Lets take Industry and put it in a box and forget about it for now.

If we look at just the combat implications currently both the 'flagged' follow and 'lock' follow limits will only handi-cap your average player more so than prevent or slow down the most grave offenders. I will restate what I found configuring my OWN rig/accounts with 3rd party tools to test the limits, dev CRM can confirm these reported findings.

Example: Mutli-boxing has the drawbacks of pulling your attention away and in some-cases cost you for this.

1x5=5
1+1+1+1+1=5

Note the difference it simply took you to read those two methods of solving and relate that to Manual multi-boxing and 3rd-party assisted multi-boxing. Having 1 guy Play Seth and mirroring his actions across 2-4 more changes the battlefield exponentially. Imagine 3-4 Rivlers who follow that ONE remote repairer in  your corp  ACTIVELY repairing fleet members makes everything you are crying about now trivial.

@ZOOM
The fastest work around and most effective means to mutli-boxing is to take the "different" accounts you have and trade for all of the "same". Then install and upload my isboxer profile to now have all of your robots follow and mirror match your lead robot. Lets see someone beat the best PvPers taking 'roles' and playing them in PvP and simply bringing 4 Seths for DPS flown by Syndic and Lemon takes 4 extra rivlers that mirror his lead one. Oh I forgot bibi sitting in 5 zeny's applying 2x suppression to 10 enemies in the time it takes me to click all 10 for locking.

You simply remove the 'easy' work around the 'hardcore' players who are STILL here after this many years will take days to adapt to work around your 'fix'.

Joke......

They are going to rebalance how many sparks you can have overall.

they plan to leave follow but make it unavailable on a locked target. This does limit the passive abuse of this but also indirectly buffs the offensive abuse of this with 3rd party tools.

Honestly if gamma is being reset, it requires a response well beyond what my phone will easily allow

I won't claim to be current on the happenings of his since I have not played but I have followed the forums. You guys seem to be finally making decisions but don't forget older lessons learned.

I worked closesly with dev crm and Alf in regards to the limits of followbots and 3rd party tools to manage them. The changes proposed in that thread will be a nerf to everyone but 3rd party users. if you seriously want to work to fix it let us know so we can show you just as I did others how we the players can and will break the system, so you can prepare for it.

This is what needs to happen with gamma, player dev team work to achieve your goal. What do you envision as gamma life, we know what it is. tell us the players how you want it, take our opinions and move forward achieve it.

zoom it's time to pull the curtain back and fix everything right once.

I know of at least one person sitting at 49:0 for last year.

The majority of why this is such a issue currently is simply due to population and the current population trying to chop down what ever their opponent is currently using as their last leg via mechanic changes. There should be no doubt in anyone's minds that both sides use multiple accounts and at this point most likely to the maximum benefit on both sides.

Two years ago fleets were running at a 20-40% second account rate to players. This problem is only exagerated with population issues because the type of gamer who will perform this tends to have more of a vested interest in the game and thus may stay longer. This style certainly makes staying in a game with population issues much easier as you can handle all tasks in-house on your own easier than finding the right people to perform those same tasks.

The second we have population and these tasks are performed by individual players then the benefits of multi-accounting begin to waiver and eventually become more of a handicap than a benefit.

Existing Counters
INTERFERENCE..........
Population.....
Speed fits.....
e-war....
Moving....

The only logical changes that could or should come from this are to take a look at and review 'fire and forget' fits that are able to approach a target and require no user interaction to win the fight beyond approach.

Closing
Anyone who still log's in and plays this game is only building to have a further advantage over the new players coming. Because it doesn't matter if its 1 guy playing 5 or 5 guys playing to killing the 30-50+ new players. Then if they do manage to finally take you down after a few attempts you have another couple hundred fit HM's ready to go. Once they finally spec in to a color of mech though to counter or play together you have such high extensions and war chest you simply rotate your fleet composition to counter their new numbers thus continuing the land slide victories.

New players or single account players will always be crippled until they have the EP and gear to run the proper fits to beat the "cheese" mutli-account fits. It is easy once you have that knowledge and ability but the power to it is the ignorance of your enemy.

The biggest issue really is having the industry to supply your combat with mutli-account play because If I have 4 guys who run 4 Rivler Mk 2's 2-3 times a week I would be hard pressed to get 30 or 40 guys who could produce those same numbers  to fuel our PvP regardless of population. Let alone having the infrastructure to support and manage that many players properly to compete until the majority of them were in near maxed Rivlers.

@Zoom

Is their anything about how moving Epitron to beta will have a direct impact on new players I can clear up for you?

Yes, 1 things will not solve it all however it is always good to know what is broken and be fixing 1 thing at a time to hopefully be getting to where we want to be. I fully understand limitations on being able to deliver developed solutions. Hell much the back lash from this change can be handled with self control from the players.

A dynamic that could soft limit this would be maybe some sort of generator system with outposts that allowed it to be tweaked as the populations rise and fall to only allow a "alpha" amount to spark in to a outpost within any given time frame. each spark uses power that recharges or something.

It could tie in to the level of facilities (making this a facility?)

Just spit balling here.

You are forcing the New players to only have 1 choice to roam. Roam the same area where my T4 Rivler Mk 2's have to mine while being protected by my Mesmer Mk 2's.

You are sending them in to a room with a knife while jack there is waiting with his shotgun.  Another 10 are missing from that but who could remember all of them.

Now I am not here to say that this is or isnt a good thing, it defanitly adds to the PvP. However this does have a direct impact on new players.  Expensive Miners means Expensive defenders to match.

The difference between a Inter-zone and a Spking is quite drastic  for power projection and response. Interzoning is not only vulnerable to being physically spotted in the game world but it also has a limit on how much force can move across it at any given moment.

Again this is not for the players who have multiple accounts and leverage cookie-cutter fits but for the none-hardcore stream-lined corps and their members.

So basically Gamma is only beneficial in a all-or-nothing sense of investment, while requiring T3 to really only achieve the needed reward?

You want players to build this up and expand all the while supplying their day to day costs?

I should be building my mutli-tile siege bots/ammo and guns trying to kick over your castle competing to be king, while jr over there gets used to PvP on beta.

Which could all consume larger ammounts of Epi.

We need to continue to vertically grow in a time-based game to allow others room to grow. If we get to big for the shark tank all we can do is keep feeding off the bottom once there is no one left at our level and nowhere up to go. Its only a matter of time before the food below runs out.

Lets take this 1 step further.

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