Multiboxing is P2W.

I love how the goal is to not have any P2W in AOC. However, paying for another subscription and using 2 accounts at the same time is paying real money to gain an advantage in the game. That is very much P2W.

I'm curious, is there any positive side to allowing multiboxing? There are clear cons, it gives an advantage over those who don't do it. Botting with it can ruin entire server economy, it takes away world resources and hoards them to one player, and it is borderline cheating in a PVP scenario. So there are clear good sides to not allowing it to fix those cons and issues. But what is the positive of allowing it? If multiboxing did not give any kind of an advantage, nobody would ever do it.

Allowing multiboxing should be reconsidered heavily. It is P2W.

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Noaani

Fae wrote: »

You do realize that you and your partner wanting to play from the same place is NOT multiboxing? Multiboxing is running multiple instances of the game on the same machine.

Actually, multiboxing is one person playing two accounts. Those accounts can be on the same computer, or can be on different real or virtual computers.

Caeryl wrote: »

noaani wrote: »

People really do need to realize there is a difference between multiboxing and botting.

There’s a difference between them but bot trains are impossible without multiboxing.

Bot trains aren't multiboxing.

Multiboxing is one person actively playing multiple accounts. Botting is automation.

It wouldn't be that hard to set up a bot train with accounts that are running on computers in different countries.

unknown

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Noaani

Fae wrote: »

Undead Canuck wrote: »

I have multiboxed in the past. I have 2 computers, and I had 2 keyboards and 2 mice. I did everything manually (including moving). I did it badly, but I did it. Was it worth it? Not really. I just wanted to see what the hoorah was about.

Now, the people who use scripts are botting, which should be banned. But IP blocking is not going to work.

But a lot of people say that multiboxing is P2W, and I can verify that it is not really worth the effort.

Mate, if multiboxing gave no advantage at all, we would never see it done. It is no secret that many MMO's are plagued by multiboxing. They do it because it gives a very clear advantage over other players. No way around it.

It's actually the challenge more than anything.

There are almost always faster ways you can get better rewards when you work with other people, but those activities are almost always far easier.

In general, multiboxing in games that I have done it have cost me both real and in game money - but the enjoyment of the challenge makes it worth it.

Again, this is multiboxing, not botting.

Bolobao

Steven also did mention alot of resource nodes will be "one taps" so unlike in WoW where a multiboxer can get 5x from the same node, a multiboxer attempting to do this in ashes is not going to benefit at all from it.

Also, the fact that we can flag them and kill them is also another thing to consider depending on how the corruption stuff plays out.

But what i think Steven meant mainly is, if they only allow 1 account per IP (to combat multiboxing) then it destroys house holds that have multiple users.

What Steven does NOT want is having 5 characters following eachother being controlled by 1 click. THAT is cheating. However, if you have 2 monitors and 2 accounts and are going back and forth between them MANUALLY doing individual movements then that is fine and in all honesty, im ok with that.

juts my 2 cents.

Aharon

I think if someone wants to load the game on multiple computers, and run from one computer to the other to individually control the characters, then, that is fine. (Mainly because it would be way too inefficient to provide any gain.) If someone wants to hose a virtual machine, or run multiple instances of the game on one machine, and control them individually by swapping from screen to screen, I also think that is fine. (Again because it would be way to inefficient.)

However, I dont think that multiple accounts on multiple computers, or the same computer, being controlled by software, or any kind of automation, including synchronizing input from one source, then delivering it to all instances, should be allowed. Those ARE a form of automation.

Xrael

Talents wrote: »

Again, they're not allowing multiboxing where for example if you press W on your keyboard, all 20 of your characters move forward. If you want to multibox, you'll need to manually control each and every character independently. That, in my opinion, is perfectly fine.

This. This right here. Steven should have mentioned this in the AMA as i dont think most people remember that addons dont exist in AoC like in WoW.

Also as he mentioned in the AMA, its very difficult to punish multiboxing as you could end up banning families that play with multiple accounts in the same house, room mates that play together etc. So just like in WoW, they are going to allow it, however, because there are no addons, its going to be MUCH more difficult to pull off.

Hansrutger

I honestly have no problem with for instance dualboxing where you just have 2 accounts and even you trade yourself items. My personal issue with mutliboxing is when you use it to farm materials simultaneously by using a 3rd party software.

And this comes by someone who actually enjoyed attempting multiboxing on a WoW:Cataclysm private server (free accounts obv) but just to attempt to solo dungeons from level 15-85. And it was fun! I didn't ruin anyone else's experience and I was trying something challenging, because as much as you guys think its easy to multibox, its not. It's easy to 1 shot things but the moment you have to coordinate movement it becomes an issue.

So I agree with Steven that multiboxing is fine as long as you don't use a 3rd party software for it. Additionally, iBoxer do not develop their software for games that don't allow multiboxing so people would have to find some more shady programs or unknown publishers (given they dunno how to setup macros in a simple notepad file

Haratsu

If input broadcasting (like with isboxer) and heavy macro usage (like with AHK) is not allowed it becomes much harder to maintain several clients. Remove autopathing and click-to-move and this p2w-multibox-dream just becomes really a waste of time and money. I rather would have them spend time on good anti-botting tech serverside, sure if that tech can be expanded to ban heavily automated input broadcasted multibox farms ... by all means.
With a bit of restrictions ... the ridiculous WOW multibox stuff is really out of scope and there would be no benefit. Anything else you could do with that extra client can easily be achieved with alts on one account.

Undead Canuck

What is the difference between me using 2 computers to control separate accounts, and me and my partner using 2 computers to control separate accounts.
The answer is 2 people are more efficient. No other difference!

Atama

Tsukasa wrote: »

Any multi-boxing is P2W. It doesn't matter how it works.

Trolling.

Fae

Undead Canuck wrote: »

The answer is 2 people are more efficient. No other difference!

And 2 people controlling 2 accounts each is even more efficient. That is the entire problem.

Xrael

Fae wrote: »

Undead Canuck wrote: »

The answer is 2 people are more efficient. No other difference!

And 2 people controlling 2 accounts each is even more efficient. That is the entire problem.

NO, It is only efficient when compared to a solo player. In a 2v2, a multiboxer controlling 2 characters will not beat 2 individual players playing 2 different characters.

Due to the nature of AoC, players will be found in groups so it wont be that difficult to find 2 man and 3 man groups.

So think of a 2-char multiboxer as a person playing with a friend. It is NOT easy to control 2 NON-IDENTICAL characters, simultaneously, without using any sort of software.

Multiboxing becomes a problem, when the no. of characters being multiboxed is GREATER than the average no. of players in a group, in the world.

This occurs with multiboxers with 7+ characters, as it becomes fairly difficult to find 6 man and 7 man groups of players in the world, to contest these multiboxers, because the large majority of players will either be soloing or will be in 2 to 5 man groups.

nibiru97

Fae wrote: »

I love how the goal is to not have any P2W in AOC. However, paying for another subscription and using 2 accounts at the same time is paying real money to gain an advantage in the game. That is very much P2W.

I'm curious, is there any positive side to allowing multiboxing? There are clear cons, it gives an advantage over those who don't do it. Botting with it can ruin entire server economy, it takes away world resources and hoards them to one player, and it is borderline cheating in a PVP scenario. So there are clear good sides to not allowing it to fix those cons and issues. But what is the positive of allowing it? If multiboxing did not give any kind of an advantage, nobody would ever do it.

Allowing multiboxing should be reconsidered heavily. It is P2W.

In what way does multi boxing ruin an economy. Someone multi boxing is not going to be able to hoard resources anymore than a group or guild of players. You need to explain further how that is possible in AoC. Running around with a group of multi boxed accounts will not give an advantage for resources. If you happen to spread your characters out it will take time moving each character seperately to find gatherables. Maybe if you find multiple veins throughout the map, you could mine different areas at the same time, but not to the point that it will ruin an entire server economy. And thats assuming a non-interactive type system. It's not like you would have sole control over certain resources.
Also, how is it borderline cheating in PvP when you are at a disadvantage trying to jump from account to account to cast skills. A team of 5 people will always have an advantage over a person multi boxing 5 accounts. Same goes for 2v2, 8v8, whatever the number is. And I can't see many multiboxers running around gaining corruption on all their characters at the same time.

DaRougaroux

Talents wrote: »

Again, they're not allowing multiboxing where for example if you press W on your keyboard, all 20 of your characters move forward. If you want to multibox, you'll need to manually control each and every character independently. That, in my opinion, is perfectly fine.

What? Lol. You realize the control of multiple toons is done player side, not game side? Or am I misunderstanding you?

Fathym

I have read all of these multi-boxing posts and after some consideration, I feel that there are only 2 major problems with multi-boxing in this game.

1. With the implementation of the family system, It will give multi account players effective fast travel. This can 100% be considered pay to win.
2. It give multi account players access to multiple free holds which are directly associated with resource processing output. Again, this is 100% pay to win.

I have no problem with multi-boxing if these two issues can be resolved.

This is under the assumption that any form of scripting will be a bannable offense and that the combat system is engaging enough that it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to control multi characters at once.

MrScrewtape

Healawin wrote: »

I have read all of these multi-boxing posts and after some consideration, I feel that there are only 2 major problems with multi-boxing in this game.

1. With the implementation of the family system, It will give multi account players effective fast travel. This can 100% be considered pay to win.
2. It give multi account players access to multiple free holds which are directly associated with resource processing output. Again, this is 100% pay to win.

I have no problem with multi-boxing if these two issues can be resolved.

This is under the assumption that any form of scripting will be a bannable offense and that the combat system is engaging enough that it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to control multi characters at once.

Nicely summarized, agree that these are the only two legit P2W scenarios I've seen for Multiboxing.

Fathym

screwtape wrote: »

Healawin wrote: »

I have read all of these multi-boxing posts and after some consideration, I feel that there are only 2 major problems with multi-boxing in this game.

1. With the implementation of the family system, It will give multi account players effective fast travel. This can 100% be considered pay to win.
2. It give multi account players access to multiple free holds which are directly associated with resource processing output. Again, this is 100% pay to win.

I have no problem with multi-boxing if these two issues can be resolved.

This is under the assumption that any form of scripting will be a bannable offense and that the combat system is engaging enough that it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to control multi characters at once.

Nicely summarized, agree that these are the only two legit P2W scenarios I've seen for Multiboxing.

Thank you. Steven said in one of the other discussions that the next dev discussion will be on multiboxing so I will repost my comment when that goes live. I would appreciate it if you like my post at the time so it becomes more visible to the developers.

Noaani

Healawin wrote: »

I have read all of these multi-boxing posts and after some consideration, I feel that there are only 2 major problems with multi-boxing in this game.

1. With the implementation of the family system, It will give multi account players effective fast travel. This can 100% be considered pay to win.
2. It give multi account players access to multiple free holds which are directly associated with resource processing output. Again, this is 100% pay to win.

I have no problem with multi-boxing if these two issues can be resolved.

This is under the assumption that any form of scripting will be a bannable offense and that the combat system is engaging enough that it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to control multi characters at once.

The family teleport system will need to be addressed regardless of multiboxing.

It is a system ripe for outright exploitation.

As to freeholds, I am unsure how much of an advantage this will be, and is an issue with multi-account holders, not multiboxers (if I have two accounts, I have two freeholds, even if I don't multibox).

To me, this is the only potential avenue to advantage that having more than one account can offer, regardless of whether you can play both accounts at the same time or not. However, I am unconvinced that it will be all that much of an advantage.

Even the simple fact that freeholds can't be side by side somewhat reduces the value of having two.

One thing I will say, a multi-account user is the only person that has any chance at all of ever infultrating my guild as a spy. Without the ability to own multiple accounts, there will be no ability to spy.

Undead Canuck

When I open my Freehold to my guild, technically everyone in the guild gets access to (at least) 2 Freeholds. Does that make it P2W?

Fathym

noaani wrote: »

Healawin wrote: »

I have read all of these multi-boxing posts and after some consideration, I feel that there are only 2 major problems with multi-boxing in this game.

1. With the implementation of the family system, It will give multi account players effective fast travel. This can 100% be considered pay to win.
2. It give multi account players access to multiple free holds which are directly associated with resource processing output. Again, this is 100% pay to win.

I have no problem with multi-boxing if these two issues can be resolved.

This is under the assumption that any form of scripting will be a bannable offense and that the combat system is engaging enough that it will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to control multi characters at once.

The family teleport system will need to be addressed regardless of multiboxing.

It is a system ripe for outright exploitation.

As to freeholds, I am unsure how much of an advantage this will be, and is an issue with multi-account holders, not multiboxers (if I have two accounts, I have two freeholds, even if I don't multibox).

To me, this is the only potential avenue to advantage that having more than one account can offer, regardless of whether you can play both accounts at the same time or not. However, I am unconvinced that it will be all that much of an advantage.

Even the simple fact that freeholds can't be side by side somewhat reduces the value of having two.

One thing I will say, a multi-account user is the only person that has any chance at all of ever infultrating my guild as a spy. Without the ability to own multiple accounts, there will be no ability to spy.

The big problem I see with multiple freeholds is that Steven mentioned in interviews that the freehold will be integral in the processing portion of the artisan system. He hasn't mentioned the specifics of how the processing system works but if it works similar to real life processing plants, then an extra freehold will obviously correlate to a higher output of processed materials.

Proceeding with this train of thought, the worst possible outcome is far more sinister. If freeholds are that important to the processing of raw materials, wealthy players could buy out as many freeholds as they can on the server with different accounts and effectively corner the market, forming a bottleneck where players will have to go through them to craft anything in the game. This, of course, is the absolute worst case scenario but the possibility exists and needs to be brought to the devs attention so it can be designed around appropriately.

Undead Canuck wrote: »

When I open my Freehold to my guild, technically everyone in the guild gets access to (at least) 2 Freeholds. Does that make it P2W?

This, of course, is not pay to win because no one is paying extra money to have an advantage. It is only pay to win when 1 player uses multiple accounts to buy freeholds to increase their personal processing efficiency.

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