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Pirate Boxing Theory

12/6/2012

8 Comments

 
The discussion article this week is on multiboxing in Star Citizen and it’s theoretical impacts on game strategies and battle tactics.  As this is Dread Citizen, the emphasis, as always, will be toward the arts of skulduggery.

So, what is multiboxing and why should you care?  Multiboxing (or dualboxing or just boxing) is PC gaming terminology for running multiple game clients attached to same online game.  This was originally done with multiple computers (or boxes), hence the name, but many games allow multiple client instances on the same machine or through hacks (or Virtual Machines, etc.)  

As for why you should care, multiboxing does influence what is possible in many online games and it is guaranteed that some people will do this in Star Citizen.  It is not ‘bad’, per se, but it does change the scope of the game’s mechanics.  Indeed, many games are built around the fact it is a given that many of the players will multibox (though it is usually far from a main stream activity).

The feasibility of multiboxing in any game is tied to the level of interaction the game requires.  RPGs, where stats are king and real-time interaction is minimal, are ripe for multiboxing.  A character that just follows you around buffing you or casting heals is a temptation that many cannot resist.  Even if it costs them another $15 a month (or even 25 times that for single-man raids).  Multiboxing in other games that require near real-time control (FPS or other twitch-based) is much less advantageous.  If reaction time matters, then it is hard to split your attention without sacrificing too much.

Star Citizen’s space combat (to our current knowledge) is a real-time affair and It is likely we won’t see many (if any) people trying to simultaneously pilot two Hornets into combat.  That said, there are many other things that may be conceptually feasible.  Also, the lack of a monthly fee and the extra low bar game cost from the crowdfunding means we are guaranteed to see a bunch of people with extra accounts.  Let’s explore some possibilities:
  • Pirate crew - Capturing another craft in SC happens in two stages.  First you must cripple / disable the other ship by shooting out its thrusters.  Then you must dock with the ship and your crew must board it doing battle with the other ship’s crew and defenses.  Notice, that the action here does not include the pilot and the crew simultaneously.  Theoretically, it may be possible for a person to crew his own ship with a second account and simply switch when it comes to boarding.  One-crew craft (like the Cutlass) seem ideally suited for this.  You could theoretically have more than one (like 4 extras in the Caterpillar / Constellation) and just play one at a time during boarding, but that seems a little more extreme.
  • Refueling - In my earlier pirate ship post I mentioned the Starfarer freighter could be strategically interesting for pirate fleets, but few people will want to give up a fighter in battle for one.  This math is turned sideways when everyone can simply use a second account to park a refueling ship outside the fight or at the next jump.  This could influence common guild strategy of fleet movements in that they just have extra refuel ships in areas that are hard to refuel in and relatively safe (and / or kitted with stealth mods).
  • Low-interaction ships - Some ships are more interactive than others and need more handling.  For instance, the Retaliator is a ship covered in missiles and turrets.  It is not beyond reason to think a person could hop between two screens just calling targets without serious aiming or flying.  For that matter, a skilled person might be able fly a whole squadron by themselves if they are just going in a straight line and casually launching hoards of ordinance.  Closing on a tightly packed formation of auto-turrets could mean the accuracy of the AIs aim isn’t really all that important.
  • Trading -  In a low-conflict area, you could theoretically have two characters meeting halfway on a route, trade cargos, and double your profits (per given time).  This, of course, assumes that you can navigate two sets of waypoints at once (seems reasonable assuming downtime in travel), you don’t run into trouble (thus the low-conflict areas), and you have some way to ‘trade’ cargos in a fast / efficient manner (the biggest unknown, dumping and tractoring?).  The more nefarious version of this strategy is when one half of the route is in a different reputation area than the other.  For instance, shuttling commodity supplies from Terra to a pirate asteroid at a sufficient markup; using separate pirate and Citizen accounts (depending on how important Citizenship is to trading).   Trade missions / jobs would obviously not work in these scenarios.
  • Guard Duty - This will likely be the first strategy tried by players, but possibly the hardest to get right.  While using a Starfarer or similar vessel for asteroid mining or gas harvesting, the player brings along a more dedicated fighting vessel for protection.  The idea would be that spending your flight time in the fighter gives you a better chance against pirates than the limited armament of the trading vessel. At a minimum, the second ship could be a deterrent against potential attackers and this strategy may actually be a good idea when fighting against a single pirate (as they will be forced to focus on the fighter), but the odds of survival go dramatically down with a pirate group.   Then you’re potentially on the hook for two insurance payouts instead of one.  Mining in groups could swing the balance back, but this will require each miner to have a multibox setup.  My guess is that mining / trading guilds would benefit the most here.

Any other ideas?  Tell me in the comments!

-Kinshadow
8 Comments
Mr. Nav
12/6/2012 05:06:52 am

The trade boxing is a fascinating idea, for the ability to just have long convoys of freighters piloted by a single person that would bring in a serious haul. The problem is if the pilot sets his pvp interaction to minimal he can almost run no risk of being jumped by pirates and just auto-piloting himself to a fortune in trade profits. This could wreck the economy in the hands of greedy gold-farmers and for-profit websites that sell in game credits for real cash...basically Bot Trading.

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Kinshadow link
12/6/2012 07:20:29 am

I think that botting / scripting is more of an issue than boxing. If someone is manually piloting a bunch of trade vessels then they likely won't be able to defend them all as the PvE-PvP toggle is not a 100% thing in SC. They'd end up being tagged by every pirate they passed. Your right though that if they can script a bunch of ships, they'd just be able to overwhelm the whole system of trade. NPC Wingmen proposals may also be an issue here.

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Mr. Nav
12/6/2012 08:58:10 am

You have excellent points Kinshadow, I bring it up because I also currently play Guild Wars 2 and I can tell you that botting there is a serious problem with herds of rangers almost 20 strong running around in packs and farming mobs for gold. The fact that its a cooperative game means that the other players have little recourse to control the botting other than report the location to GMs, and then wait for a response which may or may not come due to high customer service volumes. Botting can be annoying but it can also wreck an economy if not taken into account.

WP
12/10/2012 12:12:39 am

Not a huge concern to me, as there will certainly be NPC pirates as well. They may not be quite as dangerous as player pirates, but clearly we don't know that for sure.

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Mr. Nav
12/6/2012 05:21:34 am

Also I love the idea of crew boxing. Basically just using the extra seat in a Cutlass or on a Caterpillar to hold a boxed crewman that you could control for boarding parties so you don't have to leave your original ship behind. Is that technically circumventing the mechanic of the game and cheating though? I would probably say yes, but its intriguing.

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Kinshadow link
12/6/2012 07:24:26 am

I don't think this is an exploit. The whole point of crew for ship captures IMO is that you need another person to crew the second ship once captured. Otherwise, they have to have a tow system, which is a whole separate avenue of exploitation (and multiboxing for that matter). If they really don't want people doing this, it would be trivial for them to add an interactive element on the pilot side to keep the ship docked (a button press every couple seconds) or the boarder get vented.

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J.
12/9/2012 06:40:44 pm

CryEngine 3 is a notorious resource hog, especially with CPU usage. In fact, most people trying to eek out every last frame in the CryEngine aren't failed by their GPU's but by their CPU's. Even assuming the performance advantages that Intel/AMD will have two years down the roads the GPU's out by then, the massive CPU strain will simply make it unfeasible to the sort of trade boxing being discussed. This is because CryEngine 3 does not scale well downwards; you can reduce the settings all you want, but it is still going to turn your CPU into a fried egg.

As for the issues regarding gold farming, and so on, you can't stop it but you can mitigate it. The PvP slider will only mitigate your PvP encounters. It won't stop them, just lessen the chance of them occurring. I wonder how this will work in any sort of system besides system jump interrupts. Mainly because the way Shards have been described, they are simply instanced zones to keep the game from lagging to death trying to process thousands of players in a single server. Basically the current GW2 system would be applied. What's interesting about this though is that it doesn't actually stop PvP.

Let me explain: Say the slider works by grouping players who have a similar slider level. Which is honestly the only way I can conceive of it functioning, then Pirates and Outlaws will simply do the same. Thus the chance of PvP isn't actually decreased at all, the system mostly becomes a sort of placebo to keep non-PvP centric players sated. Although from what I've seen with Chris every time someone bitches about PvP he just laughs. Even in his most recent interview he stated that he wants to teach those players to come out of their shell (forcibly).

Thus trade bots will still probably happen, but the situation of one guy controlling 30-40 boxes and then just flying them around unimpeded is farce. From a hardware standpoint it won't happen (unless multiple rigs are being used, each of them costing thousands and thousands of dollars). And from a gameplay standpoint it probably won't happen either.

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Kinshadow link
12/9/2012 11:33:35 pm

I don’t think CPU power is going to be that big of a barrier. Even if the you can’t run 2 clients on once PC (and I doubt that as minimum will be somewhere in the mid-tier PC), you can always just use multiple machines. Based on the release minimum specs, I personally own three machines that would run it and the game is still two years off. I think your underestimating your PC-gaming brethren.

As for the trade-boxing, you are completely right that the situation is nebulous, though I would say ‘any’ encounter is the issue (not just PvP). NPCs are just as big of a problem, so you would be fairly restricted to low-margin tradelanes that have a low chance of ‘any’ encounter.

I don’t think your description of PvP is correct. The description of the slider is about the chance of a PvP encounter vs. NPC encounter. It does not control whether you have an encounter or who you meet. If you set it to 20%, then 20% of your encounters will have real people and the other 80% to be NPCs (though the settings are likely to be low-high with no numbers attached). The people you meet in the PvP encounters are supposed to be roughly matched on skill, not their slider setting. My guess is that NPC killing skill will also factor into this (e.g. completing S42 will likely up the skill of people you meet in instances).

Lastly, almost all of the above scenarios (include trade-boxing) are assuming dual-boxing. A high numbers of boxes assumes some form of scripting / botting and there are probably better avenues for exploiting that than taking your chances in instances. If someone could get a good number of boxes going, they would likely have to be on a very low-chance route AND they would need friends protecting them. Perhaps there is some optimum mix here (e.g. 4 guys with Stellas and one guy with 10 Starfarers), but that is a big question mark.

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