Hello,
I don’t expect to get much positive feedback to this post but please be civil.
I’m someone that would be affected by the recent multiboxing policy changes and so would like to give my feedback to this change. (I play 5 character to run dungeons on my own and level different team comps)
I understand the policy to now be that, multiboxing is allowed but not when using keyboard broadcasting software. I think that this change will not make anyone happy on both sides of the argument.
First of all, this will not heavily affect those multiboxing 8 Druids, farming all the herbs and orb in a region. Doing this type of multiboxing does not require any software. You just need to set them on following and click the herb 8 times. Those people will still be affecting the economy.
I don’t believe that this change will removing botting either, I don’t know for sure but I highly doubt that botters would be using key broadcasting software but rather just multiple bot sessions. Even if for some strange reason they are I don’t see such a policy change stopping them. It is possible to see if a keyboard event is fake but this is difficult and I expect something that will not be implemented into the client and likely to result in many false positives if it was.
Overall I think this change many affects people like myself that are running a small group in order to do activities in game solo, which don’t hurt the economy and generally go unnoticed by the player base.
I’ll be clear, I do think that some types of multiboxing have caused negative effects in the game, people abusing the farming possibilities mainly. However I don’t think this change will really impact this. I think that a better solution would be things such as:
Limiting multiboxing to 1 battle net account (8)
Reducing the number of herbs from a herb node to 2, maybe 3 charges before it despawns.
Having the instance lockout (The amount that can be done in an hour) battle net account wide
I’m probably just typing into the void here, but I’m of course disappointed with the change and I don’t think those that dislike multiboxing will see a the positive change they hope for from this either. So this is my feedback as a customer.
I mean if you got a decently sized monitor you can just run all 5 clients in window mode and then it’s simply just to hover the mouse to right window, click on the screen, click to herb. No alt tabbing required
Hi,
It is of cause slightly easier to do this with keyboard broadcasting but we’re talking a few seconds longer.
Just off the top of my head I think they will do the following:
Firstly open your 8 clients, all on the same display, overlapping. Manually alt tab and put them all following.
Then setup a keyboard macro to ALT TAB (could be manual but your not sending alt tab to the game so I guess it technically isn’t automation). Then just spam click the herb which should be in the same location on each client if all clients are over lapping. Your macro (or you) will quickly tabs through the clients while you spam click and all herbs are farmed in a few seconds.
So you really don’t need to broadcast to do this kind of farming.
Trust me people that wants multiboxing gone will be happy about this change and without any numbers I dare to say we’re a big majority of the playerbase.
Them making using 3rd party programs to make actions in the game is a good thing and good for the game. Sure heavy farmers etc will still find ways but it won’t be as easy and they will be forced to take other routes. Just because they will find other ways is no real reason to not making it harder for them.
And when doing something that is clearly in a very grey area you gotta be prepared to it being taken away at some point why it took Blizzard so long to realize this I don’t know.
As far as the pure multiboxing aspect of it goes even if they find new ways with alt tabbing etc, having 20 druids/20 hunters running around one shooting people will be gone and the lagg it causes in game. So a big reason to why people hate multiboxing from a gameplay pov will be addressed with this.
And I’m quite sure that if running dungeons while levling with different key comps is your sole purpose of using it I don’t see this affecting you as much.
Ok let me start off by saying that I understand your frustration and I’m even a bit sad for you that you are no longer able to play the game the way you want to.
But here is the thing. In every game I’ve seen it present it predominantly had a negative impact. While there is a minority of players that use these methods to a neutral effect the majority usually uses it in one of two ways eventually.
Obtain in game resources in orders of magnitude larger quantities that players who don’t. Often messing with the in game economies in a destabilising way.
Obtain an unfair advantage in player vs. player encounters in a way that makes it hard even for a well coordinated team to counter.
Unfortunately both of the above are almost a pay to win scenario where people that are willing to invest the resources are given a significant advantage over those who do not.
Can something be done to accomodate this kind of playstyle only in a neutral way? Maybe.
The design of every online game is predicated on the assumption of no automation and a single human being per client. And the amount of players that wish to play in this way is usually small.
Finding a solution to this problem is I think uneconomical both from a design as well as implementation point of view.
As it would require a large commitment in development resources for a very small percentage of players.
I hope despite this you stick around and find different ways of playing that will still make you enjoy wow.
I’m not presenting a solution to farming but more giving ideas as to why this change won’t discourage this kind of farming.
Overall though, camera angles can be synced by having a static camera. Characters on follow mean they are all facing the same position anyway.
This can easily be done without the software and so it will continue.
Even if you do this just by having all the characters in a grid and manually clicking each one, it’s still x8 of the gold/resource.
I’m not aware of gathering breaking follow, but you can get addons that auto follow anyway without any human input.
Well as I have said you can multibox using windows 10 own functions. The 5 druids will continue herbing just fine
This change wouldn’t change me loging in my minions either as I can run a ‘script’ that runs macros many end-gamers use and… absolutely 0 changes to my game play.
I don’t believe it’s suitable for the majority to gain a very slight ‘victory’ (even though all the reasons you want this will, I think , remain unsolved) at the huge expense to the minority.
You admit in your post that heavy farmers will find ways and this will just make it a little harder for them. But that’s at the cost of removing other peoples hobby. There are way better ways of crippling these farmers.
For the rest, I totally agree with you. I, even as a multiboxer do not support people running 20 druids/20 hunters. As in my first post I think that the amount of accounts should be limited to 1 battle net account (so 8 chars). It causes lags and there is too much personal power when someone has that many accounts. I don’t even really want multiboxing in PvP either.
I can assure you that running a dungeon and leveling are the main places where you want to broadcast keys
This wouldn’t work. none of my accounts are linked. I am still like different people for Blizzard.
But also i see this anti MB thing just another example of cancel culture that always blaming someone else for their own problems. Once they get one thing achieved, they will find another target to attack.
So my 2c on this is that I feel the mistake that’s been made is in the design of the game intensifying multiboxing.
I’ve multiboxed since WOTLK and feel that for a long time Multiboxing was a very small niche that you never really saw in the wild other than big servers. This I think changed mainly around the time when herb nodes no longer despawned and the WoW token came in. I noticed a huge amount of people starting to multibox for farming and these people was not ‘in the spirit of multiboxing’. These days you see a 8 druids sucking up all the herbs in a zone daily. For many it’s at no extra cost too as they use the gold to get game time and then pocket the rest.
I don’t believe this is because people suddenly really want to multibox but because it’s the meta to multibox.
Overall I respect your input, I think if you do read my other posts you’ll maybe we align slightly.
Thats more than enough to satisfy some people cause of how much of a inconvenience that will be to some extent, whereas currently its just done via 1 click or so.
This change makes it easier to target ban botting since there’s no risk anymore of banning a multiboxer since there’s the ban on software.
As much as it might be distasteful for you, you do realise its a minorities fun ruined by the majority, hence why the change is being put into effect. In the grand scheme of it, over 90% of players will still benefit from this change.
I have 'boxed since vanilla, and I can tell you the MB wasn’t even an issue up and until Nazjatar, but of course instead avoiding stacking new grinded herbs into small zone in future and since MB is actually a niche it is a small loss relative to the signalling that “we hear you”. remember SL is kind of fan service expansion.
But also keep in mind while some games have banned MB as an act (owning multiple accounts) then Blizzard has stated that they do NOT ban multiboxing and I have typed here many-many times that we do not really need 3rd party software… but ok, i admit, i am not a gatherer multiboxer either, i have attended raids, and dungeons though.
