Is Multiboxing A Form Of Pay To Win?

No, an AI should never be considered human. Should an AI be considered sentient, is a better question.

The turing test is not an absolute test, it is more of a baseline.

To be sentient, an AI would have to understand the context of what it is doing.

Just to be on topic: Anyone who claims multi-boxing is P2W has likely never played a P2W game. The amount of effort to make multi-boxing worth it it just to much for P2W (which is generally an instant advantage).

Lots of people bought their 2nd,3rd++ account and didn't actually do the work themselves though. In this case, it is paying to win.

Just to clarify, multiboxing takes an extreme amount of dedication. Some folks who stick with it for months and years, eventually realize that there are days where your N-th alt character is 'now your main character' until you finish the task you've assigned yourself.

Alt Bard needs more Song+? Full reforged AF1/2/3?
Alt WHM needs more Cursna+? Might farm a Gambentein
Alt GEO baking for 6+ months until you can make an Idris?
Alt RDM ..just needs a ton of gear.

Very often FFXI doesn't reward players for partially equipping your character a certain way. You may find that sometimes squeezing out 25 more Accuracy/M.Accuracy in gear is enough to make all of the difference. This is especially clear when you're building alts and not completing content successfully.

What I personally can't stand: When people play any character that is just woefully unprepared for the content at hand, and it just ruins the fun for everyone. I've seen this happen a lot with PUG bards and corsairs, which I suspect to be people's alts. They just don't have enough Roll+ or Song+ gear and the whole party suffers. It's a shame because someone trying to pass along a crappy alt for their equally poor 6-man 'multbox' setup, is just a drain on server resources.

I used to play with someone who would frequently ask newcomers: "So, who's mule are you?" She was hilarious, but also kind of right.

Wow what server are you on cause the population there must all live in the rich neighborhoods...

Of the alts I have now all took some form of dedication to level/gear. The ones that were played, while I didnt buy, were in some form of neglect or another. Story missions, half cleared content, or just plain gimp. The effort to gear another character is still just as time consuming as it was to gear the first, regardless of others perceived notions of multiboxing is the magical jp button. You are simply eliminating the need to have 5 or 17 other people along for the ride.

come to asura and hang around the Merit point HTBF NPCs.
All I see is countless rows of 6x characters popping up at the Homepoint crystal, running to the NPC, running back to the HP crystal, popping in selbina.
Countless amounts of them, all decked out in i119 iii mythics and +3 empyrean gear.
All the "real" players are in raboa afk.

If people were "poor" in this game, the servers wouldn't be up. There's more RMT than ever before. If there are 50k active accounts, at least 60-70% have got to be RMT, supporting the remaining 30-40%. Directly or indirectly. Normal players sell clears too, as well as crafted items. RMT is the backbone of this game now. That indicates people have a significant amount of disposable income.
I RMT. they always have billions available for sale. They never run out. and I'm told, as much as I buy, I'm not even in their top 100 list. And I've bought enough in 4 months to put a downpayment on a mortgage or buy a nice sports car

Not likely, heavily geared characters are thousands each. Even then, acquiring them doesn't mean the game is put on easy mode. There's plenty of multi-boxers that are heavily geared, but struggle with easy content.

It really doesn't matter if you built the characters yourself, your friends retired and left them to you or you bought them from a website. Paying for advantage is pay to win and that happens regardless of RMT interaction.

On the most popular online currency sales websites, you can buy 100 million gil for 43usd. It's dirt cheap. To make calculations easy, let's assume a nice sports car is 43k USD (a cheap sports car). Are you saying you bought 100 billion gil in 4 months? to do what? even making an eschuteon doesn't cost more than a billion gil.

Galkapryme in the Forbes 500 of buyers lol

A lot of gil buyers see buying gil as a measure of their own self worth or how "dedicated" they are to 11.

A lot of the same mental gymnastics done by the top 1% buyers of onlyfans, scantily clad female twitch streamer tippers and the like.

The only argument I could ever see this as “pay to win” is if no one on planet earth could afford an additional character or two save for a few elite humans out there. I’d argue that is not even remotely close to true here. I’d imagine most everyone here could afford multiple accounts if they do choose. That leaves this all up to CHOICE. You can argue TOS all day long like it’s a moral mountaintop to climb…it’s not.

How many thousands we talking? For a character with, oh I dunno, all V25s cleared, for example?

I was extremely off turned off by the multi boxing meta
But the fact of the matter is you aren't going to find someone for every job available all the times you play.

But...
It's just compounding the game experience. That feeling you get from slotting in a piece on multiple sets that you just worked for. It's chasing the high you no longer get on your main.

One that's done you ascend to how can I make this synergize experiencing the same thing as the gear but different... It becomes less about one and more about the many working together.
Dia lightshot slow earthshot

And oh my god do you earn more money from things like ambu

Not p2win but a method to counter a dead game full of rmts and no real players to do content, multi boxers just don't want /yell 3 hrs
for a 4 song bard.

You could also just...play BRD on your main then?

Right? It's like saying "these damn players won't gear up bard so I can DD forever...".

People complaining about content in Asura are usually people who don't have support jobs. If you had bard, sch, geo, cor, whm you will get invited to content pretty fast.

Or, just hear me out, they could play their main how they like and just 2box a BRD.


Except they are gearing up a BRD in this case, just not on their main.

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong. I'm not against any type of playstyle... multibox, buying gil, hiring mercs. I don't get why the way other people like to play ffxi should be of my concern. I also don't think multibox is a pay-to-win. Controlling 6 characters is not at all easier than having 5 human players (that know what they are doing).

Ignorable personal rant:
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Even the pay-to-win concept should be taken with grain of salt. For FFXI specifically, adults with jobs and family don't have the same amount of time they used to. I'd rather see a father buying the items for his new empyrean and doing something more relevant with his time. The things I wouldn't buy myself are clears, or the first time I make an item. For example, I made one relic, one mythic, one empyrean and one Aeonic weapon by myself. I do not mind just AFking and buying any new REMA from mercs. Making new REMAs thereafter just means I have more time.
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The point I made earlier was just about people complaining they don't get invites in Asura, everyone is a bot etc. That's not true. People with DD only jobs don't get invites. That's not new!

Sorry for the long post.

Not trying to imply that people shouldn't multi-box, I play 2 characters all the time. I was just saying that "I don't want to shout for 2 hours looking for a 4 song BRD, so I have to multi-box" isn't a very strong argument for multi-boxing, because that problem has another, single-box solution: gear BRD.

The underlying problem is the other stated problem: nobody wants to play BRD, WHM, GEO so they just bot them. And let's be honest with what we're talking about here, the vast majority of people (in my experience) who are "multi-boxing" are botting n-1 characters while they play their favorite flavor of DD.

Multi-boxing would be a significantly less potent form of P2W if you couldn't automate the other characters. It's a *** and a half to play 2 characters at once and a lot of efficiency is lost. Playing 3+ is basically impossible without tools, and incredibly ineffective compared to actually playing them.

As others have said though, I think in most contexts the term "pay to win" is referring to an advantage you get directly by paying money without putting in any level of effort. I think if you told the average Clash of Clans player what 2boxing looked like in ffxi, they'd tell you that's nothing like p2w in the traditional sense of the term

I never thought of it as pay to win because SE lets you put 10 POL accounts per SE ID. Each account can have 10*16 = 160 characters. It's literally baked into the platform.

I made a pocket BRD with a friend because no one wants to waste all the progress they've done on their actual jobs to play a musical drug dealer. Now we don't have to waste time pretending we want to find one and deal with someone who may know nothing about the game other than toot toots.

My main character primarily plays RDM, RUN, PLD, and RNG. It's a little ridiculous that I have to make another support to play with my support or tanks but here we are. RNG is awesome without real supports and broken with them so w/e.

I've said this a thousand times too. Players don't inherently value support jobs the way they do, DDs. Also, the game doesn't incentivize excelling at support roles. Imagine if every content had a yellow proc or VW-stagger that could only come from a WHM/GEO. If performed correctly, you got a bonus 10% gallimaufry. But this will never happen.

To add insult to injury, this is why singer, healing and roller exists. To further add icing on this cake: many DDs just straight up exhibit behaviors that will stress the healers to death

It's around ~2k - 3 for V20 clears with a handful of REMAs. Just to give you a ballpark.

I have to disagree with this generalization, Felgar. Players value support jobs so much that in V25 clears they usually attribute the win to the backline. DDs are mostly valued to people doing segfarms or easier content where Cureplease and autosing can handle 90% of the backline jobs. However, as soon as Ngai ***-tail-slaps the front-line to the ground the DDs come to realize that the WHM is the with one massive balls of steel!

So multi-boxing more difficult content puts you at a disadvantage?

It can and likely will. For example, a fully geared BRD (Songs, TP, WS, Etc...) should outperform any 2boxed BRD.

There are plenty of fully geared bards with full on tp/ws/hybrid etc sets that are alts and/or exclusively 2boxed.

Poorly shitty geared multibox chars are usually run by people who have an equally shitty poorly geared main char

No ones running a pimped put main char just to be flanked by a terpander bard and a dunna/NQ bagua geo.

I don't think that's what he means by outperform.