I don’t think it’s any more unethical than say, people killing rares on Mechagon without announcing them. And that’s a common thing too.
It’s nice when people have some sense of community, but i don’t think that should ever be required/forced, nor do i think a big chunk of the current community deserves it. A big chunk of players now, are just pretty horrible to others in general in my experience.
Add to that that these threads appear on the forum like every other day. Blaming multiboxers for what’s objectively clearly not their fault. Painting them as botters, cheaters, scum, griefers and just generally undesirables without solid reasoning. In their position, the last thing in the world that would instill in me is a sense of community. Them, giving up straight up herbs, that could be theirs for zero extra effort, just to help out the people shouting that every day ? I think that’s unrealistic.
Also, let’s not forget that nothing is stopping us from making a group in groupfinder to get 10 singular Herbalists together, slapping an icon on the leader, and flying the same routes ourselves, depleting every herb in our trail.
The multiboxers have no significant game advantage. Just the fact that they don’t have to organise a group, they’ve prepared for that bit.
I mean, first that was a decade and a half ago, i’m sure some of the current crop of multibox players weren’t even born then. Besides, it’s been a legit mode of play since the start of the game, Blizzard didn’t just throw them a bone one day.
It would be like saying all Mages should calm down on teleporting around, they’ve been given all these teleport-spells, up to them not to take the whole hand and rub the rest of our collective faces in the fact that us non-Mages can’t get around that fast.
Once you start multiboxing, aside from some heavier system requirements and a larger upfront cost, the skill requirements and play style are practically identical between a 3 or 10 box setup. If farming a herb gives 5 Zin’athid, then doing it on 3 characters gives 15, and doing it on 10 characters gives 50; for the exact same amount of effort. It’s pretty standard wow mentality to go for the way more profitable option there.
Put in order words, in the current system, the game mechanic itself incentivises doing it with “whatever the relevant cap is”, i understand from your and other posts that that’s 10. It’s very easy to think of an alternative that doesn’t share that characteristic (like the example solution i quoted above).
Whenever there’s a clear advantage in the game, that benefits us, something totally legit where the mechanics just give you a massive advantage in some way, just about everyone of us uses that (and good on them/us).
If something nice gets added to the game, say some rare mob with a cool drop. And it has a once/day per character lockout, and you and i both have a stable full of alts, we may well kill the thing on all our alts to benefit from that.
It’s pointless for some newer player, who may only have 1 character, to complain and expect us to handicap ourselves. If Blizzard didn’t want us to do this, they would’ve made it an account-wide thing like they did with Blingtron or a Pet-dungeons.
They make the rules and we stick to them, the Multiboxers are largely doing the same. It’s just that the rules for this one particular thing don’t cater very well to everyone.
We ended up with the current herbalism system, because the old system had weaknesses.
Mainly that, when 2 people leaped to the same herb, only one would get it, and the other would just see his cast fail at 99%, and that felt bad.
The current system solves that, mission accomplished.
But it also introduced a new weakness, making it crazy efficient for a 10-farmer group (be it 10 players or a single 10-head multiboxer).
My solution above solves both those, and it’s just one out of many possibilities, i’m sure Blizzard will implement one or another come SL, they’re not hearing about this frustration for the first time.