So, after 15 years they just now decide it's bad? Damn. Blizzard is slow to react. Though, I guess if people are buying 8 accounts and paying for all of those accounts I can see why it took them so long to care. They made all the money and now they can do something.
It got old doing PVP years ago, while some dude auto kills a group of people because they have 8 Shamans mutliboxing.
So as I read it they did not ban multi-boxing per se, only are prohibiting using 3rd party programs like isboxer.
Same move CCP did in EVE four or five years ago.
I am a long time MMORPG multi-boxer, all the way back to Lineage 1, however I've never used a program or set up a bunch of macros to make playing multiple accounts easier outside of simple ones to make slash commands a one button affair.
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I'm okay with this. I wasn't ever totally against the idea of multiboxing and I've run 2 at a time before but it was all manually. Once you get people like PreparedWoW who ran 40 accounts at a time and essentially took over multiple quest hubs to prevent people from playing it became a bit of a problem. I guess now a days it's a bit easier to avoid since WoW doesn't really have world PvP anymore unless you enable it, but I still dislike the idea of a person using 40 accounts with one button push every skill.
Played D3 a lot while multiboxing. Same goes with Lineage 2 ( made my own custom script for that, because there is no software on the market to make it work for L2 ). I also tried a bit of WoW with it and..it was not my cup of tea.
Having said that, a lot of people commenting about Multiboxing have no idea how hard is to manage more then 3 boxes at once ( 2 is ...kinda easy ) and are jumping against it like it's ruining their gameplay.
Let me ask you something, how many Multiboxers have you seen while playing WoW and which literally ruined your game-play? I personally can't remember seeing more 2 to and I did played WoW a lot.
Let me ask you something else : How is a Multiboxer ruining your gameplay in WoW? PvP? Nope. PvE? How?
Multiboxers can be a royal pain in the butt on PVP servers. Once you're out in the world, managing multiple accounts of the same class/spec is simply dependent on how you have your monitors setup. The main account does the targeting and the alts just use macros to attack the target.
I don't think I've seen any multiboxers use different classes and such. But yeah doing that could make it trickier, assuming the content required any type of microing of them which isn't really efficient.
In Classic, on a PVP Server, may be. But on Retail should not be a problem.
Also, is a pain in the ass for the Multiboxer to PvP too, which not many at all are doing it, mainly because if you have say .. 5 chars, and they all die, getting them back is well ...not fun at all.
Usually Multiboxers are doing PvE content, which again, does not affect any other player's gameplay!
That is unless your farming stuff with it and flooding the market with all the extra stuff your farming, your view is very narrow if you cant think if ways it could mess with other players...
Played D3 a lot while multiboxing. Same goes with Lineage 2 ( made my own custom script for that, because there is no software on the market to make it work for L2 ). I also tried a bit of WoW with it and..it was not my cup of tea.
Having said that, a lot of people commenting about Multiboxing have no idea how hard is to manage more then 3 boxes at once ( 2 is ...kinda easy ) and are jumping against it like it's ruining their gameplay.
Let me ask you something, how many Multiboxers have you seen while playing WoW and which literally ruined your game-play? I personally can't remember seeing more 2 to and I did played WoW a lot.
Let me ask you something else : How is a Multiboxer ruining your gameplay in WoW? PvP? Nope. PvE? How?
Multiboxers can be a royal pain in the butt on PVP servers. Once you're out in the world, managing multiple accounts of the same class/spec is simply dependent on how you have your monitors setup. The main account does the targeting and the alts just use macros to attack the target.
I don't think I've seen any multiboxers use different classes and such. But yeah doing that could make it trickier, assuming the content required any type of microing of them which isn't really efficient.
In Classic, on a PVP Server, may be. But on Retail should not be a problem.
Also, is a pain in the ass for the Multiboxer to PvP too, which not many at all are doing it, mainly because if you have say .. 5 chars, and they all die, getting them back is well ...not fun at all.
Usually Multiboxers are doing PvE content, which again, does not affect any other player's gameplay!
That is unless your farming stuff with it and flooding the market with all the extra stuff your farming, your view is very narrow if you cant think if ways it could mess with other players...
Your view is very .. narrow, if you believe that there are a lot of people multiboxing. Botting? Yes, but there are not that many people multiboxing in order to fuck up an entire server economy.
Even then, actually it kinda helps the market. More stuff for sale, cheaper to buy, right?
Unless you are in the minority and play WoW to farm gold massively that is...
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Played D3 a lot while multiboxing. Same goes with Lineage 2 ( made my own custom script for that, because there is no software on the market to make it work for L2 ). I also tried a bit of WoW with it and..it was not my cup of tea.
Having said that, a lot of people commenting about Multiboxing have no idea how hard is to manage more then 3 boxes at once ( 2 is ...kinda easy ) and are jumping against it like it's ruining their gameplay.
Let me ask you something, how many Multiboxers have you seen while playing WoW and which literally ruined your game-play? I personally can't remember seeing more 2 to and I did played WoW a lot.
Let me ask you something else : How is a Multiboxer ruining your gameplay in WoW? PvP? Nope. PvE? How?
Multiboxers can be a royal pain in the butt on PVP servers. Once you're out in the world, managing multiple accounts of the same class/spec is simply dependent on how you have your monitors setup. The main account does the targeting and the alts just use macros to attack the target.
I don't think I've seen any multiboxers use different classes and such. But yeah doing that could make it trickier, assuming the content required any type of microing of them which isn't really efficient.
In Classic, on a PVP Server, may be. But on Retail should not be a problem.
Also, is a pain in the ass for the Multiboxer to PvP too, which not many at all are doing it, mainly because if you have say .. 5 chars, and they all die, getting them back is well ...not fun at all.
Usually Multiboxers are doing PvE content, which again, does not affect any other player's gameplay!
That is unless your farming stuff with it and flooding the market with all the extra stuff your farming, your view is very narrow if you cant think if ways it could mess with other players...
Your view is very .. narrow, if you believe that there are a lot of people multiboxing. Botting? Yes, but there are not that many people multiboxing in order to fuck up an entire server economy.
Even then, actually it kinda helps the market. More stuff for sale, cheaper to buy, right?
Unless you are in the minority and play WoW to farm gold massively that is...
If markets get out of hand, there is ways to fix that. Over letting people bot. I will say, people who bot also buy out matts and jack the prices to control the market. So its not as clean as you paint it.
For once Blizzard is doing a good thing with no agenda behind it,however the yare also announcing it NOW before people buy the game and get banned a day later lol.
When boxing they can use commands from the main player that trigger a command to any other,they don't need many different commands for each.I personally wouldn't have pvp in my game anyhow because that typically promotes cheating and that so called "toxic"environment Blizz claims to be against.
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That's gonna hurt a few folks. There was an older guy I saw on twitch multiboxing a full raid in classic and not just running one or two classes but running what seemed like a fairly balanced raid. Dude's setup was hella impressive as his stream cam was set behind him and he looked like one of those people working an old pipe organ as he played and the amount of followers and donos he was getting in the short time I watched were even more impressive. One of those people who streams as a full time job.
Probably a good thing. In BFA on the Stormrage server there was a guy that was 40 boxing. All of them basically stacked on top of each other, going around collecting every mining node and herb at the same time (since they don't despawn for like 30 seconds or something after being collected). He made the claim somewhere that he was making like 300 ($6,000 USD) WoW tokens per day during the expansion's first month.
The multiboxers also farm dropped mini pets this way since the loot is personal loot, he'd get 40 attempts per 1 kill to get the pet. Big $ on AH.
That's gonna hurt a few folks. There was an older guy I saw on twitch multiboxing a full raid in classic and not just running one or two classes but running what seemed like a fairly balanced raid. Dude's setup was hella impressive as his stream cam was set behind him and he looked like one of those people working an old pipe organ as he played and the amount of followers and donos he was getting in the short time I watched were even more impressive. One of those people who streams as a full time job.
If he doesn't have a ton of subs then he'll save money by not needing to sub to that many accounts anymore.
I don't see an issue with multiboxing but what levelbuddy does is NOT multiboxing and absolutely should be banned. When I heavily played EQ and WOW, I multiboxed but that literally meant multiboxing (multiple computers, multiple accounts, and multiple inputs). At least to me, that is significantly different than levelbuddy or similar software which changes things so you are playing multiple characters on one computer with one set of inputs.
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Played D3 a lot while multiboxing. Same goes with Lineage 2 ( made my own custom script for that, because there is no software on the market to make it work for L2 ). I also tried a bit of WoW with it and..it was not my cup of tea.
Having said that, a lot of people commenting about Multiboxing have no idea how hard is to manage more then 3 boxes at once ( 2 is ...kinda easy ) and are jumping against it like it's ruining their gameplay.
Let me ask you something, how many Multiboxers have you seen while playing WoW and which literally ruined your game-play? I personally can't remember seeing more 2 to and I did played WoW a lot.
Let me ask you something else : How is a Multiboxer ruining your gameplay in WoW? PvP? Nope. PvE? How?
Multiboxers can be a royal pain in the butt on PVP servers. Once you're out in the world, managing multiple accounts of the same class/spec is simply dependent on how you have your monitors setup. The main account does the targeting and the alts just use macros to attack the target.
I don't think I've seen any multiboxers use different classes and such. But yeah doing that could make it trickier, assuming the content required any type of microing of them which isn't really efficient.
I've got a lifetime sub to LotRO but after they went F2P many years ago, I tried multiboxing for a while with six new accounts and characters. I took out a sub to IS Boxer, which enabled playing all six characters at once on a single PC. Each character had its own mini window on the monitor and there was a bigger window as the main focus. I was able to play a variety of characters with the single keyboard.
I had a Guardian, two Champions, two Hunters and a Minstrel in my fellowship and each keyboard button was assigned to an appropriate action for each character. E.G. button one would use the main attacks, button two the secondary attack, button three another etc. Meanwhile some of the buttons while being an attack for the main characters would be a heal by the minstrel. I got all six characters through the original game and the Mines of Moria expansion before getting bored with it.
So yes, you can easily use a mix of different classes with the right software. I only ever used it for PVE and in fact undertsood from the IS Boxer forums that multiboxing had no advantage in PVP anyway, as any multiple commands to a group of characters were likely to be a compromise of basic skills rather than the most effective ones an active player could use.
So I wonder how they will police it. Because you could always use mechanical means to split your input to multiple machines if you wanted to. I assume there are still such splitters which can be used to install OSes to multiple machines at once.
Most multiboxers don't need an additional PC but they could do so.
I tried a multibox for the first time on a private server that let multiboxers take advantage of the refer a friend XP bonuses.
They could also police the commands received by clients. If two clients consistently receive same commands at exactly same time, you can tell that the commands are either mirrored or given by a bot.
I'll add to what Vrika said. Given two accounts that you suspect might be part of a multiboxing scheme, it's pretty trivial to check the inputs to see if they're extremely correlated with each other. If they mostly input exactly the same commands several milliseconds or in the low tens of milliseconds apart, then you know that they're using some sort of splitting software to do that. You couldn't do that with two separate keyboards even if you tried. The software making commands show up within milliseconds of each other will stick out as a huge, obvious spike in statistical tests of how similar two characters are behaving.
As for how to catch multiboxers more widely, the server could just frequently pick two characters that happen to be near each other, then monitor their input commands for a a short period of time. If they're not particularly correlated, then they're not being multiboxed by the same person, so move on to another pair of players. Only if you happen to hit two that are extremely correlated do you need to watch for a longer period of time.
It wouldn't need any human interaction at all. So long as you set the statistical thresholds properly, it will pick up any splitting software in use quickly, and could send an automatic warning or ban or whatever. The only real reason why a human would need to look over what it finds at all is for a sanity check so that you don't have a software bug ban a bunch of legitimate players. If you set the statistical thresholds properly, there will never be false positives. They don't need to know how you're splitting your input commands to measure that you're doing so, and the latter is sufficient for a warning or ban.
This wouldn't be a full ban on multiboxing, of course, but only using input splitting software to assist with such multiboxing. It wouldn't be able to tell if you were running two characters with completely independent input. But having two accounts running and alt+tabbing between them (or perhaps using a KVM switch to connect the same controls to multiple computers) to control them one at a time should be legal.
A guy claiming what he's doing is "Hardware only" multiboxing. What he's in fact doing is using a programable KB with macros to automate alt-tabbing and pressing the same key on several clients when he presses just once on one of the 6 programable keys.
This is the KB he's using:
And the video (skip ahead a bit) if you want to see what it looks like on his screen:
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Same move CCP did in EVE four or five years ago.
I am a long time MMORPG multi-boxer, all the way back to Lineage 1, however I've never used a program or set up a bunch of macros to make playing multiple accounts easier outside of simple ones to make slash commands a one button affair.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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That is unless your farming stuff with it and flooding the market with all the extra stuff your farming, your view is very narrow if you cant think if ways it could mess with other players...
Even then, actually it kinda helps the market. More stuff for sale, cheaper to buy, right?
Unless you are in the minority and play WoW to farm gold massively that is...
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
When boxing they can use commands from the main player that trigger a command to any other,they don't need many different commands for each.I personally wouldn't have pvp in my game anyhow because that typically promotes cheating and that so called "toxic"environment Blizz claims to be against.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
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I've got a lifetime sub to LotRO but after they went F2P many years ago, I tried multiboxing for a while with six new accounts and characters. I took out a sub to IS Boxer, which enabled playing all six characters at once on a single PC. Each character had its own mini window on the monitor and there was a bigger window as the main focus. I was able to play a variety of characters with the single keyboard.
I had a Guardian, two Champions, two Hunters and a Minstrel in my fellowship and each keyboard button was assigned to an appropriate action for each character. E.G. button one would use the main attacks, button two the secondary attack, button three another etc. Meanwhile some of the buttons while being an attack for the main characters would be a heal by the minstrel. I got all six characters through the original game and the Mines of Moria expansion before getting bored with it.
So yes, you can easily use a mix of different classes with the right software. I only ever used it for PVE and in fact undertsood from the IS Boxer forums that multiboxing had no advantage in PVP anyway, as any multiple commands to a group of characters were likely to be a compromise of basic skills rather than the most effective ones an active player could use.
As for how to catch multiboxers more widely, the server could just frequently pick two characters that happen to be near each other, then monitor their input commands for a a short period of time. If they're not particularly correlated, then they're not being multiboxed by the same person, so move on to another pair of players. Only if you happen to hit two that are extremely correlated do you need to watch for a longer period of time.
It wouldn't need any human interaction at all. So long as you set the statistical thresholds properly, it will pick up any splitting software in use quickly, and could send an automatic warning or ban or whatever. The only real reason why a human would need to look over what it finds at all is for a sanity check so that you don't have a software bug ban a bunch of legitimate players. If you set the statistical thresholds properly, there will never be false positives. They don't need to know how you're splitting your input commands to measure that you're doing so, and the latter is sufficient for a warning or ban.
This wouldn't be a full ban on multiboxing, of course, but only using input splitting software to assist with such multiboxing. It wouldn't be able to tell if you were running two characters with completely independent input. But having two accounts running and alt+tabbing between them (or perhaps using a KVM switch to connect the same controls to multiple computers) to control them one at a time should be legal.
A guy claiming what he's doing is "Hardware only" multiboxing. What he's in fact doing is using a programable KB with macros to automate alt-tabbing and pressing the same key on several clients when he presses just once on one of the 6 programable keys.
This is the KB he's using:
And the video (skip ahead a bit) if you want to see what it looks like on his screen:
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED