Here's How Multi-Boxing Can Be Exploited
Tsukasa
Member
1- Teleportation/summon with an alt family
2- Attacking a caravan requires a group(unknown size), family(or not) alts can be summoned/brought to minimize the time needed to find a group to initiate an attack on a Caravan rider
3- Use of Cleric or Bard for buffs, heals, and revives which helps @solo grinding or whatever. Whether or not auto-follow is a thing in this game it's still an advantage, plus there are proximity based skills, which are just a matter of 1 button press. Assuming the range is large for raid purposes. (Edit: and gears are tradable)
4- Owning more than 1 freehold. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to build a freehold, people will do it anyway.
5- Mastery of all professions! They can ignore the limit, if they planned to add one.
6- Queue against your alt in Arena for perfect score or KDA or win for your group!
7- Votes and votekicks! (group PvP included)
8- Multiple dice rolls for higher chance of winning the loot for your main! (Very common in Archeage)
I can come up with more and more and moreeeeeee32ediowedjweod potential exploits.
Finally I want to say:
An MMORPG that encourages its players to use alts isn't an MMORPG, but just a slaves simulator like BDO and AA, nothing special. A person's identity, existence and RolePlay in this world is their main character.
THE.
MAIN.
CHARACTER.
We are reality escapists; RPers. Not slave drivers!
Not asking for self-sufficiency. Just stop giving us reasons to play alts !!!
Need alts to play other classes despite possibly needing new gear anyway. Need alts to utilize all 3 paths on your own. This is too wrong. Alts don't have identities! You have to tell your friends your main's name to know who you are and break the immersion, because alts are nobodies, walking trash bags.
2- Attacking a caravan requires a group(unknown size), family(or not) alts can be summoned/brought to minimize the time needed to find a group to initiate an attack on a Caravan rider
3- Use of Cleric or Bard for buffs, heals, and revives which helps @solo grinding or whatever. Whether or not auto-follow is a thing in this game it's still an advantage, plus there are proximity based skills, which are just a matter of 1 button press. Assuming the range is large for raid purposes. (Edit: and gears are tradable)
4- Owning more than 1 freehold. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to build a freehold, people will do it anyway.
5- Mastery of all professions! They can ignore the limit, if they planned to add one.
6- Queue against your alt in Arena for perfect score or KDA or win for your group!
7- Votes and votekicks! (group PvP included)
8- Multiple dice rolls for higher chance of winning the loot for your main! (Very common in Archeage)
I can come up with more and more and moreeeeeee32ediowedjweod potential exploits.
Finally I want to say:
An MMORPG that encourages its players to use alts isn't an MMORPG, but just a slaves simulator like BDO and AA, nothing special. A person's identity, existence and RolePlay in this world is their main character.
THE.
MAIN.
CHARACTER.
We are reality escapists; RPers. Not slave drivers!
Not asking for self-sufficiency. Just stop giving us reasons to play alts !!!
Need alts to play other classes despite possibly needing new gear anyway. Need alts to utilize all 3 paths on your own. This is too wrong. Alts don't have identities! You have to tell your friends your main's name to know who you are and break the immersion, because alts are nobodies, walking trash bags.
7
Comments
Also the kind of multiboxing that Steven has mentioned is not the one that allows for 10 different game clients to be opened on the same PC, but rather one that allows for multiple PC's to run on the same IP adress. This means that in order to multibox, one would have to purchase multiple PC's that can each run the game and then sit and switch between playing on each one of them. This is basically the equivalent of switching between three alts and having to level/keep them up to par in order for them to even be relevant in some of these scenarios. Also, alts are going to be a thing whether you like it or not, as have been stated by the devs.
I like being able to play different classes in game. No way in hell would I have the same interest in Ashes if I was locked to one main class for the entirety of the game.
If a person is able to upkeep both a main character and their alt, I'd let them. You want people to play your game more and that mean providing the ability to utilize different playstyles, which Imo includes being able to try out different classes or take on different roles.
So? Let them. I don't see the issue with people wanting to play on multiple pc's as it is in general going to set them behind trying to level up multiple characters at the same time. Others are going to be miles ahead of the dude trying to level up one character on PC 1 and the other on PC 2.
Now what is crucial is that macros are not put into the game that makes playing on multiple pc's more efficient than playing on one, which is really the biggest concern in my opinion. Should macros be allowed and if so, to what extent?
You cant gain PvP experience from friend farms, you'd struggle to put two freeholds together or purchase any property. You could master the crafting but you'd have a massive time sink with multiple accounts. I'm not against alts and I see multi accounting as alts. The issue I have is the person to person trading that could happen which could see the caravan system being evaded through multi accounts.
I agree there is realistically no way to prevent it so I find the only thing that is important is making simultaneous control (2 fighters charging, both cleaving, both hamstringing) to be the issue and the only thing that should be ban-able. Everything else is just unpreventable p2w.
Multi Accounting is a different issue and has no remedy.
Edit: there is a solution to multi accounting and it would be based on payments but a parent might pay for a child or two partners might use a joint account and it would be unfair to block such people.
However people that do need the option to multi-box will be unnecessarely frustrated, but still will get their laptops if needed.
Let me give you an example, of my on case. I am a group leader, for quite a long period of time. And in my group when people tend to not show up for some reason(job, uni, going out, we are grown ups here), but i still need their character to perform a certain role, we as a group just load his character on someone else who's job is not as demanding, and he can manage 2 accounts. And that action can grow up to the amount of people until it becomes unplayable - cant contest a spot with 3 people playing 8 characters against 8 living people for example, or it just becomes to inefficient, and we drop the "multi-boxes" and go do something more productive.
Out of all the issues you adress, only valid one is the professions, and let me explain why.
The family summon is cool and all, but we dont know the cooldown, we dont know the family size, and we dont know the family limitations(if its 1 family per account, the whole argument on summon abuse in every thread goes down the drain).
"A group will be required to successfully attack a caravan" - has absolutelly nothing to do with multi-boxing, what it states is that the more living people you have, the higher your chances to succeed, alts provide nothing in that situation.
Abuse of heals and buffs - i mean... those actions are so basic that you dont even need a secondary machine for that, just launch that cleric on a vm in a small window, and tap "1-2" on him from time to time. Also against those "boxed" cleric you will have an advantage in pvp if you have a living cleric behind you, dont like their mentality? Bully them of your spot. And thats absolutely not effective in raids, so people wont just take someone with a random "boxed" cleric, if you play a cleric, you will always find your self a group somewhere.
Freeholds from my understanding are really expensive to get at the beginning, you mentioned archeage, but in archeage you had basically free land-holders thrown at you for no effort. Here you will have to work for every single house you want to install, and i would believe that in order to get so many spots for your self in even remotely popular node to share between your alts is gonna be impossible at the beginning. In later stages however sure, you can buy out the close territory for your boxes, but i actually still dont see a good reason to do that, too expensive for little advantage.
Professions, now this is a valid concern, that a player can setup his own factory starting from raw, and ending with a full product, may lead to a problem. But it has nothing to do with multi-boxing... If i get a multi-box with different profession, or if i get an alt character on my main account with the same different profession, it will take me roughly the same time to get them to a usable state, i dont need to multi-box to abuse the crafting system.
Queueing in arena wont work past your 2-3 games if the system uses any rating at all, let me take an example of Archeage again, since thats the one i assume you played and can relate to. If at the start of the season you and your alt have 4000 points, you queue in a way to get your alt as your opponent, you win, now you have 4050 points and your alts has 3950 points, you repeat that twice more, now you have 4150 points, and your alt has 3850 points, at this point it will be practically impossible for you to queue against your alt, even if no one else is in the queue, since you two are simply out of competition range for one another. Yes, alts may be a problem in that regard, but how meaningful that abuse will be? It wont allot you to climb even remotelly high.
Multi-boxing to win dice rolls... where are you gonna roll exactly? Dungeons? I doubt pugs will take "boxed" accounts, quite the opposite, if i would see someone "afk" through half the dungeon, thats a guaranteed kick. In statics thats not even a concern. In raids? Those are going to be contested, so i doubt an "afk boxed character" will be wildly accepted in those raids, since if a contest is hapenning, every subsequent alt will greatly reduce the chance of its raid to even loot anything... Dont see that as an issue, since there will be no "click to join system" like in archeage rifts for example where you can dump your alts and just roll the loot, not the case here.
All in all, i dont find multi-boxing to be a problem to some extend, if someone can pay 30-45$ a month, and can efficiently play with 2-3 boxes, i would say - let him. Such player will be self sufficient to some extend, but in no way he will be ever more productive or efficient than a few people doing the same job.
Sorry again for the wall of text, here is a
TL;DR
Multi-boxing is a problem, but in my opinion, people that live of of that wont stop, those measures wont prevent them doing that, while people that do it for valid reasons and not to "abuse" game mechanics will have inconvenience doing so, but will still find a way to do that. The fight needs to go not against Multi-boxes but the systems that allow multi-boxing to even become an issue.
If there is no auto follow then a multiboxer cant function. A multiboxer also cant function in hybrid combat because not all buttons will be passive combos. It is true I am using WoW multiboxing for my references but multiboxing has no use for afk toons.
As stated by Steven, "multi-boxing is playing 3 different accounts on 3 different monitors(or 1, lol)", so basically all i described falls under the category of multi-boxing.
Also even "afk boxes" can provide great use, starting from camping city exits to spot caravan gathering, and sitting on boss locations to camps spawns, and end up as a rig mechanic in a scentific node election.
Again, i am not here to pick a fight with either sides, i am open for dialogue and arguments.
The corruption system does provide protection from such an approach but multiboxing a full raid does maximise xp/hour, gold/hour and materials/hour. Thankfully IS have already replaced gold with certificates. Not sure if a multiboxer could exploit the material gain.
Edit: if IS maintain cash for subs and not do gold for subs, multiboxers wont be subsidised either.
If someone wants to support the game by paying for multiple accounts just to have a character sit, go for it. Intrepid gets more money to make the game better for the rest of us.
1, that will get exploited if it makes it to the live game regardless of multiboxers.
2, attacking caravans doesn't require a specific group size, you just need enough players to be able to defeat the defenders of that caravan. You can attack with any number of players, but you will need a group or more to be successful. Multiboxers won't help here much as it doesn't offer much of a benefit in PvP.
3, In a game with open PvP, this isn't exactly useful.
4, this is an issue with people having more than one account, not with people multiboxing. However, the same issue arises in regards to people having friends - they are likely to be able to make use of friends freeholds as well as their own.
5, Chances are, you will be able to do this on one account. Alts are a thing.
6, there are no arena rewards, so this is a pointless waste of time.
7, who said votekicks will be a thing in Ashes? That is a thing they put in games built for children.
8, Most of the time in Archeage, people running raids for GR/CR would say that you can only roll once if you were boxing. Since boxed characters were blatantly obvious, and people that attempted to get around this were often not welcomed to the next raid the same person ran, most people were more than ok with this.
Put another way, this is a social issue with social remedies.
1) The family system is entirely up for change, as Steven has said before. They will test it in Alpha and Beta and make sure they balance it/remove it if they cannot.
2) & 3) There are NO macros/scripts in this game. So it will be EXTREMELY difficult for you to fight off multiple players if you are multiboxing.
4) How exactly is owning multiple freeholds going to matter, if you cannot get those resources in the first place? Turn large vein gatherables into PvP zones so killing players that come to contest these resources won't give you corruption.
5) Every one will be able to master all the professions in 3 characters. Not sure what your point here is.
6) Simply prevent players from the same IP from being matched up. Its that simple.
7) If they are stupid enough to participate in group PvP, in a game with Active GMs, they are going to get all of their multibox accounts banned.
8) Same thing with group PvE, you will get reported and you will lose all your accounts.
Also, you have to understand that, MACROS are the MAIN reason why multiboxers are able to play like this.
That doesn't exist in AoC. I've also explained multiple other reasons in this post right here.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/45037/multiboxing-its-solutions-and-why-it-wont-be-as-much-of-an-issue-in-aoc#latest
Not really relevant. Everything you've listed has been easily countered. You need to make a new list.
It is impossible to win because the people who would use these tactics are willing to defy IS even if IS states it is not wanted. I wouldn't even waste my time arguing, if IS can track cheaters then the cheaters will be banned. If IS can't track the cheaters then all the work would be for nought anyway. There are simple solutions but people hide behind 'It means I can't play with my BF/GF/Kids/Partner' which is a convenient shield and not the epitome of the accusations. No-one wants to block partners and families from playing together so its a convenient shield to use on the forums.
I think we should really readdress the multi-boxing stance. There are multiple reasons to not allow this.
1. Instead of thinking about it as a P2W feature within the game itself, put yourself in the shoes of the players in regards to their personal financial range. Perhaps not every player has the hardware to run multiple instances of the game, or the Benjamins to buy the hardware, thus giving those that do an advantage. I for one am sitting over here with a $7k PC but I refuse to perform multi-boxing because it simply doesn't feel right.
2. We all know one of the main reasons for multi-boxing is account selling which is already outlined in your ToS as illegal so why would you allow one of the primary delivery vehicles to be allowed? "No Account Transfers/Sales . Accounts are registered to you personally and may not be sold, traded, gifted or otherwise transferred at any time under any circumstances." - https://ashesofcreation.com/terms
3. Last but not least, the promise of AoC is to make MMOs great again and bring back the nostalgia we all desire. Players driven by software has no place in that vision.
If you disallow two people in the same house from playing, that’s stupid. You are literally telling customers you don’t want them to play and you will piss off a lot of people.
How about preventing multiple accounts from the same payment method? Oh well, I guess I can’t pay for my kids to play, see above.
What exactly do you want AoC to not allow? Don’t say “multi-boxing” because that means 30 different things. If you want them to disallow multiple clients running on one PC, that easy and fair (and not uncommon) but please be specific.
Asking the players how they would prevent multi-boxing is not a valid argument. That is up to the design studios engineering team to determine. The players job is to provide feedback in how the subject matter could be exploited or unfair.
I never said disallow two people in the same house from playing.
I never said prevent multiple accounts from the same payment method.
But since you asked, this is absolutely doable in more modern ways than the archaic ones you mentioned.
Implementing modern security tactics such as host-based IDS or IPS systems are 100% necessary in today's world. If you're unfamiliar with this type of technology, the most known example is something like BattleEye. Obviously for a studio like Intrepid, it would be in their best interest to invest in a proprietary solution for their platform (They've already set it up for scaling and it will need this in the future)