That's grey territory. I'd say as long as theres a significant amount of basic powersets avaliable to the free player so that performancewise they're not missing out by not buying the new powerset (I.E. the powersets which they do get are balanced against the buyable ones) and as long as a subscribed player gets all the powersets as part of their sub benefit, that would be ok.

Gerald Deemer wrote:
This is what I'm wondering what Aegis is trying to point out. Personally having played through GW2, Neverwinter, MH and ESO, I have not encountered people constantly interrupting my game. I'm pretty casual and only play less than 10 hours a week so maybe I'm just not seeing it. Are we talking high prices on an auction house, are we talking about spam in chat, etc? I never attributed those issues directly to mutliboxing so it would be nice if Aegis would give a little clarification on exactly what the worry is. What negatives does he know about multiboxing that I don't?

As I pointed out earlier, my idea of multiboxing was just friends/family playing together in the same home. Yes, I know you can team via internet but when it came to CoH, it was just more fun to play from one location.

ESO is actually very not pay to win. it's buy to play however.

My main point is if a game claims to be free to play it should live up to that without gouging money for a decent experience. if the free player wants better customization they should have to pay for that, but making a free or only occasionally paying (in microtransactions) player feel underpowered is a very good way to turn away prospective customers, and ones which would end up paying good money.

Preventing multi boxing without penalizing an entire household can be a problem. Independently you will always have an issue. And the stricter you are the worst the experience is for people who do not do this behavior.

My opinion is let it go. Someone giving themselves that amount if trouble earned it.

Just make sure people can't "bot" the 2nd account and you will at least prevent abuse more easily

Whether "multiboxing" means running multiple clients on one machine (possible to prevent) or running on multiple machines (nearly impossible to prevent), I don't have much of an issue with it. It is a huge gray area. For example, back in the CoH days, my brother and I ended up with 3 accounts between us. Sometimes we would have a healer on follow and hit the heal aura when we needed it. Now tell me, how would you tell the difference between that and when we had our 5 year old sister play and hit the heal aura when we told her to? The game server would have no way to distinguish between these two scenarios.

In either case, you are going to have to deal with a "player" that isn't really pulling their weight. For some things this is okay, but I think a well designed challenge will prevent people being able to this. A well designed challenge will make people have to really focus on one character (and not let their little sister 'play' either lol).

This is partially why I believe in a subscription model to make it harder to multibox in any fashion. And if someone wants to pay for 3 accounts then better for the game community.

Well I think most of us if not all of us (and those who have played Champions Online especially) are hoping for a well designed content experience.

ZeeHero wrote:
if you limit accounts to one per ip, my wife and I couldnt play together. many of the "solutions" for multiboxing would prevent both of us from logging in with 2 accounts from the same location.

ivanhedgehog wrote:
OK I was specifically referring to the multiboxing which is running multiple clients at once on one machine. This could be probably be addressed by making it so there can only be one copy of the client running at a time somehow.. Don't know exactly how that would work.

you cant really stop multi boxing, you can pay wall it. but you'll have a certain market there for bots if theirs a in game economy and game is successful even with a pay wall. which as i understand it isnt part of your planed F2P model


i would suggest having deteriorating currency so it cant be hoarded and to keep inflation in check with it a say 1%(for eg.) of total a day loss(call it living expenses or something), that way people will keep items rather then hoarding cash and driving inflation and creating a market for bots and multi boxers

have a currency exchange/auction house that also incurs a 1%(for eg.) or something tax.

have a cash shop where you can purchase in game currency directly from company along with tradable items.

have a cash token/game currency player exchange again with a transaction tax

i wouldn't worry about multi boxing id worry about getting the economy so theirs not much in the way of drivers for multi-boxing and bots because they will always find a way around if you leave them a market

multi boxing per say isn't the issue (i feel having more people running about in world isn't usually peoples issue with bots unless they are stealing all mission items).
i feel what people dont like about multi-boxing and bots is bots controlling the economy, but unless your going to sell currency for cash at a price that makes botting uneconomical and have depreciating resources and a on trade/tax, you cant actually stop bot's and multi boxers.
not that you can eliminate them entirely anyway they are 2 advanced now they can run through a encrypted VPN service no problem to mask IP and they can be very very complex/capable of controlling a action MMO character such as in neverwinter.
but you can control any impact they have on game via how you arrange the economy.

Archanarchist wrote:
I prefer a system where anything good is NOT ultra rare. One of the mistakes I saw in COH was the rarity of purple recipes. When wings came out, I did not get a single drop in the entire expansion, while teammates got one or more every couple of days. Some people made bank and others got absolutely nothing.When you have haves and have nots on this scale, some will buy currency. If you dont need massive pools of currency to get cool things in game, you wont be tempted to buy currency, and there will be less gold sellers.

ivanhedgehog wrote:
Totally agreed, one of the things which completely ruins games is when they introduce absurd levels of grind to get anything good. this actively discourages players instead of encouraging them to grind for the item. it works in Korea not in the west.

My question on multi-boxing (to the devs): What problem(s) do you perceive? Would the publisher be losing actual money (sounds like no if game accounts are free)? If the publisher stands to lose money, prevent concurrent logins from a single account and make game assets non-transferable, that's one way to handle it.

Is the problem more about fairness, i.e. one real person gets more virtual property for equivalent effort? Almost impossible to say how big a problem that is without knowing the game economy.

For me, multi-boxing is only a bad thing if it is exploiting something. A great example from CoX: multi-boxing two toons from the same supergroup, so getting double prestige.

I think before throwing out a question about multi-boxing, it would be better for the devs to look at what might be exploited by doing it. If the answer is nothing, who cares?