Multiboxing - Why does Blizzard STILL allow this?

Community General Discussion
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This is a genuine question to put forward to Blizzard - why is multiboxing allowed?

Take Nazjatar, for example. There’s been at least FIVE groups of around six-nine toons flying around (and, usually it’s Tauren/Troll druids) that are from either Kazzak, Silvermoon, Argent Dawn and other realms that are constantly depleting the nodes for Zin’anthid in particular. This is hugely frustrating when you get to the node they’re at, and when you’re trying to pick up the herb, you’ll get the notification of “There is no loot.” - or, even, “Invalid Target” comes up once in a while.

Surely this practice is considered against ToS in respect of detrimental gameplay towards others, just because certain players want to get that extra little bit of gold, or to have some sort of monopoly on the AH when it comes to items like this? It really does need to be looked at in a deeper vein because the economy in general is already shot to pieces, and these kinds of people just make it worse.

Three bits spring out a bit from Blizzard’s Code of Conduct for players here:

“Behaviour that intentionally detracts from others’ enjoyment (such as griefing, throwing, feeding, etc.) is unacceptable. We expect our players to treat each other with respect, and promote an enjoyable environment. Acceptable behaviour is determined by player reports and Blizzard’s decision, and violating these guidelines will result in account and gameplay restrictions.”

“Using third-party programs to automate any facet of the game, exploiting bugs, or engaging in any activity that grants an unfair advantage is considered cheating.”

“Scamming, account sharing, win-trading, and anything else that may degrade the gaming experience for other players will receive harsh penalties.”

All the genuine players out there want to grab their herbs and make preparations for raid or M+ progression - or, even want to give friends and guildies a helping hand to provide stocks when they may need it most. Seeing an absolute gaggle of druids around one node (and in one particular group’s flying, it really does look like it’s not controlled by human hand) and it’s a real ballache to see.

Does the playerbase have any kind of answer from Blizz in respect of what direction they look to take with multiboxers - and, is it one where this is going to be closely scruitinised, or even banned completely? To a good number of people, answers are being saught after.

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The problem isn’t multiboxing per se but the fact that one particular herb is only available in such a small zone.

As for why don’t they ban it, it is very hard to suddenly ban something that you have allowed for 15 years, no?

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You cant imagine how much money they bring to blizzard. Hence they are allowed to do it :wink:

They also negate us the ability to farm, more earnings for blizzard!

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well, i dont think you will get an official statement from blizzard on the multiboxer subject.

i suppose its because they can make money with it so they allow it.

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Blizzard are primarily at fault here, because in their infinite wisdom they made all Potions and Flasks use the same herb as a base, and said herb is found in a tiny zone that is no longer current…

MB’ers are just exploiting that fact.

I sincerely hope they personalize Resource gathering Nodes so MB’ers can’t immensely benefit the multi-tap we current got.

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Blizzard also allows spamming on forums, it seems. We have already topic about this, but i guess people make alts and write same things over and over.

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Dont we already have three or four very recent threads about this?

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For the xyz times… its for the money.

Either accept it, or leave the game (not much choice u have).

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they get money for it, same with bots`

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I’m not sure what’s more annoying, the Botters that are multiboxing to gather herbs or the spamming of the forums with threads whining about it.

Difference is that multi boxing is allowed and making duplicate threads isn’t.

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My friend gave up on Nazjatar herbs because of them, started to collect something else. Multiboxers are a plague in this game.

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Multiboxing, or playing multiple World of Warcraft accounts at once, is not a violation of our Terms of Use. We do not actively support multiboxing tools. For questions about setting up or running multiboxing, you will need to refer to third-party sites such as [WoW Wiki]

Google: Is Multiboxing Okay? Blizzard
Support article has last been updated 2 months ago. So fair to say it’s not against 2020 ToS.

/thread

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“Behaviour that intentionally detracts from others’ enjoyment (such as griefing, throwing, feeding, etc.) is unacceptable. We expect our players to treat each other with respect, and promote an enjoyable environment. Acceptable behaviour is determined by player reports and Blizzard’s decision, and violating these guidelines will result in account and gameplay restrictions.”

Multiboxers are farming herbs to sell them. Multiboxers are not paying for their accounts with money/tokens to harass you. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t make it griefing.

“Using third-party programs to automate any facet of the game, exploiting bugs, or engaging in any activity that grants an unfair advantage is considered cheating.”

Multiboxing is not automation; Go to Youtube and look at Isboxer guides, it’s not as easy as you think it is to multibox.; There’s a lot of annoyances and setting things up to deal with that you don’t have to worry about with a single character.

I got a 2nd account to get the RaF awards and did a trial of Isboxer, the streamers and such you see controlling 5+ characters make it seem so easy and “automated” but it requires quite a lot of keybinds to make it work. You constantly have to press a button to make your character follow again, you have to set-up interact with target keybinds, you have to set-up macro’s to reset the camera view so that all your character line up properly and you can actually click a herb . There’s also the issue where spamming buttons ends up with your characters running off into the distance unintentionally.

So to say it’s automation is simply not the truth. You still need somebody behind the PC pressing keybinds and paying attention to what you’re doing.

“Scamming, account sharing, win-trading, and anything else that may degrade the gaming experience for other players will receive harsh penalties.”

It’s not account sharing as it’s you playing on the same computer with multiple accounts to your name.

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Yea, this issue has been addressed a zillion times before.

  • The problems with Zin’anthid in Nazjatar all revolve around the design of Herbalism in its current form, and have little to do with Multiboxing.
  • Infact, the current herbalism design attracts Multiboxing because it is the natural progression / most efficient method in the current system.
  • While the problem is clear, i doubt they’ll overhaul a profession this late in the xpac, so i wouldn’t expect a change before 9.0.
  • Multiboxing doesn’t bring an unfair advantage.
  • Multiboxing and Botting are very different concepts with no overlap, the latter is very much against the ToS.
  • Botting should be reported and should/does eventually result in bans.
  • Other people looting herbs before you do (Multiboxers or not), is not “degrading the gaming experience for other players”
  • Multiboxing has always been allowed, doesn’t result in anything unfair and can easily be made less or more desirable through normal game mechanics (just like some game mechanics result in more/less alt-friendly content)
  • The irrational and poorly directed rage and hate towards Multiboxing (due to the frustrating Herbalism system currently in effect) actively helps Botters
  • Multiboxing is unlikely to be enough of a mainstream activity that Blizzard supports it “for the money” or for subscription numbers. They could put a bright pink recolor of Ashes of Al’ar in the Store for 25 EUR, and earn more money over the weekend than they’ll get from 10 more years of Multiboxers paying their subs.
  • Multiboxing was a thing in WoW since day one, and in preceding games before that, suddenly banning it now (especially for stupid reasons) would not be sensible.
  • No, i don’t Multibox myself, i just play Space Invaders, shooting down bad arguments coming down the way.
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Oh sweet summer child. It’s because it gives them more money.

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Multiboxing is unethical. Blizz let them do it bcoz of greed. Also putting one of the most desired herb in small zone also somewhat bad idea.

Anyway it’s end of expansion so still you can see herbs. At start of expansion I haven’t seen Anchor weed in month.

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I don’t think the size of the zone matters too much

Why ? I can’t really think of any reason it would be.

All the problems people describe on these kinds of threads fall 100% within the domain of gathering professions, or herbalism specifically. You’re just a bit more likely to notice a Multibox-train doing it, rather than a group of 10 random grouped herbalists, but the problems would be identical.

I’ll quote one of my examples from last week, to save myself from making the same argument again:

Multiboxing is clearly making a large portion of the community unhappy. What could the reason be for blizzard to allow this? . . .I wonder.

And that’s one of many alternative systems they could have easily gone for, had they foreseen all this.

What do you base that on.

It’s been explicitly allowed since vanilla, so they’d have to have made that determination back then, i’m sure the handful of boxers back then didn’t even bring in enough money to cover Blizzards coffee expenses. It’s also allowed in many other/similar games.

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Feel free to agree or disagree. It just my opinion and how I feel.

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Sure, that’s fair but it doesn’t come off very different to me than someone saying

I can’t stand Disneyworld, because NASA stopped the Shuttle program.

There’s many valid reasons one might have a negative opinion of Disneyworld, and many reasons to be sad about the end of the Shuttle program.

But to use one as the reason for the other seems pretty spurious, when the only connection between them is that Mickey Mouse was on TV the same evening NASA made the announcement.

I think you’ll likely see that even the simplistic example system i described above, would probably solve all the problems you’ve run into with herbalism/multiboxers. And it’s far from the only alternative.

It also wouldn’t require any changes to decades old “rules”, nor really force any Multi boxer to stop playing. Though perhaps the few that specifically started Multiboxing because the Nazjatar herbs made it so appealing, they might. (but i think you’d welcome that).

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because it helps fake player numbers