Eve Online has 500k+ people and MCing is a blatant P2W benefit. I can get a combat ship, fleet up with my scavenger alt, and chain level 3s and level 4s together for much much faster profit to time ratio than bookmarking each site and hoping no one takes the loot I was forced to leave behind if I did things with one character.

The difference is that for every person that does MC, there are 30 that don't.

Pfft Eve.

People still count that as a game?

Solution is an inelegant and, quite frankly, shitty solution to a simple problem. Master accounts are dumb as hell because the only way to track someone violating the system would be IPs, and if you have any college students, roommates, or children living with their parents playing the game your whole system lacks any feasible means to enforce it.

My suggestion? Make MCing against the rules, or don't. People who sub extra accounts can do whatever the fuck with them they want as long as admins allow it. So instead of coming up with a terrible solution that relies on the honor system, just list all the reasons that it shouldn't be allowed... or lobby for mechanics that make it ineffective or counter intuitive by its very nature.

WoW is also a really bad parallel to draw here, because someone mentioned it. WoW doesn't have as large an issue with MCing (though it's still there, but only in very niche areas) because contestable territory doesn't exist and resources and bosses are all active play mechanics. So they don't really compare well.

TLDR: Your solution is bad and you should feel bad, but that isn't to say there is no problem. There is a problem, just your suggestion does a horrible job of addressing it.

The utility of mcing is huge when n is this low. It's not just a nice to have.

I mentioned WoW because of all the active play measures. You try to MC (not macro box, which is bannable there) in WoW, you'll find you swiftly get outpaced in all but the driest raids. And this is typical of an MMORPG. In Eve you can get away with MCing, but the time requirement means MCing tends to be rather specialized; you rarely see a person using two full combat accounts. It's normally a guy MCing a small capital ship, a cynoscout, or a hauler. And then why MC in eve when you can grab 100 people and faceroll with hydra fleets?

See the thing is.
Removing MC'ing is extremely unlikely to happen.
And most other solutions are unlikely to happen too, because less income = fuckdatnoisepayus

So then, what do you propose the game does to solve the issue?
The only other thing i can think of, is allowing multiple characters to connect at the same time from ONE account, and just banning multiple accounts entirely.

But then you're gonna say "but whose gonna enforce the banning of all the people playing multiple accounts?" and try to make that idea invalid aswell, correct?

Not to mention the fact that those players with more than one account, would lose a fuckton of their progress, gear, etc, unless given time to transfer whatever they can.

So at the end of all this, i'm to assume if there is no PERFECT SOLUTION, then fuck the idea, its shit. Obviously.

Try to Multi-client a game like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQrHGrwM_54

Maybe not that fast paced, but far faster than the snail pace that SS is.

A more relevant comparison would be to try and MC Subspace Continuum, but there's no RPG progression in that game, and it's more action oriented than the snailfest that is SS

Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAF4EwiGkVg

I picked an MMORPG for a reason.

The point is the same regardless, is it not?

And now you see the point I've been making for months?

Tbh making the game more fast paced and putting more of an emphasis on skill, dodging, and such, would probably breathe new life into this otherwise relatively stale game, imo, at least.

The fact that everything i see revolves around long range instant hit lasers, or ridiculously high tracking projectiles for no logical freakin reason, is kinda silly looking.

Edit: needless to say it'd also kill MC'ing, if only inadvertently.

Perhaps this is a retarded idea, but i'll say it while it's in mind just for the sake of criticism, hell i might just be repeating something someone else already thought of.

It may be a possibility to remove base slots almost entirely from accounts, maybe give them a tiny amount each for unteamed chars/shop bases and such. And move slots over to a Team Maximum based on playercount in that team or something? This doesn't completely remove the MC advantage for slots, since MC'ers technically add slots to the team in question, but it gives a somewhat equal opportunity all round, it also doesn't have to be in the exact manner im stating, but something similar.

This would also put more emphasis on teamwork since all the slots are shared Team-wide, and there would need to be more thoughtwork put into how you'd build given the amount of slots you may have access to as a TEAM.

Edit: Forgive me if there already is a team base slot limit or something that i'm unaware of, but i googled and didn't find anything besides references to the old galaxy specific limits.

There is a hard limit of 99 unattached and 99 attached bases in a galaxy for the defending team. Rarely do you actually see galaxies above 30 bases, though.

The attacker has an initial limit of 5 kits, but can increase this by 5 for each station amp they build in their attacking galaxy. Amps are galaxy bound and the base that holds an amp can be destroyed and the amp lost. Amps take 7 days, a bunch of money, and a ton of promethium to build, but don't need to be built in succession (build them all at once if you want to have more bases to attack with).