CCP making changes to EULA and multi boxing rules.

[Voiran]

AO's average population

@DigitalBath: If you dont do towers, then I'm sorry, but you really do not understand how serious the situation is.

apparently you are trying make it look more worse than it really is and i dont believe on that link you posted about population since: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...=1#post6178107 .Why would they have told you that info?

Pls go read those links that i posted on my previous message.

[Freor]

lol

Can't say I'm surprised though - people are often so determined to their vision that nothing you show will convince them otherwise. FC hasn't told me anything, the graph was from a private source. AO's population has been low enough for a long time for private bots to track the population. That's toons online, only FC knows the number of actual individual players. You can choose to ignore all data, but that doesn't change the fact AO has lost players - a lot - after boxing started.

I'm well aware of the few discussions we've had with FC about this. If you check your own links you can see posts from me there as well. New people in charge now, and they have the chance to make the right decisions. Technical aspects I leave for fc, but at least I can't see why the "players report, fc investigates" I suggested above wouldn't work. I don't think it was suggested or knocked out before.

[Psikie]

AO's average population since merge (1). Numbers are now around 25% lower than they were before boxing first started.

What is that? Someone made a MS Paint .jpeg that you are trying to post as fact? Without headers we don't even know what the time line is that could be people online within a 4 hour period for all we know lol.

There is nothing you can do to win against multiboxed 5-6 toon personal army.

You can ofc say "bring friends", but that's not a way to balance things.

Such a defeatist attitude, you can't figure out new tactics so you want FC to "fix" it for you lol. If you are tryng to defend your towr spot by yourself and a MB player comes along you should probably turret up and try to clip at least 1 of them lol.

In AO there's only a handful of people boxing, at least in pvp.

So what you are saying is that literally a handful of people are single handedly bringing AO down to it's knees lol.

apparently you are trying make it look more worse than it really is and i dont believe on that link you posted about population since: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...=1#post6178107 .

Interesting that some random player has access to population information but the former lead programmer and designer say even they don't have access to that info. Laughable and hilarious all at once.

FYI- MB has been around for over 10years, it's just become more common knowledge with HKN. So your argument about "all the sudden because of MB population o noes" is complete shenanigans.

[Voiran]

lol

private bots to track the population.
New people in charge now,

"private bots to track the population" gonna report this. and who are those new people in charge you are talking about? only seen people leaving dev team.

[Freor]

If you don't even know we have a new GD, perhaps doing more than trolling on the forums would help

[Voiran]

If you don't even know we have a new GD, perhaps doing more than trolling on the forums would help

he wasnt in dev team earlier?

[jorricane]

"private bots to track the population" gonna report this.

Report what? To whom? The bots have access to the chat system, and via the chat system can check the online status of everyone who has connected to it. Without it, some of the more useful functions of bots would not operate. It's a simple(ish) matter for someone running multiple bots to aggregate the information to compile a somewhat accurate (notice though, I said somewhat - they are not 100% accurate) list of total players.

FC and the rest of the forums have known this for a good while now, and it's been beaten to death in a few threads already.

[Freor]

Edit: @Voiran: Ofc he was. But you have slightly different chances to affect decisions as game director. He already changed the BS reward nerf among other things.

[DigitalBath]

@DigitalBath: If you dont do towers, then I'm sorry, but you really do not understand how serious the situation is.

If you focus solely on towers, you miss out on the bigger picture of the game. There's admittedly less pvp'ers than pvm'ers in the game. Hybrids are mostly pvm, too.
That said, I currently don't do towers but I stay informed. You can do that, you know? Would be nice if you had answered the remaining part of that sentence, where I talked about the recent clan rush and how multiboxing may have affected it (or not).

You clearly ignore ALL the lead designers and programmers' insight on the subject, which is greater than yours. No question.
You also ignore the only insight into population statistics we're ever truly had (Nusquam's post stating its steady decline).
All to suit your point of view, which makes your point much weaker.

As to the bots tracking population.. they can only track people registered to the bot and/or in an organization. A "discover everyone" bot network is doable but I highly doubt anyone would ever bother to do it.
Your graph has zero credibility. I can plot a similar one with different data in a few minutes and claim similar validity and source and then what do we have? Nothing. We're both not credible sources on this. FC is.

Multiboxing in PvP is an issue because of low population, mostly. If you look at other games, Multiboxers actually often run off when they have similar organized numbers on the other side.
It's entirely feasible to kill one person controlling 5-6 toons.. if you have at least 4 toons that know anything about what they're doing in pvp.
Google this - killing a multiboxer
And learn how it's done in more mainstream games.
Organize yourself with your org and do it.

As for the tower sites not lasting long enough.. that's something FC should indeed address, but it was an issue WAY before multiboxing was widespread in pvp, when population was higher and people brought towersites down faster than you could respond to as well. The power surge that came with expansions post NW wasn't properly addressed in tower wars.

The issue is 90% low population, 10% multiboxing without regard for the eula (one key/click in one client per click/keypress on the keyboard). Remove multiboxing from the game and prices will inflate even more (far less supply lost than demand lost, as multiboxers often gear their characters to the desired spec before farming) and "population" (as in characters played) goes down because multiboxers will either quit or play just 1-2 accounts instead of whatever number they play now. It's a bad idea at this point.
It won't affect me primarily as I mostly run content in teams with friends (as previously mentioned). But it will take a heavy toll on the general population over time.. and THAT worries me. I don't want the game to shut down early because of this.

Most anti-multiboxers come from a PvP background and seem to think about nothing but the implications multiboxing has had in their PvP experience. They ignore everyone else's points and just repeat their own. They ignore ANY hard data from reliable sources and sometimes even fabricate their own. Instead of thinking of why multiboxing wasn't an issue for a long time despite being present for 8+years in the game, and thinking of how to make it a non-issue again.. they just want to shut it down. Not thinking of how that will negatively impact economy and population numbers. This isn't good for anyone. It's bad thinking/reasoning.

In THIS game. We have to change things for the better to attract more people.
Multiboxing won't really negatively impact any truly new players with the current learning curve. They'll quit before they even get to PvP at this point. The few that stick around will be too busy leveling up their ranged energy MA until they realize it's not a good weapon choice and they have to start over because IPR's are a bit hard to get to and they won't know they're there.

Let's make AO friendlier to noobs overall, but without too much carebear stuff. Let's have mentor systems if that's what it takes, too.
Let's fix decade-old bugs and concerns and make the game playable on the majority of computers sold today. (see: issues with switchable graphics laptops than run Crysis 3 just fine but can't run AO without massive glitches.. there's a thread about this, too!).
Let's implement balancing changes quicker and gradually instead of trying to make a "huge patch" that will never come to Live.

I could go on, but it should be clear by now that there's a lot more important things to do than to worry about this.
One day, in the distant future, if AO is still up and healthy in population numbers and MB is STILL an issue.. we should look at it. But right now? It's just a bad idea.

TL;DR - Please focus on the real issues and get real sources of information.

[Psikie]

Multiboxing won't really negatively impact any truly new players with the current learning curve.

The few that stick around will be too busy leveling up their ranged energy MA until they realize it's not a good weapon choice and they have to start over because IPR's are a bit hard to get to and they won't know they're there.

That was funny, made me actually laugh thinking about how true that is.

[DigitalBath]

@Psikie: I was a shotgun NT in April-> ~June 2003 (hard to remember how long it took). I loved my vektor shotties because they fired huge beams at the mobs while my nukes were mostly not amazing looking enough for my taste and made me run out of nano sooo much. I loved it so much I kept going on that for ~80-100 levels.. it wasn't too viable but it took me a while to accept it. I still have my vektors in a bag in my bank. Being a noob was great fun and something I keep a reminder of.
Most of us have been there

[Esqi]

Problem in Eve is that people are using autohotkey/hotkeynet with continued looping type macros as automation software for mining/botting.. where it causes issues. It's a major issue there. AHK does not allow looping as such, but autohotkey can and its a little different than just using hotkeynet for key broadcasts.

[Caloss2]

CCP changes

In short running multiple accounts at the same time remains legal. In regards to Input Broadcasting & Input Multiplexing, this will be looked at as a bannable offense.
Meaning you will risk a permanent ban, over a two-strike policy for broadcasting commands over multiple clients.

I would just like to say well done CCP, I hope FunCom can follow up and do the same.


Darkempire

Can't come soon enough.

[Traderjill]

Problem in Eve is that people are using autohotkey/hotkeynet with continued looping type macros as automation software for mining/botting.. where it causes issues. It's a major issue there. AHK does not allow looping as such, but autohotkey can and its a little different than just using hotkeynet for key broadcasts.

Not that I can say I know a large percentage of multiboxers but of the 20 or so that I know, I think around 60-70% of them use some form of looping macros while multiboxing. One simple example is having the doctor in their multibox team spamming heals constantly on the tank toon. Some people auto/afk ai raids and such. There's one guy I know that will join a raid and basically put his toon afk on follow on someone just for extra DD because he's automated assisting and doing all of his attacks.

[Esqi]

I dunno about others, but speaking for myself.. When i want to use BI.. i use a specific key, when i want to team heal, i use another..so on for team hot etc. The person your referring to is possibly also running that dual logged client on a diff machine and using the script to spam heals? I find that truly cumbersome when you can manually control it, on demand. Same with debuffs and perks etc.

[DigitalBath]

Not that I can say I know a large percentage of multiboxers but of the 20 or so that I know, I think around 60-70% of them use some form of looping macros while multiboxing. One simple example is having the doctor in their multibox team spamming heals constantly on the tank toon. Some people auto/afk ai raids and such. There's one guy I know that will join a raid and basically put his toon afk on follow on someone just for extra DD because he's automated assisting and doing all of his attacks.

That's not really just multiboxing then. It's botting (the doctor you've described is the definition of a crude heal bot script) + Multiboxing (or single playing if the person's dual logging). This is 100% against the EULA and something everyone should oppose by principle alone.
Introducing loops and delays and any other automation is not necessary in any way to play in a multiboxed setup.
All you need is clever keybinding across multiple clients without breaking the EULA. Not everyone is willing to be that honest, though.

That said, that wasn't what CCP seeked to ban here. Automation was always banned. Afaik, automation in AO is also still very much bannable if detected/reported.

Something to add to the discussion - It's easy to use tools to check the color of a pixel on your screen/one of your screens. One could easily use this to make a less crude healbot script/program that checks if the pixel is red or black or the exact color used for when the HP bar is not filled and if it's at a certain coordinate (let's say 50% hp), the doctor bot casts BI.
This is and always was a bannable offense to my knowledge, though.. I just wonder if it's being enforced at all these days.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

I dunno about others, but speaking for myself.. When i want to use BI.. i use a specific key, when i want to team heal, i use another..so on for team hot etc. The person your referring to is possibly also running that dual logged client on a diff machine and using the script to spam heals? I find that truly cumbersome when you can manually control it, on demand. Same with debuffs and perks etc.

You can set up a subroutine in hotkeynet to tell a slave to do one thing on a timer.

Say for example you wanted to tell your crat to fire off malaise+ Imp red tape + Norm red tape + Nan Adv red tape

If my crat is named crat and I set the debuff key to say, "Z", and I've set Malaise/tape1/tape2/tape3 to hotbar 2 number 1/2/3/4 you could do:

<Hotkey z>
<SendPC local>
<SendWinM "Anarchy Online - Crat">
<Shift+2>
<1>
<wait 280> # because 1s cast time+1.5s recharge 1+1.5=2.5*100=250 +30ms just in case.
<2>
<wait 150>
<3>
<wait 150>
<4>
<shift+1> # to be back on hotbar 1


But I'm not sure about loops.

[Anonimofied]

We dont need bots to analyze the server see the current population ingame, all we need to do is simply open our eyes.

[Difs]

Not that I can say I know a large percentage of multiboxers but of the 20 or so that I know, I think around 60-70% of them use some form of looping macros while multiboxing. One simple example is having the doctor in their multibox team spamming heals constantly on the tank toon. Some people auto/afk ai raids and such. There's one guy I know that will join a raid and basically put his toon afk on follow on someone just for extra DD because he's automated assisting and doing all of his attacks.

spamming heals and auto assist/attack can be done via macros from ao (no program needed, fc gave us everything we need to do it)

[Voiran]

some interesting stuff i found http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8156016099

one interesting quote: Semantics issue #3:
Does multiboxing give a player an in-game advantage?
“Yes–and so does grouping.”
Therefore, can multiboxing be considered an exploit?
“No. We consider it be an alternative playstyle; not everyone can do it, but if a person is willing to devote the concentration and capital to such a venture–legitimately–we’re perfectly fine with it. Five multiboxed accounts can be feared and CCed just like five solo accounts.

-Belfaire, Blizzard Poster

i hope fc handles it this way