EVE Online mission multiboxing ships ?

[Stabface]

Do we still have anyone multiboxing EVE? I know Bradster was kicking ass there for a while. I'm going to pick back up EVE Online when the new xpack hits (March 10th). My goal is to have accounts that pay for themselves within 6 months, to become filthy rich -- 100B is my long term goal -- and then PVP for the lulz.

Last time I quit I got rid of all my high SP characters so I'll be starting over from scratch skill-wise, I do have my forum posting account alt who has around 500M ISK as a nest egg for when I wanted to come back. So I do have a rather good leg up on getting restarted since I can easily buy ships, skills and implants right off the bat.

I've done the whole industry & market thing before; T1/ship production is okay but the market-pvp is more cutthroat than any pirate, lol. Mining in 0.0 with multiple accounts is boring but easy ISK and would be a pretty fast skillup. But I don't have access to 0.0 and don't really have any contacts to get access anymore. And I think I'd rather like to stay in empire with some fat implants for at least a few months.
Exploration is interesting to me, especially with the wormhole stuff coming out. But it needs some high SP totals to scan down and then handle the sites, especially looking at how tough the Sleepers are from the test server videos.

My current plan is to set up 3-5 accounts and start by spamming the heck out of missions. I get standings this way for jump clones which I want anyhow, it's about as low-risk as you can get, I can login and play whenever without worrying about locals or wars. I can spend a few months this way training in empire with nice implants and , then move on to bigger and better things in 0.0 with some skills under my belt. I think I can get up to handle L3's within 2 weeks easily, which make pretty decent standings gain and ISK. Probably not enough to play for multiple accounts, but enough to buy skills and ships easily and build up a decent wallet balance.After that look into access for 0.0 space and either rat or mine on multiple accounts while training up a PVP alt.


I'm torn between what race/ship setup would be the best for boxing missions though. Thoughts:

Caldari - Caracal or Drake w/ FoF heavy missiles - I heard FoFs still kind of suck, shoot structures, won't target out past 80? km, sometimes won't shoot at hostiles, etc. But if you ran 5 Drakes with them, thats 35 launchers. Solving problems through overwhelming firepower? And the idea of a capless passive tank is very appealing since it's just one less bit of micromanagement to deal with. Warp in, F1->F7, and fly to the next gate while you watch the carnage. If it works...

Gallente - Vexor or Myrmidon (or a Dominix) w/ drones. I know with reasonable skills you can AFK many missions this way, warp in and grab aggro, launch drones, go afk... sounds like it would scale easily to multiple ships. Sentry drones are pretty kickass DPS and instant recall if they get aggro. It wouldn't be hard to do some remote rep spider tank either, which would get me into harder missions that much faster with lower skills. I'm strongly leaning towards this setup since drones are not as stupid as FoF missiles and you can set them to assist (or defend) someone, so I can link up and focus fire with one character. Drone skills would also help with mining if I got access to nice 0.0 mining. And beyond the ship skills, most drone and fitting skills I'd want right away would be int/mem same as learning, so I can focus stats and then do the attribute respec later on once I need guns and more ship skills... int mem learning to 3/4 and some +3 implants will be super fast training right out of the gate.

Amarr - ? some laser boat. Lasers melt face and are probably what I'd want for PVP anyhow... but it sounds like a lot of micro, with targeting and such since there's no way to assist and autotargeters have been broken / useless since the game came out. Bit more skill intensive too. But it would certainly be fun shooting things with 40 lasers, pewpewpew!

Minmatar I don't really like... split weapon ships, generally more skill-intensive. Open to suggestions though.

[Powerwar]

5 manticores firing bombs and heavy missiles is also nice.
They costed like 15 mil before I left EVE for last time and take about 3 days to train the skills.

Anyways, I didn't like eve much because I found the game a bit boring and an endless grind.

In any case... 5 riffters with cruiser afterburner and laser or normal guns would melt faces pretty nice.

[Zzyzxx71]

Not sure why you'd want 5 - from what I hear the lvl 5 missions are doable by 3 as long as you have 1 dedicated logistics ship and he was pretty deep into the tree.

When I was playing 3 accts I was chain running lvl 4's with a CNR (Caldari Pilot) completely loaded out - it was permaboost. Second acct was a megathron with remote reppers, tractor beams, salvagers and remote repair drones. There wasn't a lvl 4 out there that could even really dent my shield. Made for some really consistant cash.

The 3rd acct was for hauling hauling hauling...

[Stabface]

Well bombs are 0.0 only and I don't think the Manticore is great for missions. In PVP I'd be single-account or maybe some scouts/cyno alts of course if I got into cap ships. I like small gang more than big fleet engagements though.

Looking at 5 accounts because of fleet size for gang boosters, if I did get back to 0.0 mining an Orca + 4 miners is something around 250-300M+ an hour last time I played which is pretty sweet income. I can run 5-6 accounts comfortably on my hardware, 4 on main machine and 1-2 on laptop. So I'd just be out the initial cost, ~150 bucks for 60 days of game time or more with buddy system. Hopefully in 2 months I can afford game time with ISK so there'd be no more $ cost after that.

And yeah it really only takes 1 account to run any L4 or maybe 2-3 to run any L5. You gain speed from multiple accounts in the same mission but beyond 2-3 ships I think its diminishing returns as you spend a larger % of your time traveling, which isn't helped by having multiple ships. The idea though is to get into the tougher missions sooner, and to then get skills for a mostly AFK setup so I can do missions in parallel.
For example I could be in 5 Myrmidons running L3s in a matter of 2-3 days. Then skill up more and maybe do 2 missions with 2 ships each, and the 5th guy salvaging/looting. Then move to a Dominix and run 2-3 L4s in parallel. And with a good location with multiple agents nearby you can pick and choose your missions, avoid the ones that give the faction hits and farming multiple Extravaganzas or Worlds Collide or whatever gets the most ISK.

[Redbeard]

Theyre supposedly revamping rat AI so keep that in mind. I dont know how long (if ever) that will take to trickle down to missions. Apparently making them much smarter at targetting (instead of just targetting the first thing that hits them, etc).

[RobinGBrown]

Apparently making them much smarter at targettingHow will this make any difference to combat? EVE combat is stunningly dull - orbit target at optimal speed/range, switch weapons on, wait - I don't see how 'smarter' targeting will affect that. This is not a go at you Redbeard but at the EVE devs and their poor game design.

Stabface - my preference for EVE has always been to go with the prettiest ships and weapons - which is why my EVE 'main' is Amarr (not that I've played in a while...). Amarr also get a couple of 'mini' drone carriers and a decent logistics ship for support of your focus. Also one or two missile boats IIRC.

I'd certainly aim to be self paying for EVE by making ISK in-game - it's a very expensive game to play.

[Redbeard]

I didnt take it as a stab at me.

Currnetly in eve. you enter a belt / mission whatever. your "tank" hits the rats. They all attack the tank. Your other people are basically free to do whatever at that point without fear of them fighting back.

If they revamp the AI that might not be the case. If you come in with a ship set to tank the rats could just ignore you since theres no real taunt mechanic in the game. Just wanted to throw it out there so he would be aware.

[RobinGBrown]

Ah I see your point now and it's a good one.

However I would recommend having every ship capable of putting up as good a tank as possible - you never know when you might need it

After all you wouldn't have your followers with level 1 spells and gear while your main is tanking - far too much chance of a follower getting wiped (I know becasue I've had this happen a few times recently while I've been RAF-ing a new team to 60. So I've made sure that every 10 levels or so they get their spells and always kit up with quest rewards)

[RobinGBrown]

I read a dev blog for EVE and their new 'AI' is basically a threat system - just like every other MMO uses...

How comes EVE devs get all these 'awards' when it's taken them until now to implement a threat system for NPCs (and not all NPCs, only the new ones). What a bunch of *sshats.

For those considering trying out the new content - it's _ALL_ PVP - and you DO NOT want to PVP in EVE unless you've played it for a long time already.

[Redbeard]

Well if you think about it... a threat system is kind of stupid haha. I was explaining how WoW fights work to my friend (who plays eve and has never played another mmo) and he was like "Thats stupid, why does the player get to dictate who the mob attacks?" A truly smart mob probably isnt going for the tank, you know? And the whole "ive pissed off the mob so it attacks me" reasoning is, i hope youll agree, pretty L O L.

We allow the combat system to work and suspend disbelief because it creates a game for us with a set of rules but if you really think about it the whole thing is kind of silly.

Anyways.

As for why Eve gets rewards, that I dont know. The only reward they deserve I think is getting everyone on 1 game server (though dont show up to the same system or well crash haha).

[moog]

As for why Eve gets rewards, that I dont know. The only reward they deserve I think is getting everyone on 1 game server (though dont show up to the same system or well crash haha).Agh! That's such a spurious claim!

Everyone might be in the same "universe" but each system is limited in population and it's damned annoying being stuck at a portal being unable to get into the next system as it's technically full!

[Redbeard]

Yeah thats why I said dont go to the same system lol. I agree with you.

[Khatovar]

Please be aware, I have sent e-mails to a number of MMORPG teams asking for their stance on multi-boxing. This is in an attempt to get a solid list going of who allows what in various games.

I recieved the following from GM Zhainius, EVE Online Customer Support :


"2009.03.09 13:47:00 GM Zhainius
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,

The following 2 EULA articles are considered to apply to this:

"You may not use your own or third-party software to modify any content appearing within the Game environment *or change how the Game is played."

"You may not use macros or other stored rapid keystrokes or other patterns of play that facilitate acquisition of items, currency, objects, character attributes, rank or status at an accelerated rate when compared with ordinary Game play. You may not rewrite or modify the user interface or otherwise manipulate data in any way to acquire items, currency, objects, character attributes or beneficial actions not actually acquired or achieved in the Game."

More specifically regarding your questions:

1: We do not allow this I'm afraid.
2: We also do not allow this.

3 and 4, are not possible due to multi-boxing not being allowed."

Original questions :
1. Do you allow Hardware multi-boxing? [...]
2. Do you allow Software multi-boxing? [...]
3. What are your rules for distinguishing multi-boxing from botting? [...]
4. Do you have "fair play" clauses in your EULA that multi-boxers should be particularly aware of? [...]

*emphasis mine


Once I get responses from my last 4 tickets, I'll be creating a final post, but I wanted to get this out here because I do have a response from these guys. If someone else has something different from a Dev or CM, please let me know so I can e-mail them back again. Screenshots, PMs or e-mails, please. I can't go back with "Some guy I don't really know told me that someone told him that when they asked someone, they said someone who might have been a GM said..." ;)

[hardcoded]

unfortunately the GMs in eve are known to be a source of errors. Petition a senior GM, and you will get a more reliable answer. Even then, there have been numerous issues that senior GMs have been wrong about.(rabble rabble)

Hard to imagine that their official stance would be "multiboxing is not allowed" when the vast majority of high-end players play multiple accounts, and publically so. Even further their promotional material for "the power of two" ( http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/13199 ):


We can give you that someone. We can bring that new dimension to your life, that special fluttery moment when you realize there are now two of you going through life's hardships. Together. As a Power of 2.

[Khatovar]

Well, sent another e-mail requesting a senior GM, we'll see in a few days I guess. Until then, I guess everyone can take the e-mail I got as a warning "GMs might not know what they're talking about and can action you based on their own random guesses. Be warned." Hehe.

[hardcoded]

did a basic search, and while they do not allow direct posting of GM replies , question "can we use keyclone", laster his reply was "Lets multibox".
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=929251&page=1
P.S. -- I have some good memories about skirting the no GM posting rule. You should have seen the petition QQ when we took an unpiloted enemy carrier :)

[Thulos]

As for why Eve gets rewards, that I dont know. The only reward they deserve I think is getting everyone on 1 game server (though dont show up to the same system or well crash haha).

EvE deserves rewards because of its massive fleet battle capabilities. With the new reduced lag in massive fights the epic scale of an 800 man fight is something to behold. Some of the fights i've been in in the past month destroying disBand of Brothers have been spectacular. No other game much less MMO can match the scale of EvE 0.0 Warfare.

As far as Multiboxing eve you recieved an ignorant GM. I've been multiboxing EvE since release and it is allowed. About every few months they reopen their Power of two program which allows you to open a second account for a reduced cost. If they didn't allow multiboxing why on earth would they have a program that allows you to create your own second account. The one thing you cannot due is automate any keystrokes. Since eve's UI is rather simple there is no need to even broadcast keys.

Edit: They even have info in their FAQ section and a dev post about how to run multiple clients on one machine. It even states at the bottom that it requires more than one account to do so.
http://support.eve-online.com/Pages/KB/Article.aspx?id=65
"Please note that to play EVE with two clients you will need two separate accounts; it is not possible to be online with two separate sessions on the same account."

[Stabface]

As far as multi-boxing missions go, I've ran through a couple of weeks with 4 trial accounts - they limit to 1 trial account per machine so I could only easily run 4 max using some spare hardware & laptop along with my main machine. My thoughts so far :

Controlling multiple accounts:
I did this manually "hardware boxing" with multiple keyboards/mice. It's not really too bad, some key or mouse broadcasting would really help though. PvE in EVE is not terribly input-intensive although it does get a bit busy, you warp in to a mission, lock a few targets and start shooting. With sufficient skills you can have like 6-8+ targets locked at once up to your ship's maximum, giving you quite a few targets to shoot at. Unfortunately without mouse broadcasting there's no good way to lock on to targets on multiple clients at once.


Friend-or-Foe missiles vs Drones... I tried both.

FoF missiles are funny and often refuse to shoot something unless it's shooting at you. I ended up fitting a remote repair module and warping in 1 ship to get aggro, then warping in the rest and running 1 cycle of repair on that guy. Then all my ships would have their FoF missiles able to blow up stuff. I read that you can get around this by setting the NPC factions to -10 standing somehow, but I didn't get around to trying it. Remote repair is pretty powerful in it's own right anyhow and is probably something that a multiboxer will want to use, more on this later. FoF missiles also however shoot at whatever is *closest*, including space walls and other structures. These are harmless and pointless to destroy, you can in most missions it seems avoid this by just flying away from them. If not then they generally don't have too many hitpoints, so it's annoying and inefficient but not a show stopper for FoF's. It is quite funny watching a bunch of frigates orbiting each other in close range, spewing out a constant wave of missiles and just annihilating stuff.

Drones are pretty awesome. They again will only aggro on things that are shooting you... but they have commands to guard or assist another player. So you can simply tell the 'slave' accounts to assist the main ship, and those drones will (almost always) assist whatever your main guy is shooting at with his guns. This ended up working much better than FoFs -- even though the DPS was lower (probably due to skills) it was just much less hassle to kill things. It's far less micro as long as you're not getting aggro on the drones, you only need to lock and shoot at targets on one screen. Just warp in, drop drones -> guard/assist on the alts, then start shooting on your main.

Now, these things are not mutually exclusive, but unfortunately there are no good missile + drone ships. The good missile ships have a small drone bay with no bonuses to drones, and the drone ships have no launchers at all in most cases. It would be full of win if you had a ship with a full rack of FoF missiles and 125MB drone control, but there's no such thing AFAIK.


The best combo I think for combat missions would probably be drone ships on your slaves and a gun or missile ship for your main. You'd be wasting the guns from the drone ships, but from a cost/benefit perspective I think the extra time spent targeting and shooting on all the slaves is just not worth it. I think for level 4's I'd go for Amarr or Minmatar on the main and Gallente (Dominix, duh) for the slaves. I'd skill the slaves towards Sentry drones and remote repair, on the main ship sniper fit. 4 slaves give you 20 sentry drones out, with rigs/skills its something over 2000 DPS all focus firing at whatever your main shoots. This is a rather large amount, And if you mount 2-3 remote armor repairs each on the Dominixes and along with hardeners in the lows on all ship you have a HUGE tank (avoid NPCs that jam you though) Each T2 large remote rep gives something ~100 HP/sec repair, 2-3 of these alone with decent resists gives any ship the ability to tank all the DPS from pretty much any L4 mission.


Another option for multiboxing missions are mining missions. You can apparently blitz these really fast with multiple ships, level 3's have you mine something around 5000-9000m3, and L4s have 45000m3 to mine. The top mining barge (Covetor) is accessible after <2 months training and mines around 1000m3 per minute while a Hulk probably takes 4-5 months training and gets close to double that. This scales pretty linearly so with 3-5 mining toons you can rip through these mining missions. The only problem is that mining agents sometimes give kill missions, which you can decline but only once per 4 hours per character. So I'm not sure if it's viable or not. You could just go mine in a belt though while waiting on the mission expiration.

Oh and one last option for multiboxing mission would be couriers. These just have you haul stuff from X to Y and can be done in parallel pretty easily thanks to the autopilot. As long as you avoid low sec it's pretty safe since the vast majority of missions have you hauling stuff that has no value. But I don't think they pay very well, I never tried too many of them.


I'll be setting up real accounts pretty soon once I decide exactly what I'm going to be doing... stay tuned for more updates.

[Thulos]

For running missions the Raven is pretty much the ship of choice for L4 missions. Once you build up money good mission runners move up to a Raven Navy issue and then possibly later on a Golem. If you really want to get fancy with missions then you can train up one of your alts to run a remote repping logistics ship to be your space priest. If your main pilot is a shield tanker (Raven, Drake, etc) then the Basilisk is the ship of choice. If your main is an armor Tanker (Dominix is an example) then you want the Oneiros (Gallente Logistics ship). If I was to make a recomendation for running missions I would do 2 Ravens, 1 Baslisk and one Loot/Salvager. This will shred all level 4 and 5 missions in the game.

FoF missiles are almost entirely worthless for anything in the game. Whatever you do please don't use them. Sure you don't have to pay attention to what you are shooting at but you are going to do absolute crap DPS and this method will take forever to complete missions. Drones are great but the problem with some missions is they will cause the entire room to aggro which could be very bad. You have to know the missions well to be an effective drone user. Don't take this as a diss on drones though because they are awesome. Additionally drones take a lot of micromanagement, because of this they are a very poor choice for a multiboxer.

For running missions there is a great website that has info on all the missions in the game that is usable with the in game browser:
http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=MissionReports

TLDR: Use Ravens for PvE. :thumbup:

[Souca]

FoF missiles are almost entirely worthless for anything in the game.This has been the case since launch. Drones have always been nice. My experience with the game is so out of date though. Part of me wants to play again, but then I remember all the time mining to get ISK to buy more mining equipment.

As for skills, have they restructured it much? Last time I activated my account I was looking at 7 or 14 days for anything interesting. I know they added queueing, but if it still takes weeks of real time to get a skill from 4 -> 5 then I wonder how much it really helps.

For those of you playing, do you play regularly, or is it more of one a week sort of a playstyle? Am I better off starting from scratch, or using my original character?

- Souca -

[Redbeard]

Training times arent any lower. Youll still be waiting weeks. I am ambivalent against wow, intellectually im interested in getting my 5 man to 80 but im depressed about what happens when i get there. Anyways, considering picking this back up.

The longer training times are offset by the fact that its real time, in my opinion. This only really penalizes people who like binge / powerlevel really fast.

Basic systems, mining, ratting, etc are still the same. They JUST put out a new expansion which has some new wormhole type things, ill let you check it out if youd like.

[hardcoded]

Am I better off starting from scratch, or using my original character?

- Souca -Generally speaking, roll a caldari achura monk. Their starting stats are crazy, and you get 1M skillpoints to start (was: 100k for others) After a year and a half, my achura alt caught up with my other combat alt which was signifigantly older, and continued to train faster.

When they came out thekiller8 asserted that they had the "sexy" skill:
http://www.student.ru.nl/martindevillers/rmrnstuff.html

Good memories. Popping the author of that video's carrier was awesome :) That'll learn them Europeans to lay claim to (largely) American territory.

[Redbeard]

Hardcoded, they just changed the new player experience with the expansion in march.

Players now start with very limited skills and then they train twice as fast.

Theyve also introduced stat rerolling.

[hardcoded]

o.0

[Souca]

Hmm, maybe I'll download the trial and seem how much things have changed.

- Souca -

[Thulos]

As for skills, have they restructured it much? Last time I activated my account I was looking at 7 or 14 days for anything interesting. I know they added queueing, but if it still takes weeks of real time to get a skill from 4 -> 5 then I wonder how much it really helps.The way skills work has not changed. With learning skills you can greatly reduce skill training time. Beyond that it's just part of the large curve getting into the game. Fortunately you get to train without actually playing. It's a tradeoff but one that is worth it. If you think about it from another angle you can train skills in the game without playing for years on end, as long as you are willing to pay for subscription costs. Once you reach a point like me and you can pay for multiple accounts with in game currency and minimal effort the system becomes great. For the past year I've been paying for 4 accounts with in game currency.
For those of you playing, do you play regularly, or is it more of one a week sort of a playstyle? Am I better off starting from scratch, or using my original character?For the past 4 months I've been playing pretty hardcore. On the other side I've setup passive income where I can go long stretches without playing. As far as starting from scratch it depends completely on how many skills you have with your character, with once a year stat respecs the main factor is whether you have a core build thats worth building upon. The most important thing to building a new character is learning skills. If you have more than 2 to 3 million sp with most of them in learning skills then you are better off using your existing character, otherwise you are probably better off starting from scratch. The new system starts you with very minimal skills but gives you double training speeds up to 1.5 million sp.

[Souca]

Well, I've reactivated my original account. Figure I'll play it a bit and decide if I want to get back in. I'd also use it for the buddy referal. Once the patch downloads I'll have a better idea where I am in terms of skill points and ISK.

I like the idea of passive income that pays for your subscription to keep your training going. It's the one thing that always bugged me, I could have had years of training if I'd been willing to keep paying the subscription. I started playing within a month of launch or so.

- Souca -

[Redbeard]

Thulos, what are you doing in game thats generating passive income? Did you invest? Research agents?

Hmm.

[Souca]

Okay. I jumped back in.

I reactivated my main account and referred three buddy accounts. Made two Caldari Achura Monks, not sure if that's meaningful anymore since the whole creation is kinda simple now and have them training learning. Created a Gallente Jin-Wo(sp?) something and have her training mining, still need to get her the learning skill. My original character is Gallente Miner and has over 3 mill SP total, but only 280k in the Learning tree, but he does have learning rank 5. I think I have him working on some ship skills for now.

I'm guessing that my referer accounts are going to have to sit in station for a while soaking up knowledge. I looked at boosters and implants, but there doesn't seem to be anything I can really afford or could use right now. I have around 750k ISK, yes its pathetic I know. Can anyone reccomend a good place to start looking at for skills I should be training, ships I should be after? I'm guessing Raven on the two Caldari, and maybe a third Caldari to run logistics. The Gallente are goign to be transport and mining with drones.

This game is just so aliento me now that I feel sorta lost in how to even start. I do have a company thats over 5 years old though ;)

Characters are James DiGriz, Souca, Kiellie and Kaetryna. Feel free to poke me ingame.

Oh, and unless I'm doing something wrong, it won't let me play my pay account and my trial the same time on the same machine. Can I play multiple pay accounts at the same time, or did that change with the latest expansion?

- Souca -

[Redbeard]

Learners are important but I would suggest doing the following. Take the basic learners up to level 3 or so, that will be quick. Then figure out, basically, what you want the character to do. If you want to mine, get some mining skills out of the way (maybe up to a retriever depending on how long you want to wait) and then when you get to the point where you can PLAY the game then go back and finish learners.

There are a lot of various opinions about whether to train them, not to train them, etc. I fived them on my guy but i just liked having them done. Supposedly id have to play for many years in order to benefit from getting all the learners to 5, but im not some power gamer who thinks about things in those terms.

Anyways.

[Thulos]

Thulos, what are you doing in game thats generating passive income? Did you invest? Research agents?
I buy materials in bulk to produce items in empire and then export them to deep 0.0 stations to sell at a decent markup. Unfortunately what I do requires a lot of startup isk, capital ships fro transportation (a couple billion here) and an alliance/corp that has access to 0.0 space. I typically have between 500m and 1 billion invested in my goods and sell them for about a 20-25% markup. I go through stock about twice a week atm. It's not 100% passive but the amount of effort I put in to making isk ends up being just a couple hours.

There is a bit of passive income to be had in research agents but its probably no more than a couple hundred million a month, but it is completely passive. Playing the market is another way to make easy money but you have to baby sit orders constantly. Even so it doesn't take much effort. I used to make a couple hundred million a week doing it but got bored of it. Basically you find items in the market that have at least a 10% margin between the buy and sell orders as well as having a decent volume. YOu can then setup buy orders for the item and just relist them at a higher value. You are basically just taking advantage of lazy people that want immediate sales. This requires a bit of startup capital and a market hub. You could porbably start off with 100m but it would take a while to build up.
Oh, and unless I'm doing something wrong, it won't let me play my pay account and my trial the same time on the same machine. Can I play multiple pay accounts at the same time, or did that change with the latest expansion?You cannot run two accounts on one machine if one of them is a trial account. You can do it on multiple machines though.

[Stabface]

I am pretty sure that you can run a trial + another account(s) or multiple trials using fast user switching / separate users in Vista.

[Zzyzxx71]

For running missions the Raven is pretty much the ship of choice for L4 missions. Once you build up money good mission runners move up to a Raven Navy issue and then possibly later on a Golem. If you really want to get fancy with missions then you can train up one of your alts to run a remote repping logistics ship to be your space priest. If your main pilot is a shield tanker (Raven, Drake, etc) then the Basilisk is the ship of choice. If your main is an armor Tanker (Dominix is an example) then you want the Oneiros (Gallente Logistics ship). If I was to make a recomendation for running missions I would do 2 Ravens, 1 Baslisk and one Loot/Salvager. This will shred all level 4 and 5 missions in the game.

FoF missiles are almost entirely worthless for anything in the game. Whatever you do please don't use them. Sure you don't have to pay attention to what you are shooting at but you are going to do absolute crap DPS and this method will take forever to complete missions. Drones are great but the problem with some missions is they will cause the entire room to aggro which could be very bad. You have to know the missions well to be an effective drone user. Don't take this as a diss on drones though because they are awesome. Additionally drones take a lot of micromanagement, because of this they are a very poor choice for a multiboxer.

For running missions there is a great website that has info on all the missions in the game that is usable with the in game browser:
http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=MissionReports

TLDR: Use Ravens for PvE. :thumbup:

My current mission running setup (this is currently with a lvl 4q10 agent) is a CNR, 3xCCC rigs, 7xnavy cruise launchers, a drone link augmentor, 2xDG invuln fields, T2 Damage Control Unit, Gist C Type X Large booster, 2x Navy Boost Amps. 2 T2 Cap Relays and a T2 Cap charger, and 2 Navy BCS's. It's permaboost, but even if they start to break the tank (which is crazy rare.... and takes absolutely forever...) I bring in my 2nd acct flying the Megagistics ship...

Megathron with 4 tractors, 3 salvagers, a large remote repper, the rest is nothing but T2 AB, rechargers and cargo mods. It can haul about 2700m3 with a perma AB flyin around 270mps. He can also deploy 5 large remote shield repair drones

All ammo is mission specific (eve-survival.org). Missions go fast because once I'm past the first 25% of the fight, it's more or less overwith, and the Mega is flyin around haulin in the loot. I don't have any rigs on the mega, but when I do, it'll probably be some cargo or speed rigs...

[Souca]

I went ahead and upgraded the new accounts. Too many skills I can't train on trials and I was already up against them. I'll give CCP this, they made trials flexiable enough to give new players a taste, but limited enough to keep existing players from getting too much out of them while they are free. The big one was that trials can't give money to anyone, so I was a little annoyed after I divied up my main's ISK between them. Oh well, just some free time for the main worst case.

So after taking stock of what I had on my main and how much time and ISK it would take to get the new accounts to where I wanted them skill wise, I've settled into a nice little mining op.

The two Caldari are acting as defense in Kestrels with with a mix of Bloodclaw and Serpent missles. The missles are kinetic so they are pretty effective against Serpentis. These are the rats I deal with since I'm in the Essence region of Gallente space ( main is Gallente and had too much crap to move somewhere else yet ). These two are traiing up to Cruisers right now, should be able to pick up Carcals tomorrow evening. Once I get then in Cruisers, I'm likely to start to take them in different directions. Two cruisers are overkill for 0.5 space where I'm mining, but times when I've had one of the Kestrel's off picking up orders I've found that one frigate just isn't enough defense.

I have a new Gallente working her way down the Gallente Industrial command skills. With my main being Gallente it made more sense than going Minmatar as I already had a Iteron 2 and Iteron 4. She hit level 3 last night and I picked up an Iteron 3 to get the second high slot. She has enough skill to run remote armor repair, so she lets me stay out longer with having to go back for repairs.

The main is flying a Procurer with a modulated strip miner fitted with a crystal for Veldspar. At first I was mining everything but Veldspar, but given the price on Tritanium I'm getting, 3.97 to 4.15 ( I lucked out and managed a decent sized sale at 5.0 over the weekend ), I see the most profit in veldspar followed by Scordite. Unless I'm willing to track down some Kernite, I won't be able to beat the yeild on Veld. I'm aout three days out on getting my Astrogeology up to level 4 so I can upgrade to a Retriever.

By no means am I rolling in the ISK, but I can bring in about 8Mil per asteroid belt just strip mining the Veldspar. I picked up Ice Harvesting last night just to try it out. Perhaps I'm not hitting the good ice, but the value of the product seems rather low. Is this a case of there being little demand in Empire space, or is it more that you need to convert the isotopes into something more valuable.

One of the best and worst things about Eve is that you can pretty much set your own goals. Right now I'm considering a POS for moon mining in the highest sec space I can place one, I'm thinking that its > 0.4, but the docs and wikis are a bit vague. I'm going for low sec over 0.0 because I really want to try a setup that pretty self suficient and see how much I can generate for something I only have to deal with once a week.

Okay, one final thing in this mega post, I was seeing PLEX at 350mil, is that about the average for them? Trying to figure out what my income needs to be to pay for my accounts.

- Souca -

[Alptraum]

If your serious about multiboxing Eve let me know, Im also considering going back to Eve, im burnt out on WoW, plus the new expansion for Eve just came out, so I am definately curious. Im looking at reactivating my main (caldari 20mill SP toon miner/hauler believe I can fly a raven, just do not currently own one :)) + my 3 new alts I'll be rolling I figure i'll probably roll out a small mining operation as that seems to be the quickest way I can remember of making money and staying in empire. FAT implants well low risk in .05+ sounds like perfect place to chill to me. I think im bringing another crazy Wow addict with me to eve so if we got a few more serious players together and formed a casual corp we'd be all set (i have corp skills as well if memory serves)


Do we still have anyone multiboxing EVE? I know Bradster was kicking ass there for a while. I'm going to pick back up EVE Online when the new xpack hits (March 10th). My goal is to have accounts that pay for themselves within 6 months, to become filthy rich -- 100B is my long term goal -- and then PVP for the lulz.

Last time I quit I got rid of all my high SP characters so I'll be starting over from scratch skill-wise, I do have my forum posting account alt who has around 500M ISK as a nest egg for when I wanted to come back. So I do have a rather good leg up on getting restarted since I can easily buy ships, skills and implants right off the bat.

[Souca]

If your serious about multiboxing Eve let me know, Im also considering going back to Eve, im burnt out on WoW, plus the new expansion for Eve just came out, so I am definately curious. Im looking at reactivating my main (caldari 20mill SP toon miner/hauler believe I can fly a raven, just do not currently own one :)) + my 3 new alts I'll be rolling I figure i'll probably roll out a small mining operation as that seems to be the quickest way I can remember of making money and staying in empire. FAT implants well low risk in .05+ sounds like perfect place to chill to me. I think im bringing another crazy Wow addict with me to eve so if we got a few more serious players together and formed a casual corp we'd be all set (i have corp skills as well if memory serves)



Do we still have anyone multiboxing EVE? I know Bradster was kicking ass there for a while. I'm going to pick back up EVE Online when the new xpack hits (March 10th). My goal is to have accounts that pay for themselves within 6 months, to become filthy rich -- 100B is my long term goal -- and then PVP for the lulz.

Last time I quit I got rid of all my high SP characters so I'll be starting over from scratch skill-wise, I do have my forum posting account alt who has around 500M ISK as a nest egg for when I wanted to come back. So I do have a rather good leg up on getting restarted since I can easily buy ships, skills and implants right off the bat.

Yea, I'm serious. I pruned my wow accounts down to 2 since I didn't expect to be playing much now that I'm enthralled by Eve again. While I'm not 100% sure what I want to do long term, I'm currently content to work toward accounts that cover themselves. Once I have that taken care of I can always leave some sleeper accounts to bake skills while I play active accounts or even go back to Wow if I need a change of scenery.

I'm rounding out my main character right now, while only 3.2 mil SP, he has enough skills to give me flexibility in playstyle. Currently he is 6 hours from being able to start training Battleships and another 2 days from bumping up to a retriever for mining. Both my combat characters are at Caldari Cruisers 2 and once they finish up some missile training they will begin to work on learning skills before the push to Battleships for them. The cargo character is working on some learning skills before she puts the 4 days into Gallente Industrial 4 and then works toward freighters; between her Iteron 3 and my mains Iteron 4 I can move cargo when I need to and she sits idle between trips when I'm mining so there is no hurry.

I created two other trial accounts and set them up to work toward being able to fly Procurers in about 14 days. It's amazing how much you can accomplish skill wise when you know exactly what you want and you can leave a character alone to train. I've really become fond of the planning feature of EveMon. You tell it your end goal in terms of skill, item or ship and it plans out the skills you need and how long they will take. It even suggests learning skills if they will lower the total training time. I plan on creating a couple more trial accounts and setting them up for specific roles. If I find I don't need them, I'm only out the ISK I spent on the skills. If I end up converting the accounts, it's only just over 2 months to Exhumers with the new character skill bonus now.

I find the style of multiboxing that you have with Eve interesting in cntrast to Wow. With wow I had to be playing and paying attention every second or I felt like I was getting behind. I could only progress on as many characters as I could play at once. I had to be there for all the grinding. With Eve, I actually feel like I'm benefiting from having other accounts when I'm not even playing them. If I feel like doing combat or some missions, my mining characters are being wasted; they're just getting better at skills and closer to being able to fly bigger ships. There is still grinding the intial ISK for gear and such, but I don't feel like I'm getting behind if I'm not playing like I did with Wow. If you add in the fact that all the end game goals are goals you set for yourself, then it feels even more liberating. The only thing that can get to me with Eve is that time delay on skills. It drove me crazy when I was playing in the begining, but having multiple accounts makes that less of an issue since you can play other characters while you train those week and month long skills.

297 days until I can fly a Titan. Should be just enough time to earn the money to build one.

- Souca -

[Darthane]

I used to dual box lvl4 missions with a Galante drone Command Ship and a Gallante support cruiser, with right skills you will have about 95% to all your resists in the command ship, throw that into a zone first, agro everything, then have the logistics ship warp in behind and start repairing, even with basic T1 gear your logistics will keep up ok, in the end I had her skills high enough to fit battleship class remote repairers in the cruiser (just 2) but they meant that she could repair anything within 150k of her :)

Worlds collide was the best money spinner, you could clear that once a day, but not kill the boss at end, salvage it all up (hint, destroyers are the best salvage boats, lots of gun slots for tractors and salvagers and fast as hell) and go grab one from another mission guy, after server maintenance it would repop :)

The main reason I didn't stay hooked to the game was the downtime every day, in the middle of my peak time :/

[RobinGBrown]

Would anyone be interested in a key to mouse broadcast application for EVE?

i.e. Press a key and the program does a mouse action on each of the clients (switching them to focus as required). It would have to be single clicks rather than complex actions.

Would that be breaking EVE ToS?

Because I have some stuff half developed from when I last played EVE that could be thrown together to make such a tool.

[Zzyzxx71]

I'm in the same situation as the person who posted "Wow on hiatus - Multiboxing Eve".

Currently running 3 accts, can either mine or mission, whatever my heart desires - did a small mining up last night, made 47 million without really even paying attention. Running a Hulk, Retriever and an Orca.

We all wanna get together and set something up?

[Alptraum]

I think 3 or 4 accounts with proper planning will more then cover themselfs in about 6-10 months of training/playing a 60day GTC (game time card for those not in the know) goes for bout 620-650mill isk which can be made fairly easy by each player (every 2 months) if you do a few serious mining events once or twice a week. In regard to long term plans I hope to see myself in a pretty successful mining/freighthauling/researching capacity and buisness..its not about hoarding isk for me, its about owning rae blueprints and building ships that other players can only drool over. Eve's playstyle can be tailored to whatever your heart desires and thats what makes it so appealing...you hit it on the head about alts in Wow, they truely do just sit there, and do nothing, unless they are your crafting alts..but again how often do you use them. Where as in Eve with careful planning and forethought each account can have a function and purpose that will match up with your long term plan.

The other beauty of Eve is there is no MAX level, no 14 year olds running around on level 80 dk's with all day to play greiving everyone simply because they are bored. Eve's to harsh for most kids, when you lose a 500 million isk decked out ship, you seriously just log off and go cry in a corner for a day or two...lick your wounds, remember what you did wrong and move on.

I think there might be enough like minded people wanting or already returned to eve to put a corporation together and start helping each other out in game, I know on my trial account already i've helped countless people out which shocks them cause your instantly assumed to be a noob like everyone else if your still in the rookie chatroom *hehe*.




Yea, I'm serious. I pruned my wow accounts down to 2 since I didn't expect to be playing much now that I'm enthralled by Eve again. While I'm not 100% sure what I want to do long term, I'm currently content to work toward accounts that cover themselves. Once I have that taken care of I can always leave some sleeper accounts to bake skills while I play active accounts or even go back to Wow if I need a change of scenery.

I'm rounding out my main character right now, while only 3.2 mil SP, he has enough skills to give me flexibility in playstyle. Currently he is 6 hours from being able to start training Battleships and another 2 days from bumping up to a retriever for mining. Both my combat characters are at Caldari Cruisers 2 and once they finish up some missile training they will begin to work on learning skills before the push to Battleships for them. The cargo character is working on some learning skills before she puts the 4 days into Gallente Industrial 4 and then works toward freighters; between her Iteron 3 and my mains Iteron 4 I can move cargo when I need to and she sits idle between trips when I'm mining so there is no hurry.

I created two other trial accounts and set them up to work toward being able to fly Procurers in about 14 days. It's amazing how much you can accomplish skill wise when you know exactly what you want and you can leave a character alone to train. I've really become fond of the planning feature of EveMon. You tell it your end goal in terms of skill, item or ship and it plans out the skills you need and how long they will take. It even suggests learning skills if they will lower the total training time. I plan on creating a couple more trial accounts and setting them up for specific roles. If I find I don't need them, I'm only out the ISK I spent on the skills. If I end up converting the accounts, it's only just over 2 months to Exhumers with the new character skill bonus now.

I find the style of multiboxing that you have with Eve interesting in cntrast to Wow. With wow I had to be playing and paying attention every second or I felt like I was getting behind. I could only progress on as many characters as I could play at once. I had to be there for all the grinding. With Eve, I actually feel like I'm benefiting from having other accounts when I'm not even playing them. If I feel like doing combat or some missions, my mining characters are being wasted; they're just getting better at skills and closer to being able to fly bigger ships. There is still grinding the intial ISK for gear and such, but I don't feel like I'm getting behind if I'm not playing like I did with Wow. If you add in the fact that all the end game goals are goals you set for yourself, then it feels even more liberating. The only thing that can get to me with Eve is that time delay on skills. It drove me crazy when I was playing in the begining, but having multiple accounts makes that less of an issue since you can play other characters while you train those week and month long skills.

297 days until I can fly a Titan. Should be just enough time to earn the money to build one.

- Souca -

[Alptraum]

I think we wanna all get together and form up into something...set some longterm plans and build out from there..im definately bringing the research and manufacturing/mining skills with me to any corp I eventually end up in, or start my own with that goal in mind.





I'm in the same situation as the person who posted "Wow on hiatus - Multiboxing Eve".

Currently running 3 accts, can either mine or mission, whatever my heart desires - did a small mining up last night, made 47 million without really even paying attention. Running a Hulk, Retriever and an Orca.

We all wanna get together and set something up?

[RobinGBrown]

>We all wanna get together and set something up?

Warp over to this thread and add your names to the list if you're interested in teaming up:

EVE Multiboxers ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=20399')