CCP prohibiting input broadcasting/multiplexing beginning January 2015

[pinotnoir]

Are they trying to improve the game?
Or are they just listening to the loudest gobshites on their forum, again?

I don't see anything in the announcement that explains *why* they are making this change?
https://forums.eveonline.com/default...posts&t=387571



How is it abuse if it is allowed?

I'm not affected by this change, I stopped 11-boxing Eve when they fucked over ice mining last year.

However, I am appalled at this change.

Everyone goes on about how Eve is a sandbox but it seems you can't quite do anything you want in CCPs sandbox.

Eve has never been about fair fights. The gobshites whining about being ganked by a MB fleet are probably the same motherfuckers who will happily sit on a gate with a fleet and gank pilots just trying to pass through - how is that different? You're dead to the ships from X accounts whether they are being MultiBoxed or not?

Do I get compensation next time a multi-account fleet catches me at a gate? Hypothetical question, really, as I've only lost 2 ships to real people in all my years in Eve and I've never even shot at another person's ship (the only ship I ever killed was my own, when MB targetting went wrong!).

What about the arseholes who, with one account set up a buy order using the Margin Trading scam^H^H^H^H skill and with another advertise/sell the requested goods at OTT prices? That would appear to be multiple accounts having an impact on the EVE universe!

Eve is such a dichotomy - on the one hand it is an immensely addictive game which I keep coming back to whilst on the other it is full of the biggest bunch of cunts in the gaming environment, who I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire!

I totally agree. Eve allows the most rotten of scammers to operate. We have spies killing billion isk ships people stealing corp assets, exploitation of the noobs and economy for personal gain, massive capital fleets that can roll anything in the game. Yet hey are concerned with multiboxers affecting game play? WTF? Abusing mutliboxing..what a joke. I guess when a fleet of neutrals come into my system to kill my miners I must be abusing the system by trying to run and hide. I live in Catch where PL is roaming in capital fleets with titans taking system after system. There is nothing anyone can do to stop them but multiboxing is the problem huh. A few days ago they were roaming with 7 titans and about 20 supers not to mention their sub cap fleet. The only thing keeping them from just taking all of catch is they like cat and mouse games. They are the cat just swatting around the little mice. If they kill the mouse they would have no more fun. So if CCP is worried about anything having a negative effect on game play they need to focus their attention on their game mechanics instead of multiboxers.

[spf]

<3 Moog

[EaTCarbS]

They take a good while to deplete, so its not a huge issue.

[shadowssinging]

This makes most things a little bit harder, and some things a lot harder. It doesn't as some have said prevent you from multiboxing effectively, but it does prevent you from multiboxing perfectly.

For those that don't use isboxer at all, or who use it only for window management, it's business as usual. For those who relied input multoboxing and broadcasting before today, it became a little more complicated, maybe even challenging

There is a diminishing return on multiboxing without the aid of broadcasting. For me, I manage 5 clients without any difficulty for PvE, (afktar anomoly ratting or mining) and could probably manage 4-5 more if my connection and hardware could handle it, Beyond that, I'd be stretching the limits of my ability to stagger the timing between having to reposition each ship, fiddle with drones, modules, etc.

For PvP, 2-3 clients is the limit of what I can manage effectively, but that's just the characters in combat- there's room for another 2 or 3 to run cynos, scout, off grid boosts, or bridging blops/titans. That's going to be a bigger change for a lot of people - PvP is way more demanding, and trying to split attention between multiple clients is hard. The difficulty of fleet ejngagements primarily comes from coordinating multiple players with their own diffrent motivations and skills to shoot the right targets at the right time, or move together at the same time. Input broadcasting completely triviallized that element of difficulty, much to the grief of other players, which I think is one of the strongest arguments behind the ban.

There are some pretty strong remaining arguments:

• As some have noted earlier. the behavior similarities of certian multiboxing PvE setups, and bot PvE have probably complicated efforts to effectively enforce the EULA. against botters.
• Economics and mechanics of mining and large scale multiboxing have made it extremely unattractive for smaller operations as larger and larger multiboxed mining fleets have pushed prices down. Reasonable profits can't currently be made from mining without at least half a dozen clients, and profits competitive with other activities require dozens of clients.

With that said, mutiboxing is far from dead, and with game mechanics that actively encourage, and in many cases require muitiple accounts, we'll see it continue to be important to the game. People will have to adjust and adapt, the same activities may not be possible, in some cases the same scale may not be possible, but there will still be compelling reasons and effective ways to run anywhere from 2 to perhaps 2 dozen clients.