracking disrupting as the boxers trying to get alignment.

Bottom line is this, let CCP ban ISBoxer. I frankly don't care all that much since I can run multiple accounts without it. But if it is banned, know that it takes about 2 minutes to configure a players accounts to run behind vpn/proxy on ISBoxer, and about 30 seconds to configure a variable keystroke delay on said accounts. Not saying I would do this, but it can be done. So all the griping and complaining will only take the easy prey and boxing illiterate off the field, leaving only us... them that are a bit more skilled at the craft of the dreaded "Multibox" and motivation to make themselves that much more undectable.

I disagree.

-coordinated fitting
-coordinated coordination
-multiboxes "normalize"

True, it's strengths are formidable but laughable prone to clever pilots, 10 tricksy minds will almost always do away with 1 controlling 10 clones. Download the trial, set it up and the comment.

Isboxer can allow for certain repetitive actions and simple directions to be automated, but in many examples the moment it goes wrong all that players alts are in jeopardy. And due to the necessary homogeneity of the is boxers characters, creative things that don't involve massive synchonized firepower become very complex to pull off.

Sure some can with practice 'solo' vanguard site incursions, but they'll be much quicker and a lot less likely to lose a ship or two, potentially cascading to all, if they is only providing the firepower with corp mates doing the logistics role. This is what you'll discover.

I tried it and I love it for providing a better interface to manage multiple alts, minimal screens along the bottom of my main client that I can click to swap etc.

Cauldron, you OLD SKOOL!!!

I pulled this link off of EveOnline@Facebook :D

look, i'm sorry about the pseudo necro. I just missed this, and found it on page 2 of warfare & tactics.

Kheeria, Solutio was referring to multiboxers in general, not ISBoxers specifically, and if I don't feel a need to use ISBoxer it doesn't mean I'm an idiot for having an opinion about multiboxing without having tried ISBoxer.

I'll let it slide, because I think you just jumped to a conclusion and saw what you wanted to see. (and you wouldn't have said that otherwise).

since this thread, I have tried ISBoxer and it was only useful for travel. ... mwd cycling, aligning. it would be useful for mining, i think (but i don't mine). There were too many things I could do better manually.

this has also happened and I'm at 10 clients

What I discovered in that trial is: ISBoxer is a crutch, and it's limited compared to a player who -can- manage a gang as individual ships and modules. It took me years to get used to it, but I did, and players who set out multiboxing with ISBoxer never push themselves to that point.

to give you an idea what level of micro management I've done, I think the best example was a trip through a wormhole while escorting an orca past a megathron/T3 camp. I cycled jams, and when I ran out of jams I cycled cloaks. that's just not possible with ISBoxer, unless each control window is duplicated, but at that point you might as well work each client manually. once all jams were good, I got the orca and my recons out, no hard feelings (happy hunting, but it won't be me!)

The popular belief that ISBoxer is the answer is false. It's what people like to believe, that the answer is in some -program-.

relevant: neuroplasticity

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I've watched fraps recordings of my clients, and after-the-fact my reaction time strikes me as incredibly fast. the only explanation I have for this is: when you're in the moment and the adrenaline is pumping, your brain cpu is on overheat.

it's so quick I can't follow my own logic, don't know how else to explain it.

working memory is 7 items of data, plus or minus 2... the workaround is to continuously poll each client in cycles.

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inb4 pseudoscience. I'm doing it in practice, and just trying to explain how (but I don't know the exact, neuropsychological reasons. it should be studied, maybe).

As the famous 12 accounts guy said, there is nothing 3rd part softwares or hardwares can do that you cant do with the simplest of the hardwares that can run eve. I multibox with 3 notebooks, no software and no fancy keyboard, just well connected strategies and singularity training and testing.

You enlist a lot of strategies to counter multiboxing but you forget that multiboxers are just like regular players, they vary in use and formation. Remote multiboxers are the easiest to counter because as long as they rely on a remote link, the ships offering the remote are gunless to be efficient, and the gunboat is little resilient to be effective. Cut the link, and you have two groups of easy targets. No multiboxer as good or as geared as they may, is better than someone focused on one account.

CCP cannot do anything to prevent multiboxing as a whole without nerfing or hurting group game aswell. And you probably will regret the day CCP start to listen to this multiboxing tear threads.

Multiboxing is a part of the EVE universe as it is in any mmo, and all those mmos trying to prevent it are wrecking the game in the process. Being ganked by a multiboxer is no different by being ganked by similar number of individual pilots, from the point of view of the victim, but it is much easier to go wrong to the multiboxer.

The other thread people blame the evil of EVE to afk cloakers, here it is multiboxers, which means that the worse in this game is the multiboxer afk cloaker. LoL

drone assist is the answer to that. ex: 10 ishtars with sentries assisted to a fast-locker

Because someone start from the principle that I would take the hassle to enlist 4 account lets say, train, and equip, just go around shooting random people to look cool.

The problem here is, and always will be EGO. You "monoboxers" (in the lack of better term) only blame multiboxers because you need something to point out as being unfair so you can have the ego that you are better and did what you could but you lost.

Lets enlist some flaws in your reasoning:

- Six pack one person attacks and six monoboxers attacks are way different in power. You cannot go around multiplying the equivalence by the number of accounts.

- As more accounts are handled at once, less powerful they are.

- ISBoxer and most multiboxing softwares use the principle of multi layer click, which is far from being the most effective multiboxing strategy. ISBoxer is like "Windows Wizzard" of multiboxing. Those kind of multiboxers are usually the ones mining, or messing around with people that if lose to them, would lose to a skilled monoboxer aswell.

- Drone assist is another fail try, because the simplest of the information warfare technique will render it unusable, and the multiboxer will have a much less reactive time to counter it than one person has to exploit that advantage. If you lose to that, you still would lose to a skilled monoboxer.

- A true multiboxer that you barely never encounter "randomly" is the fleeting multi input multiboxer, and that I agree is a very nasty exploitation of the multiboxing love eve has. But no sane person will elist 6 monitors, 4 PCs and 10+ accounts just to go around shooting people. That kind of multiboxer wouldnt even bother with skirmishes. These multiboxers you see in fleet sieges that you have 5 or 6 people and 30+ characters or more. And I bet most of the people complaining about the "unfairness of multiboxers" never even faced a fleet engagement.

People use to say that EVE is PvP centric, but it is far from it. This is another thing EVE has in its PR that is just to attract new players and make some feel good about themselves while the big alliances really make the EVE legend.

EVE is about Politics and Alliance wars, as every MMO is. While some elite makes the headlines, random players go around shooting noobies in the face and thinking that makes them PvPers, and cry about balance of ships and multiboxers.

Heh, anybody complaining in this thread should try to pick up isboxer (you can get a week long free trial for it) and see if they can actually use it effectively.

Let me tell you, outside of scenarios where you have like 10 of the same ship, it's pretty much useless for eve for a number of reasons, which I'll list below:

1. Even though you can sync your cursor, the cursor's position is highly dependent on the fps of your clients. Isboxer has an option to set background clients to run at whatever fps you want them to, but if you're not running them at closer to the fps of you main client, your mouse can be slightly desynced, and considering how small eve's menus and dropdrowns are, this can cause huge problems if you're trying to do anything from sync'd fitting, sync'd refitting, targeting etc...

2. Most of the hotkey options aren't really that useful for eve because of the heavy degree of mouse usage that the game requires. For example, there is no way (at least that I know of) for a client to unlock a target without a mouse click. This means that you can't use hotkeys to control all aspects of the clients easily, and you have to use the mouse. This has other issues (see point 1)

3. The videofx feature that lets you mix and match parts of the video of various clients is nice, but ultimately useless since you can just use multiple monitors anyway and it really offers nothing except cluttering up your screen.

4. If you are trying to do anything with ships that are not all exactly the same, most of the options isboxer offers are really not that useful since sync'ing evreything is pointless and you may as well alt-tab to do stuff anyway since you have to click on stuff with the mouse. This isn't like WoW where you can use isoboxer and have 5 guys following you around and use macros to auto-target various stuff while only looking at one client.

Now, the ONLY reason imo to use isboxer in this game is for two reasons (and these are the two reasons I use it for). One is to allow for sync'd firing, i.e. if you're using tornados you can all fire at the same time. The other is that it allows you to set hotkeys for your windows so you can just hit these hotkeys and go to them. When you're using 6+ accounts on a regular basis all doing different things, this is very useful. Prior to using isboxer, I would just memorize how many times i had to press tab in the alt-tab menu to get to the client I wanted. Very annoying. I'm sure this can be done with another program apart from isboxer, but the isboxer software is well made and is straightforward to use. The addition functionalities are interesting and I've played with them, but I can tell you that they offer no really outrageous advantage like some people seem to think.

Ultimately what it comes down is that if you couldn't multibox without isboxer, you won't be able to do it with isboxer, especially using different ships in different roles. Multiboxing requires a huge amount of situation awareness.

I'll give you an example of what I tried to do at one point with isboxer, and eventually gave up on because it required too much concentration and would bug out constantly.

I wanted to run triple escalations in a C5 wormhole using 2 moros, 1 archon, and 2 webbing lokis. I set up my screen such that it showned no full clients, it was just a black screen with a bunch of video feeds from the various clients (that are interact-able with the mouse), I had all the overviews showing and all of the huds, but no areas of space. I had it set up so that i had hotkeys for both of my dreads to fire and such, and I managed to set up a system that allowed me to lock targets without clicking. So I would warp everything in and siege and **** and start shooting, but the way I handled targeting was too complex and required the dread and loki clients to constantly have focus on the overview. This meant that if I ever clicked on any of the screens, I'd lose focus and evreything would get unsynced and it would mean that my dreads would be shooting unwebbed targets and all sorts of crap like this. It was very difficult becuase I needed my lokis to web both the primary and secondary and constantly be swapping webs and TP's, and at the same time I had to constantly be refitting the dread that was being shot by the sleepers. It was extremely stressful, and to top it off, the isboxer video feeds would introduce a little bit of mouse lag so evreything was slow and a little less responsive.

I initially thought it just would take some getting used to, but eventually I gave up because something inadvertantly went wrong every time and I'd have to swap back to just alt-tabbing through the clients to fix it (it's worth noting that I only have one screen).

Isboxer setups become very complex in eve if you want to do anything that approaches being easier than manually controlling each client and this complexity just makes the system fail so often that it's not worth it.

Anybody who says that isboxer is unfair should just try it and then realize that it's a very nice piece of software that simply streamlines the multiboxing process (which is really something the eve dev's should be doing anyway since EVREYBODY who knows how to play and has played for more than a year has more than one client). It doesn't offer any unfair advantage.