EVE General Discussion

How would YOU detect a broadcaster?
Can you tell the difference between someone broadcasting and someone using round robin key sets?
Can you tell the difference between someone running 9 or 10 accounts, who has a highend machine with good internet and someone who is broadcasting to multiple clients via software?
Are you going to report and possibly get someone banned because YOU think he is broadcasting?

I have 9 accounts that can all do the same task very efficiently OR they can do many different tasks nearly as efficiently.
Am I multicasting or do I play my accounts as single entities, just very quickly?
Would you report me as a broadcaster / multicaster.

The simple idea CCP is accepting reports of breaches from players is going to see lots of multiboxers come under scrutiny for no other reason than - his characters all have similar names (mine don't).
Like any EULA breach, it falls on the player to prove his or her innocence, how does one go about proving he or she did not break the rules if CCP get it wrong?
EG;
CCP got it wrong, they believe I am multicasting and gave me a 30 day ban but I am not - How do I prove it is due to the amount I spent on my computer and the strength of my internet that allows me to play multiple accounts so efficiently?

yeah about incursion "communities." the PVE is isolated from the rest of the game yet it affects the game economy. I don't agree with its existence. mining is different, it contributes. I'm basically saying incursion communities can die too. one can wish.

If someone was botting, this change meant nothing to them as botting was already against the EULA as defined by input automation without requiring human interaction, human input, or a person behind the keyboard issuing commands.

As for the silly notion that this will stop all ISBoxing..... No. This will not stop people from running ISBoxxed fleets at all if they are dedicated. I predict that people will start to switch to drone-assist comps, alpha-heavy comps, or will head to nullsec where they can run multiple marauders or AFKtars and still earn decent ISK.

CCP wants more player interaction? Awesome. They did a decent job with the drone aggro in NPC AI, even though I personally dislike it and would've loved to see NPCs using drones, I understand the reasoning behind the change.

But this is the wrong change to make if they want to be taken seriously as a company instead of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. They have a rich history of looking at a problem and taking the time to find the right solution, or the best one with the legacy code, and they implement it.
The best example in my mind is the drone assist upper limit of 50 per target. There was an issue raised by a vocal subset of the EVE playerbase (unlimited drones being triggered by a single Loki or Huginn), and there was an array of changes they could've done. They could have removed drone assist outright, they could hard-cap it, they could've left it untouched and said "Everything is working fine". If they chose to remove it completely, they would've been impacting more than just the slowcat fleets. If they left it alone, they would've seen a massive surge in Pantheon / slowcat fleets, and the minimum bar for holding SOV in nullsec would be that much higher. Instead, they capped it at 50, a reasonable number that would prevent the massive carrier blobs while letting small fleet gatecamps, roams, incursion, and wormhole fleets work just fine with minimal effort required to change procedure.

Unless you're completely blind, the same thing happened with ISBoxing. A small subset of the playerbase (F1 monkeys in nullsec, idiots who aren't willing to distinguish between kitchen sink incursion fleets and elite communities, and the rare miner who doesn't understand words like 'destroyer' and 'Talos' and kicks up a whine whenever there's a boxxed miner in the belt) raised a ruckus. CCP looked at the array of choices (Ban ISBoxer and all similar software altogether, change the gameplay so that single-boxed characters would have an advantage, or tell the vocal players to HTFU and explore the many options available to them in the wonderful sandbox that is EVE. In our eyes, CCP went for a (not very balanced) compromise between banning ISBoxer, and telling players to HTFU, without looking at changing the gameplay to reward solo players or dualboxers, and without bothering to ask any questions to the ISBoxing community nor presenting any credentials, graphs, studies, or information supporting these changes. I'll say it again; I've personally seen more people complain and quit because of CODE in it's relatively short lifespan than I have of people complaining about ISBoxers in my 3ish years of EVE.

Don't agree with incursions or incursion communities? How is mining not PvE?

mining is fairly noble, imo. players need miners. in contrast, no one needs incursion runners.

despite incursions being level 4 missions on steroids, it makes a difference what players do with incursion income. if it's to support activity elsewhere in the game, that makes sense to me. farming incursions to support a lossy PVP habit, for example. but those players whose mains are -all- incursion pilots, and their only goal is green, blue, and purple incursion ships? it really doesn't contribute to the pulse of this game.

when it comes to key broadcasted fleets... miners drive prices down. incursion runners... not so much.

Still can't believe how silly people are.

1) Search for clients running on the same IP.
2) Check how synchronized commands are given by the clients.

If all the ships react the same way within a given time frame -> ban.

It's very easy to spot such a behavior if the ships are in the same system, but programs are not limited to a visual feedback like a player. I spotted an is multicast boxer just two days ago in Jita. A fleet of 15 Herons warped to a jump gate and away from it like a fish swarm. Perfect synchronization, no time delay. No human can do this, at least not for a longer period. You would go crazy after some jumps.

After seeing this I could only think and thank again that this will be a ban in near future.

o/

So apparently you've never heard of fleet warp.

Trading makes considerably more isk than any multiboxer could, and requires no broadcast software.

Wrong. Consumption of PLEX is as good, if not a slightly better income stream for CCP. If the amount of PLEX consumed drops too much, so will the price, and so less people will be willing to pay for them with cash. Unless every multiboxed character lost is replaced with a new account, then obviously the consumption of PLEX will decrease.

That said, most multiboxers won;t be quitting as they can still multibox in other valid ways, so it's irrelevant. It certainly sounds like you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about though.

It might be interesting to note that consumption rate is likely people actually using the Plex they have, where as a lot of people store them as investments. As such number of Plex purchased off the market is often higher than Plex consumed (IE activated) and thus why prices go up even when Plex consumption (activation) seems static.

Because CCP has backed itself into a corner. The design of EvE requires at some levels that you multibox. To do a 180 would require a fundamental change in EvE's design, from top to bottom. That's a huge amount of work in an exercise that will be the financial equivalent of an orbital strike.
The flip side is to allow completely unregulated multibox use which obviously makes some people unhappy and potentially causes issues with the way income scales for some activities.

Both of these options are clearly unacceptable to CCP, so they've resorted to enforcing some vauge line in the sand that they can shift in whatever direction the winds blow. Sadly I can imagine that leaves anyone who lives near that line feeling like they are being jerked around for showing EvE 10 years of loyalty.

Of course it will. People who are willing to spend $15 to get 900m isk aren't necessarily going to spend the same amount of cash for half that in isk. Personally though, I don't think much will change at all because only a small fraction of multiboxers will stop, and like you rightly pointed out, consumption occurs in other ways.

At the end of the day though, less subs is less income for CCP, regardless of how you want to dress it up. You might want to pretend players paying with PLEX don't contribute, but it's simply not the case.

It's not a botting support tool, there's a massive difference between multiboxing tools and botting. Remarks like that really do prove you have no clue what you are on about. Besides, you still seem to have missed the part where ISBoxer will still be fully usable following the change. Only one feature has been banned which arguably isn't even the most important one.