Is Multiboxing A Form Of Pay To Win?

Just curious what peoples thoughts and opinions are.

Of course it is. But it's never not fun to watch that trashfire debate I guess.

Make a bingo card for rmt, it's my 12.95, gearswap is botting, and someone bringing up 14

I'm gay.

No,

nothing is given to you, and it actually requires a lot of extra work before you can sow even midly noticeable results.

If anything, it allows you more flexibity to do control the time you can do stuffs, instead of being forever at mercy of others

No, multiboxing is not pay to win...it's a tremendous time investment. It's also a consequence of 6/18-man content that needs Utility jobs (PLD/RUN, WHM, etc) that humans just do not want to play or simply do not value from other players. You'll never see a WHM-parse at the end of run showing the average HP returned on Cure 3, or a ratio of Over-Cures/MP Spent for Healers in an event, because the vast amount of the population doesn't inherently value, glorify, or sometimes even downright appreciate the importance of utility jobs (especially healers). A multiboxer takes on the weight of the community that doesn't want to play certain, necessary jobs. (If PUP or BST could cap haste for the whole party...) ...Sorry, This is a topic for another thread.

Anyway, however, other kinds of extra-character benefits are situations akin to 'paying for a brief headstart'.

In my first year of FFXI (2003), I was hit with a surprise sense of disillusionment and it had to do with this very topic. I always felt a disconnect between how the game lightly instructed us to play and how some players, perhaps elitists, forcefully expected you to play.

Muling
Someone said "Brb I'm going to get gear off my mule". I actually thought it was disingenuous to pay $1 for extra storage space in 2003. I naively thought that 1 person should play 1 character and if they were paying $1 for extra storage, they weren't playing according to the spirit of FFXI's rules. Who knows maybe they had severe in-game hoarding issues?

My reasoning
After a while I thought to myself: "If the FFXI client or SE Account Management site allows any person to do something, then it's an equal playing field for all players to do the same thing". (I still kind of live by this process. However, we all know SE has in the past, banned people for "exploiting" out-of-the-box, vanilla, in-gaming mechanics, such as AFK-avatar leveling back in the day. Hilarious!).

Pay to Win
With the advent of login points campaigns, and they used to be GREAT in their first 5 years, you're effectively paying a $1/month for more Empyrean drops, VW materials, etc etc. It is, in effect, a kind of Pay to Win strategy because you're converting your $12.95+$1-$15 in exchange for items that aid slightly in your progression. This saves you time.

Why?
...It's simple. The way to win in an MMORPG is to simply have more time than the person next to you.

I'd really like to hear other people's thoughts too.

Edit: Changed my answer because I wasn't answering OPs question and got too invested in this threads Bingo.

My take on: Gear swap is botting

I was working on a friend's Frankenstein Lua file last year and it was the first time I really delved deep into the inner workings. I could see they had copied and pasted optimizations from different authors and it was worse than spaghetti code. It was a Frankenstein monster. My biggest concerns where, it did a significant amount of automation that probably hammers SEs servers relentlessly, but that's a topic for another day.

My 2 biggest gripes with functionality that I saw included in this Lua:

1.) Once engaging, I noticed that his Lua would automatically equip a different TP set based on all combinatons of haste buffs as his buffs changed dynamically or every 350ms interval.

2.) Another issue that I believe breaks the spirit of convenience in GearSwap is built-in automation. Your addon that's responsible for gear swapping shouldn't also behave like Singer or automatically Pianissimos someone, or pre-empt a spellcast with a Silence-check/Remedy usage.

These kinds of conveniences condition us to be less alert and observant of our surroundings in game. It just feels like spamming the Turbo button on a 3rd-party controller on Street Fighter 2, in 1992. :/

Could be considered pay-to-win, but then you have to also include wardrobes as pay-to-win, because you're able to use more gear/play more jobs. Also any server transfer is pay-to-win because it gives you access to different playerbase and economy. Mules are pay-to-win because of the reasons Felgarr said (more storage space, login point stuff, DM augs (if you go that route) during campaigns, ambuscade rewards (if you can leech them in) etc. etc.

SE offers all kinds of ways to pay-to-win, or at least pay for advantage. I doubt there are many people playing a single character with a single wardrobe on a single account though. To each their own, decide what level of advantage/discomfort you can live with.

is getting the first account a pay-to-win? If you don't pay for that there is absolutely nothing you can win...

Yes, multiboxing is pay to win. Only 700 of the 3,500 people online on Asura are single character players, the other 2,800 are bots or alts. Most people run 2-3+ characters. Oh, and every single one of them has infinite gil that they earned from botting Escha Zi'Tah, Chocobo Blinkers, or duped medals/Alexandrite. Or botted crafting shields. In fact, most MMOs are pay to win. The only thing SE did kinda right was Prime weapons. If they followed the same path as every other REMA then everyone would be on there[sic] fifth weapon by now.

The term "pay to win" was originally applied to games. Developers intentionally over-tuned content, but offered consumables in their cash shops that reduced the grind (exp and money bonuses, buffs that increased damage, mounts that moved faster than those available normally, ect.)


These days the term is used to describe players who spend money to gain advantage they wouldn't otherwise have. Multiboxing would be considered pay to win because it allows access to content you can't normally solo, can grant buffs beyond that of a solo player with trusts, additional chances at daily/monthly events, ect.

I obviously have some bias here but...all these other issues are 10x worse than multi-boxing. The actual P2W doesn't come from the ability to log in more than 1 character, but from the stuff people do with those characters. If you're botting 5 characters, the subscription isn't the thing enabling you to "win", it's the bot. If you're botting Zitah, Chocobo Blinkers, duping items, or botting shields, that's the thing that caused the problem.

If you really want to get to the root of it, the biggest problem FFXI has is a lack of enforcement of the tos. I'm not saying they should enforce dressup or even gearswap (lite) usage, but flagrant botting for all aspects of FFXI is way more to blame than the $12.95

Horizon isn't pay to win! Wait. Does it even exist anymore? LOL

Damn boy you almost hit a perfect bingo in just one post. Supposed to let it go a few pages. Or spread it out.

I don't understand why people worry about what other people do instead of just worrying about themselves.

Because IT'S NOT FAIR! /pout

I guess "I'm not saying gearswap usage should be enforced" is talking about gearswap being botting. "I think botting is worse than someone paying for a subscription" is talking about how it's my $13? Not really sure what you're talking about here. I hit maybe 1/2 of 1 of your 4 points? Do you know how bingo works?


Maybe it has to do with the fact that it's an MMO and not Dark Souls? Every event involves playing with other people. Everything you buy, sell, or trade involves another person. You share a physical space, compete for NMs and item drops with other people. It's a social game involving relationships and scarce resources, we're not playing the single player campaign of DOOM 2 or something. The impacts of how other people play affect everyone else's experience in a dozen different ways. This is the dumbest hot take I've ever seen, and it's all over this forum somehow.

I personally don't do this because I enjoy playing with people. I know some people have the extra cash to blow each month but I'm fine with just the one account.

I absolutely think that additional accounts are pay to win. Something something personal loot like in Voidwatch or HTBC fights. There's also a 3-man entry requirement for Dynamis-D, Delve, and Vagary. Imagine how much money you can make if you have the right setup for these events. People also make mules just to do Trove every month (I realize this is something you can do on the same account but still).

Sure you have to gear things up but each additional mule makes the process easier. Maybe you start with a blu and a whm. Then it becomes sam brd whm then maybe sam brd cor whm. At that point you can roll anything.

With that said, I think it's also a necessary evil. Multi-boxing lets you accomplish things on your schedule. I always prefer to play with other people but your time zone and/or play time just might not be compatible with others. You get to do things that you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Because it to me is. Spending double the amount of money for one game seems a little too much to me. I could do it but I know I wouldn't get anything really full filling out of it.

Edit: Just to clarify. I don't judge anyone for playing with multiple accounts. I only see it as a waste of money to myself. I don't play this game to just do things by myself seeing as it's an MMO.

I've made a lot of friends over the years & I enjoy doing content with other people. Scheduling I agree can be an issue but if you try hard enough you can make it work with other people's playtimes.~

Depends on what metrics you use to measure "cost".
From a direct financial commitment perspective, of course, it is pay to win.
You're paying additional subscription fees for additional characters, to be able to achieve things you couldn't without the same additional characters.
Remember windower isn't sanctioned by SE. This type of gameplay wasn't part of their plan. But, it's probably also their single biggest contributor to revenue.

But in reality and objectively, multi-boxing is paying to lose.
The community dwindles, the social aspects of the game deteriorate, the time you spend gearing several characters, and the associated discomfort replaces the enjoyable social aspects of an MMO.
On the flip side, you don't have to deal with idiots, trolls, and people with mental handicaps.

the question for me is, is the cost of not dealing with the above idiots a net gain?
I don't think so. I much preferred playing 1 character with several of my friends

Multibox spending is considerably higher than what is required to play. It's not about what you budget for entertainment.


When I go somewhere I don't need to, I'm not driving 3 cars. When I go out to eat, I don't order 3 plates of food... blah blah blah <3

The guy at the other table doesn't eat the food off your plate because he thinks you have more than enough already, whether you order 1 plate or 3.

Multi-boxing is not a form of pay to win because you can create those 16 characters on multiple accounts (or your friends accounts) at sign up and keep them forever dormant and free, and only logging them each free campaign for 16x the profits like ~30 times over the life of the game so far

The guy at the other table multiboxes. He's just laying back while his alts shovel food into his face.


For the money multiboxers spend, I get my sub with wardrobes and mules, gas for the ride, dinner for me and an escort, a subscription to music service to set the mood and even have enough left over to pay for the antibiotics. A life of luxury.

Wow pretty cheap escorts that you've got over there, eh!

That's what the antibiotics are for. STI roulette isn't popular in Italy?