It's one player simulating the presence of additional players for the purpose of gaining an advantage over others. I'd definitely consider it cheating.
Even if Frontier has specifically made an exemption for it, it's clearly an unfair advantage.
So is VR and yet FD has specifically refused to add a headlook toggle feature even though I've been using those in flight sims for over 25 years. Should we label VR "cheating" as well because it provides an "unfair advantage" over the standard control setup?
It's barely any advantage at all, unless your sensors have been destroyed/powered down as even an unresolved contact will give reasonably accurate positional data and the game's latency compensation makes actual facing often differ from apparent facing. Removing one's eyes from one's instruments is often a liability as well.
Sorry but that's utter nonsense. The few times I've used my mouse in headlook mode as I was maneuvering it was dramatically easier to track smaller targets, being able to do this automatically is a massive advantage. The only reasons I don't use VR is that my computer isn't currently powerful enough to handle it (as I am using a 5 year old gaming rig) and I don't like wearing heavy/bulky goggles while gaming, otherwise I would probably be using VR myself.
Headtracking and good controls could be described as pay-to-win in some cases, but I'd have thought the line between removing barriers to the personal/manual control of one's vessel, as opposed to gaining the mechanical advantages of multi-crew with a single player, would be fairly clear.
Yes, the line is clear in that a second account is far more accessible to most players, as it requires no more than $40 USD, while most IR tracking setups are upwards of $100-200 USD and VR is upwards of $200-400 USD. I to use a second laptop if I'm running a second multicrew account because I happen to have one available but even my 5 year old gaming system can easily multibox two copies of Elite at the same time so there's no need to buy a second laptop to take advantage of multicrew.
Yes, it is, because if you can obtain a legitimate advantage for a modest cost and minimal effort then it's ludicrous to call it "cheating" when players routinely put more money into other control options and setups that also provide in-game advantages. There's also the issue that you can tell immediately see if someone is using multicrew, it shows up right on the target HUD readout as "Crew", and you can choose to engage that CMDR accordingly but you have no idea if someone is using an expensive VR setup that gives them a significant control advantage.
No one who considers something a cheat is also going to consider that thing a legitimate advantage. Nor do I imagine that most of the people you are seemingly amused by are following the backwards cause and effect you presume they are. The reason I don't think a single player should be using multiple accounts simultaneously, and certainly not in this manner, is because it provides an unfair advantage that is contrary to the intended purpose of the feature. I didn't label it a cheat because I don't like (there are plenty of mechanisms I do not like that are not cheats). I don't like it because it is a cheat.
So do you also take the same approach to mode-switching? That clearly circumvents the mission board refresh limits. It actually circumvents an existing game mechanic completely. All multicrew does is use an existing game mechanic to provide built-in benefits.
If you refuse to label mode-switching as cheating than you are just picking and choosing how you personally prefer to play the game which means absolutely nothing to another player who is free to play the game the way they choose using any and all legitimate gameplay options, including mode-switching, IR/VR setups and a second multicrew account.
The intent behind multi-crew is for multiple players to play together, not for one player to get extra pips at 40 dollars a pop. Obviously, this can be abused (though I don't think it's particularly common) and I'd think the easiest solution to this would be to remove any and all passive benefits of multi-crew.
The intent of wing missions is for multiple players to play together, and yet players have been advertising "free" credits from wing missions on the forums since the feature launched. All you needed to do is join the wing at the end of the mission and cash in a full share of those credits despite doing nothing to actually contribute to those missions. It was completely permitted and was being done by players offering an advantage to other players to circumvent the inability to directly transfer credits between players. Did you jump all over those posts and label those players "cheaters" as well?
Sorry but until I see the same players who complain about multicrew afk benefits also apply the exactly same reasoning to mode-switching, IR/VR tracking and wing missions I can't take those claims seriously. All that those players are doing is arbitrarily trying to attach some sort of "moral" significance to their own personal gameplay preferences while overlooking far worse "abuses" of the existing game mechanics that are all specifically permitted by FD.
