Is Multiboxing A Form Of Pay To Win?

Yes, of course it is.

You get what you pay for. Even if that is 2-5 other characters to multi box and help others keep all drops.

So here’s a fun question:

So what if Multiboxing is Pay-to-Win?

What should be done about it?

Are we prepared for the ramifications if something is actually done about it?

There’s some very selfish reasons for Multiboxing but there’s some very valid reasons too.

Multi-boxing keeps the game and the game economy alive. So I'd say everyone wins.

No - you are spending time and money (monthly subs) to bring an account up to speed/keep it relevant and geared. It’s no different for you as a spectator if 3 people are independently spending time playing a single account each or a single person is playing 3 accounts.

Said it before as well - if you removed mutliboxing this game and the retail servers would be sunsetted in no time.

Sure, if you just magically triple the number of players, then it's no different!


Just because the community has developed a reliance on something, doesn't mean it isn't P2W. Same argument could be made for Gearswap or bots. If Thanos snapped and removed Gearswap, EZFarm, Cureplease, and Tako from the universe, plenty of people would quit the game and frankly retail would probably enter a death spiral. That doesn't mean they're OK though.

depends on what you mean by pay to win i dont get anything by playing multiple characters i cant get by playing a single character the only thing it changes is the fact that when im doing things with waits cockblocking me im playing a different character instead of youtube netflix etc

I don't know what your experience looks like, but for most people multi-boxing provides a lot of advantages. The most obvious is getting N times as many ambuscade rewards, same applies to other rewards like bonus rewards in HTBF, Dynamis [D] first time clears, statue crushers, etc.

You also have proper buffs instead of trust buffs, a real healer instead of a trust healer. You can spend half (or less) as much time doing ZNM because you can get N pops at once. You get N times as much plasm when doing delve. If you have 3 characters you can enter Delve, Dynamis, and Vagary by yourself.

Wait who had virgins claiming to have sex on their bingo card?

I dont get what's such a hot take here, yeah its p2w , in alot of situations a multiplier on item generation. Be it Gil or any of the already listed things you can do 3+boxing (dual boxing is honestly not as egregious but 3+ it starts to snowball hard). Sure effort goes into building the mules to a degree but its not the same as a fresh account and its all helping each other.

you can just compare your 12.95 + wardrobes x7 to just buying an equal amount of gil each month and i bet there's a line where its more cost effective to pay SE then RMT and vise versa.

( i went and looked quick dirty math your looking at 90m a month) so as long as your getting more then 90m an alt a month its better to pay se?if not just swipe that card i guess?

i get what you're saying but pay to win for me is literally cc swiping to buy stuff unavailable otherwise

Multiboxing is definitely not P2W, that's silly. Pay to win would be spending $2.99 for a vial of Goblin Perfume that boosted Muffins by 200% for 60 minutes.

I hope you're joking, cuz this isn't 2004 anymore buddy. There is no competition anymore. Play with friends or make friends and call it a day. Who gives a ***if someone wants to 6-18 bot any of the content, that's their problem.

Yes, it's pay to win.

The game is over as far as SE is concerned, so any changes would come from the community. Proper fk'd.

The main issue with manually tracking this is looking at a scrolling log. I don't think people equate catching 1 line out of 50 to do a paralyna or silena something related to skill. This isn't FFLOGREADER. I'll gladly accept automation to deal with this as I don't come online to read logs, I do that daily for my work already.

You could just...look at your buff bar? You don't need to look at the chat log at all to know if you need echo drops or remedy.

There isn't competition anymore? Have you heard of the latest update they added called the Auction House?

You're on Asura, go farm Sisyphus and Ansherekh and tell me there is no competition in this game anymore.

OK maybe 18boxing isn't hurting your chances to claim Sisyphus over the guy who is 18boxing, but the guy who's 18-boxing is getting an empyrean/month from Ambu alone, which means that he's going to be there camping the empyrean NMs you're trying to kill every month. See how that affects your experience?

He's going to tank the prices of Alexandrite, because he's getting a metric *** of it every month. Or at the very least he's not going to be buying your Alexandrites because he's just 18-boxing it for himself. See how that affects your experience?

Or maybe instead of inviting you to join him in Dynamis, helping you get your BST relic unlock, he's decided to 18-box it himself instead, affecting your ability to rank up your BST neck and get the Sandy clear.

Or maybe you need the Plouton clear in Vagary and he's planning to do Plouton to get 18 dark matter (tanking the value of dark matter). Well, guess you can't get your unlock with him because he's not going to give up a dark matter so you upgrade your empyrean armor. He doesn't even know you exist.

Maybe he's 18-boxing Voidwatch so you can't pop Uptala because he's taking up the spot you went to. This either slows you down (running to another spawn point) or entirely prevents you from doing voidwatch (if others are doing the same at the other spawn points). Oh, and HMP prices are *** because he's getting 18x as many HMP as he would be if he weren't multi-boxing.

Actions have consequences and we live in a shared world, that's what MMOs are. I can't believe I have to type this.

Here comes "well, if I didn't 6-box I wouldn't do any of these events in the first place, so this guy would never get a group regardless." The end boss of hand-waving tactics.

I actually went to farm Ansherekh the other day, beat whoever was there 2/3, that was fun. These new people don't know how to camp nm's, they can't handle meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

A better question is how many players would quit entirely if the TOS were more strictly enforced? No multiboxing, no jazero, no QOL automation like gearswap or even addons like AEcho? You can argue about whether that would be good or bad but it would absolutely make a dent in the monthly bottom line.

I appreciate all that Fujito is doing to minimize operating costs and set the game up for long-term life support, but if subs fall too far the game is probably still toast.

Anyone is keeping the numbers of votes "yes", "no" , "maybe" ?

I feel its a draw!

Gonna make socks accounts to vote "NO".

THAT is pay to win!

If they enforced the TOS to the letter, the game would be dead in a few months at best. That said, depending how you multi-box I don't think it's actually against the TOS at all. The relevant section:

2.1 Cheating and Botting. You may not create or use any cheats, bots, automation software, hacks, mods or any other unauthorized software designed to modify the Game and gameplay. In addition, you may not take advantage of game system bugs and exploits during gameplay.

If you have 2+ PCs and launch 2+ FFXI games and play them all in tandem, I don't think you're breaking any rules at all. It could be argued from the strictest sense of the word that using Windower to launch 2+ instances of FFXI on the same PC is breaking the above because it's modifying the game (by using a different method to launch it, bypassing the restriction of 1 instance per PC). What about using a virtual machine on a single PC to launch a second instance? The game is not being modified, neither is the gameplay, though you are using unauthorized software, sort of? Though if we're taking a strict interpretation, it says any other software designed to modify the Game and gameplay so I don't think software not designed to modify the game and gameplay is actually in violation. It's not like this stuff would go to court, SE's opinion is the only one that matters, but I think the TOS are pretty black-and-white about this issue.

That's not the bigger issue though. Remove access to "QOL" things like addons, plugins, and gearswap, and the vast majority of the playerbase would quit. The game is quite cumbersome and obnoxious to play vanilla, and most people wouldn't suffer through it, especially after years of "QOL" improvements. Maybe people's addiction/sunk cost fallacies would keep some around, but I think there would be a mass exodus.

Hate to tell ya but competition still exists. It's just in a different form vs what it was in 2004.

Meant like other players being hit by something. Partybuffs is a third party addon, unless you keep tabbing to other players to check if they have statuses that need to be removed.

If there was icons on top of players, would make more sense. And also mob debuffs as well, so we need to read the log if it lands? Come on.

Yeah, I play WHM and SCH all the time, you hit F2-6 to see if an individual player has a debuff you need to worry about. The game does involve pressing buttons, viewing the information on screen, and reacting to that information with other button presses.

I'm not saying it's perfect or that there aren't flaws, but I don't think it's a monumental effort as a healer to F-key through your party every once in a while to see if they have debuffs to remove. You have all that time between global cooldowns and nothing to do with it.

Is server transfering to Asura during $9 campaign to buy all the stuff your dead server doesn't have paying to win?

Imo, it's no different. You're throwing real world money at a problem you have.

Remember that japanese guy that had 12 ps2s for multiboxing? gamers, ikr.

What is winning anyway.

Is spending real money to go to Asura to spend fake money to buy items to make your in game character better/stronger winning?

What are you winning in the end.

All that is left are the memories you have made. To win is therefor to play. To play you must pay (a sub).

If you play with yourself it's still kinda winning. We must all be good at that.

It’s not pay to win given it takes a tremendous amount of effort for the reward.

I saw ppl mostly multi boxing when they would yell for an hour and couldn’t find a 6th. Or rather, they would rather play with real ppl but couldn’t because people wouldn’t play with them.

So as an extra means to help ppl out to actually play the game? Ya, I really don’t see it as an issue. If ppl don’t want others to multi box, join that party of the poor guy yelling for V5 Ody NMs.

Now I understand some people might multi box to solely play solo. To which I say, ‘if someone wants to pay $150 a month, go for it’.

What about developing an AI to play this game for you?

Should the AI be considered human after passing the Turing test?