A few weeks back over on Reddit, in the EVE Online subreddit, the whole place spent about ten days ranting about the evils of multiboxing and how it was ruining the game and that CCP/Fenris needed to DO SOMETHING about it NOW!
That is always the way. If nothing else, Reddit carries with it a sense of urgency and demands for action, usually coupled with bad or unworkable solutions. The wisdom of crowds can only get you so far.
Then the whole thing kind of petered out as everybody got their say and the cynics chimed in about how players with multiple accounts were all that was keeping the game going and that the company was never going to cut off a lucrative revenue stream.
But even with the current swell of rage spent for the moment, the question remains as to whether or not multiboxing is bad and how bad it really is.
Of course, multiboxing has been a thing in EVE Online since forever. Having a second account is such a force multiplier for so many things that it pretty much feels like a requirement for anybody really serious about the game. There are all sorts of uses, from hauling support to scouting a route to being able to light a cyno so you can move your own capital ship around to simply having eyes on two locations at the same time.
I was out multiboxing before the end of my first full year in the game, because jet can mining with a single account simply led to theft and griefing. So I got a second account to haul my ore while I mined with my main
Mammoth and Retriever back in 2007
Now, I don’t think a second account is really what people are on about… though you never know with Reddit. Like everything, there are the people who can see reasonable bounds and those who are absolute purists.
Back in 2009 I did a post with a poll about what people considered cheating, and multiboxing landed pretty far down the list, down in what I considered the “discomfort zone,” where it probably wasn’t cheating, but it wasn’t exactly endorsed either. (Referred to as “multi-play” on the chart below. It was a different era.)
Poll Results
So it felt, at that time… and that was kind of a while ago… that the concept wasn’t hugely bothersome. But context matters.
I think people are more likely to be upset about fleets of multiboxers than my dual boxing scenario back in 2007.
Pretty blue lasers of a multi-boxing ice mining fleet… in 2011, but I don’t have anything more recent
Now, I want to divert for a minute to distinguish mere multiboxing from input broadcasting.
Input broadcasting is using software to control multiple accounts by sending them all the same command. This was a plague for a bit in New Eden, with stealth bomber fleets being controlled by a single person executing perfectly synchronized fleet destroying bomb runs.
Input broadcasting is already explicitly against the rules in EVE Online and getting caught will get you a suspension or a ban on multiple offenses.
It is also against the rules in most other MMORPGs. How enforcement is going is a legit question, but there was a point in WoW when groups of five shaman, all being controlled by input broadcasting, were an absolute bane in retail, being used to farm for gold sellers.
And the same problem has come up in EverQuest, to the point that some of their special servers have been designated as “true box,” which means that multiboxing is not allowed and that Daybreak is using code to attempt to prevent the behavior. (While input broadcasting is also against the EULA, the company seems less interested in doing anything about multiboxing on the live servers.)
The true box idea came up on the special servers due to player complaints. But when asked to vote on the parameters for the most recent such server, Frostreaver, the polling came out against true box. So opinions clearly vary.
But neither of those titles really give you advantage in game, neither has a real multiplier effect, the way EVE Online does. And you do not often have to look too hard in New Eden to find somebody running a fleet of 5, 10, 20, or even 50 accounts, often with the same name and a number to sort them out.
Borg Units 83 to 87
That those characters are numbered up into the 80s at least implies that there are more than just the five I spotted when passing through Amarr space.
And that isn’t an idle implication. You can find whole corporations, like
There are sizable fleets of multiboxers out there, but what is the problem?
Well, there is always the “fairness” problem and some argument about pay to win, but those are pretty vague.
I saw a post from a year ago that tried to sum up some key elements, appropriately titled Multiboxing is Killing EVE, so I am just going to steal from that rather than craft my own list:
- Faction Warfare? Get ready to fight entire fleets controlled by a single player.
- Mining? Find a good ore spot? A multiboxer will show up with 15 ships and wipe it clean.
- Market? PLEX prices keep skyrocketing because these multiboxers generate insane amounts of ISK and just buy up PLEX to sustain their armies.
I have no experience with faction warfare and, as this post is a year old, it might not take into account CCP/Fenris deciding to try and price control PLEX, though the economics side of my brain thinks that PLEX pricing rising high enough would discourage multiboxers. But it would also harm everybody who goes to purchase PLEX as well as reducing PLEX transactions which would in turn hurt the company’s bottom line, so I suspect they won’t experiment with that idea.
The mining thing though, that I have seen. That is where multiboxing without the need to use input broadcasting is a real force multiplier. And if you search for multiboxing posts the multi character mining blight gets brought up frequently. These include tales of people being rude or threatening if you show up in their belt to somebody who had their own suicide gank alts to blow you up if you dared mine their rocks.
Annoying stuff and the sort of thing that having a PvP title brings with it… though people are only marginally worse to each other in general in New Eden than they are in Azeroth in my experience. But people take their ship being blown up more seriously than somebody camping the graveyard or low key harassing your group.
So it is more than an annoyance and could be classified as an actual problem.
The question is, what should be done about it?
And, to follow on, what can we actually expect CCP/Fenris to do about it?
That second part is the trick, because the company could try to ban all multiboxing, but that would be a disaster. First, players will find ways to work around any such ban, so when multiboxing is a crime, only the criminals will multibox or some such. Also, it would limit revenue when the game is probably pretty dependent on people paying for multiple accounts.
At some level the company sees the person with 150 Omega accounts as 150 times more valuable than me and my single account. (I am currently down to one Omega account.) You will never convince me otherwise.
It feels like the normal action of PvP might put a damper on some of the activity. Unless you’re input broadcasting you’re unlikely to be very deft at combat in faction warfare, at least against groups. But against a singleton you’re going to be unbeatable likely, and there are a lot of lone wolves out there.
PvP doesn’t do much for high sec mining fleets. The war dec restrictions keep corps safe, and even if those were rolled back the multiboxers would just revert to NPC corps for safety at the cost of higher taxes.
Out in null sec… well, multibox mining is the norm. But at least out there alliances own the systems and set their own rules to limit abusing people who aren’t running multiple accounts. Mining drama kept to a minimum by tossing out people who create too much mining drama.
This feels like a problem with no simple answer, something that can’t be solved by a “just do X” sort of action. (Which is about all Reddit can manage. We do love to yell simple yet impractical solutions at the company over there.)
So how does this get solved?
My gut reaction is the Invincible meme.
The only real answer I can find
Again, CCP/Fenris is a business and, no matter how much they might protest, they are not going to eliminate a revenue stream to preserve the integrity of the game. If anything, history shows they will tell us they care about such things, then will go ahead and do what they said they would not do anyway. (See the whole selling skill points issue.)
And therein lies the trick. How do you make multiboxing less oppressive to those who have to operate around it without removing the incentive system that makes people multibox and makes the company money?
I am open to ideas. But anything that does not take into account the company revenue side of things is tough to take seriously.
TL;DR: Multiboxing kind of sucks, but it makes money so where is the incentive to fix it?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 