EVE Online mission multiboxing ships ?

[moog]

As for why Eve gets rewards, that I dont know. The only reward they deserve I think is getting everyone on 1 game server (though dont show up to the same system or well crash haha).

Agh! That's such a spurious claim!

Everyone might be in the same "universe" but each system is limited in population and it's damned annoying being stuck at a portal being unable to get into the next system as it's technically full!

[Redbeard]

Yeah thats why I said dont go to the same system lol. I agree with you.

[Khatovar]

Please be aware, I have sent e-mails to a number of MMORPG teams asking for their stance on multi-boxing. This is in an attempt to get a solid list going of who allows what in various games.

I recieved the following from GM Zhainius, EVE Online Customer Support :

"2009.03.09 13:47:00 GM Zhainius
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,

The following 2 EULA articles are considered to apply to this:

"You may not use your own or third-party software to modify any content appearing within the Game environment *or change how the Game is played."

"You may not use macros or other stored rapid keystrokes or other patterns of play that facilitate acquisition of items, currency, objects, character attributes, rank or status at an accelerated rate when compared with ordinary Game play. You may not rewrite or modify the user interface or otherwise manipulate data in any way to acquire items, currency, objects, character attributes or beneficial actions not actually acquired or achieved in the Game."

More specifically regarding your questions:

1: We do not allow this I'm afraid.
2: We also do not allow this.

3 and 4, are not possible due to multi-boxing not being allowed."

Original questions :
1. Do you allow Hardware multi-boxing? [...]
2. Do you allow Software multi-boxing? [...]
3. What are your rules for distinguishing multi-boxing from botting? [...]
4. Do you have "fair play" clauses in your EULA that multi-boxers should be particularly aware of? [...]

*emphasis mine

Once I get responses from my last 4 tickets, I'll be creating a final post, but I wanted to get this out here because I do have a response from these guys. If someone else has something different from a Dev or CM, please let me know so I can e-mail them back again. Screenshots, PMs or e-mails, please. I can't go back with "Some guy I don't really know told me that someone told him that when they asked someone, they said someone who might have been a GM said..."

[hardcoded]

unfortunately the GMs in eve are known to be a source of errors. Petition a senior GM, and you will get a more reliable answer. Even then, there have been numerous issues that senior GMs have been wrong about.(rabble rabble)

Hard to imagine that their official stance would be "multiboxing is not allowed" when the vast majority of high-end players play multiple accounts, and publically so. Even further their promotional material for "the power of two" ( http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/13199 ):

We can give you that someone. We can bring that new dimension to your life, that special fluttery moment when you realize there are now two of you going through life's hardships. Together. As a Power of 2.

[Khatovar]

Well, sent another e-mail requesting a senior GM, we'll see in a few days I guess. Until then, I guess everyone can take the e-mail I got as a warning "GMs might not know what they're talking about and can action you based on their own random guesses. Be warned." Hehe.

[hardcoded]

did a basic search, and while they do not allow direct posting of GM replies , question "can we use keyclone", laster his reply was "Lets multibox".
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard...=929251&page=1
P.S. -- I have some good memories about skirting the no GM posting rule. You should have seen the petition QQ when we took an unpiloted enemy carrier

[Thulos]

As for why Eve gets rewards, that I dont know. The only reward they deserve I think is getting everyone on 1 game server (though dont show up to the same system or well crash haha).

EvE deserves rewards because of its massive fleet battle capabilities. With the new reduced lag in massive fights the epic scale of an 800 man fight is something to behold. Some of the fights i've been in in the past month destroying disBand of Brothers have been spectacular. No other game much less MMO can match the scale of EvE 0.0 Warfare.

As far as Multiboxing eve you recieved an ignorant GM. I've been multiboxing EvE since release and it is allowed. About every few months they reopen their Power of two program which allows you to open a second account for a reduced cost. If they didn't allow multiboxing why on earth would they have a program that allows you to create your own second account. The one thing you cannot due is automate any keystrokes. Since eve's UI is rather simple there is no need to even broadcast keys.

Edit: They even have info in their FAQ section and a dev post about how to run multiple clients on one machine. It even states at the bottom that it requires more than one account to do so.
http://support.eve-online.com/Pages/...cle.aspx?id=65
"Please note that to play EVE with two clients you will need two separate accounts; it is not possible to be online with two separate sessions on the same account."

[Stabface]

As far as multi-boxing missions go, I've ran through a couple of weeks with 4 trial accounts - they limit to 1 trial account per machine so I could only easily run 4 max using some spare hardware & laptop along with my main machine. My thoughts so far :

Controlling multiple accounts:
I did this manually "hardware boxing" with multiple keyboards/mice. It's not really too bad, some key or mouse broadcasting would really help though. PvE in EVE is not terribly input-intensive although it does get a bit busy, you warp in to a mission, lock a few targets and start shooting. With sufficient skills you can have like 6-8+ targets locked at once up to your ship's maximum, giving you quite a few targets to shoot at. Unfortunately without mouse broadcasting there's no good way to lock on to targets on multiple clients at once.


Friend-or-Foe missiles vs Drones... I tried both.

FoF missiles are funny and often refuse to shoot something unless it's shooting at you. I ended up fitting a remote repair module and warping in 1 ship to get aggro, then warping in the rest and running 1 cycle of repair on that guy. Then all my ships would have their FoF missiles able to blow up stuff. I read that you can get around this by setting the NPC factions to -10 standing somehow, but I didn't get around to trying it. Remote repair is pretty powerful in it's own right anyhow and is probably something that a multiboxer will want to use, more on this later. FoF missiles also however shoot at whatever is *closest*, including space walls and other structures. These are harmless and pointless to destroy, you can in most missions it seems avoid this by just flying away from them. If not then they generally don't have too many hitpoints, so it's annoying and inefficient but not a show stopper for FoF's. It is quite funny watching a bunch of frigates orbiting each other in close range, spewing out a constant wave of missiles and just annihilating stuff.

Drones are pretty awesome. They again will only aggro on things that are shooting you... but they have commands to guard or assist another player. So you can simply tell the 'slave' accounts to assist the main ship, and those drones will (almost always) assist whatever your main guy is shooting at with his guns. This ended up working much better than FoFs -- even though the DPS was lower (probably due to skills) it was just much less hassle to kill things. It's far less micro as long as you're not getting aggro on the drones, you only need to lock and shoot at targets on one screen. Just warp in, drop drones -> guard/assist on the alts, then start shooting on your main.

Now, these things are not mutually exclusive, but unfortunately there are no good missile + drone ships. The good missile ships have a small drone bay with no bonuses to drones, and the drone ships have no launchers at all in most cases. It would be full of win if you had a ship with a full rack of FoF missiles and 125MB drone control, but there's no such thing AFAIK.


The best combo I think for combat missions would probably be drone ships on your slaves and a gun or missile ship for your main. You'd be wasting the guns from the drone ships, but from a cost/benefit perspective I think the extra time spent targeting and shooting on all the slaves is just not worth it. I think for level 4's I'd go for Amarr or Minmatar on the main and Gallente (Dominix, duh) for the slaves. I'd skill the slaves towards Sentry drones and remote repair, on the main ship sniper fit. 4 slaves give you 20 sentry drones out, with rigs/skills its something over 2000 DPS all focus firing at whatever your main shoots. This is a rather large amount, And if you mount 2-3 remote armor repairs each on the Dominixes and along with hardeners in the lows on all ship you have a HUGE tank (avoid NPCs that jam you though) Each T2 large remote rep gives something ~100 HP/sec repair, 2-3 of these alone with decent resists gives any ship the ability to tank all the DPS from pretty much any L4 mission.


Another option for multiboxing missions are mining missions. You can apparently blitz these really fast with multiple ships, level 3's have you mine something around 5000-9000m3, and L4s have 45000m3 to mine. The top mining barge (Covetor) is accessible after <2 months training and mines around 1000m3 per minute while a Hulk probably takes 4-5 months training and gets close to double that. This scales pretty linearly so with 3-5 mining toons you can rip through these mining missions. The only problem is that mining agents sometimes give kill missions, which you can decline but only once per 4 hours per character. So I'm not sure if it's viable or not. You could just go mine in a belt though while waiting on the mission expiration.

Oh and one last option for multiboxing mission would be couriers. These just have you haul stuff from X to Y and can be done in parallel pretty easily thanks to the autopilot. As long as you avoid low sec it's pretty safe since the vast majority of missions have you hauling stuff that has no value. But I don't think they pay very well, I never tried too many of them.


I'll be setting up real accounts pretty soon once I decide exactly what I'm going to be doing... stay tuned for more updates.

[Thulos]

For running missions the Raven is pretty much the ship of choice for L4 missions. Once you build up money good mission runners move up to a Raven Navy issue and then possibly later on a Golem. If you really want to get fancy with missions then you can train up one of your alts to run a remote repping logistics ship to be your space priest. If your main pilot is a shield tanker (Raven, Drake, etc) then the Basilisk is the ship of choice. If your main is an armor Tanker (Dominix is an example) then you want the Oneiros (Gallente Logistics ship). If I was to make a recomendation for running missions I would do 2 Ravens, 1 Baslisk and one Loot/Salvager. This will shred all level 4 and 5 missions in the game.

FoF missiles are almost entirely worthless for anything in the game. Whatever you do please don't use them. Sure you don't have to pay attention to what you are shooting at but you are going to do absolute crap DPS and this method will take forever to complete missions. Drones are great but the problem with some missions is they will cause the entire room to aggro which could be very bad. You have to know the missions well to be an effective drone user. Don't take this as a diss on drones though because they are awesome. Additionally drones take a lot of micromanagement, because of this they are a very poor choice for a multiboxer.

For running missions there is a great website that has info on all the missions in the game that is usable with the in game browser:
http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=MissionReports

TLDR: Use Ravens for PvE. :thumbup:

[Souca]

FoF missiles are almost entirely worthless for anything in the game.

This has been the case since launch. Drones have always been nice. My experience with the game is so out of date though. Part of me wants to play again, but then I remember all the time mining to get ISK to buy more mining equipment.

As for skills, have they restructured it much? Last time I activated my account I was looking at 7 or 14 days for anything interesting. I know they added queueing, but if it still takes weeks of real time to get a skill from 4 -> 5 then I wonder how much it really helps.

For those of you playing, do you play regularly, or is it more of one a week sort of a playstyle? Am I better off starting from scratch, or using my original character?

- Souca -