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.