4 core/4threads cpu, 16gb ram, 4-6 gb vram gpu, old 1080p monitor, cheap psu and a 500gb ssd, one such pc per game = i could find / build 5 such pcs or more, cheap, second hand. A pc from 2015 even would easily play wow with nice settings.
Just lack a working hardware solution. There were popular ones back in the days… named… “x-keys?”
So there is software involved just not multiboxing softwares involved, gotcha! 
Well, it could easily be 4 different computers, but that’ll be an overkill.
Yeah, duh. You kinda need software to even launch wow, so of course some is invoved. None of it has anything to do with broadcasting input, or multiboxing though. They’re all legit tools you can’t just ban outright.
Yeah, sure the thing is it’s going to be harder to setup all this at first but people will probably make guides will see.
Now that the policy is in place it will be a cat and mouse game will see how it plays out and how far people are willing to go with this. 
YESSSSSSSSSSSS! Finally. WoW is saved? Hopefully it is enforced correctly though so that they don’t try to find a way around it.
Multi-boxing has and is always unfair. I know you can still multi-box, but have fun manually alt-tabbing to each client to manually move your other accounts 
Pinkskull the Multiboxer comes to mind. He who had something like 36 characters on at the same time, all controlled with two keyboards.
He’s a nice guy, but all the same, this get’s rid of all those people who were using multiple accounts to spam farm mobs in vol’dun or whatever.
By all means, keep playing multiple characters at once. Just do it the old fashioned way. =D Alt tab a lot and use two person mounts. =D
How’s that what’s happening? Nobody is getting punished for anything they’ve done in the past. In fact they get a warning before any punishment so even if they don’t read the patch notes/forums they get a chance to stop.
It probably won’t matter if it is one of those ‘isboxers’ or people doing it through other methods like virtual machines or whatever.
If there’s automation of all the accounts by one single source (key mirroring) whatever the method then all of those accounts can get their perma ban. Just report it and they’ll get their dues.
Had a cursory look at how to make my hardware multiplexer usable with Windows, so that you can still multibox, without running Linux: it’s perfectly doable with windows containers, by the looks of it.
So the only extra “software” running would be docker. No other tool necessary.
If the new policy would say that, yes. But it doesn’t. It explicitly says broadcasting software. You can multibox perfectly fine without any such thing. So unless they update the policy, hardware based solution will still be allowed.
No, I don’t believe 5x more players will be herbing. In fact, I believe less characters overall will be herbing now, because herbing with multiple characters at once has just become more tedious.
I agree, it will most likely still be worth. However, if you’re out there herbing and a flock of druids rushes past you towards a node, you’ll have a much better shot at getting one pick out of it compared to earlier. It may not be a lot of a difference, but a single person on multiple accounts taking roughly double the time to empty a single node ( I believe double the time is a fair estimate, perhaps even a bit on the lower side ) can have quite some impact.
Of course it’ll still be profitable. It’s always more profitable to steer multiple characters.
Of course my experiences are my own. I don’t believe there’s a lot of multiboxers in BGs or Arenas and the only times I’ve noticed them where when they were either herbing or whenever I’ve walked through a portal and was greeted with an army of 500 ghouls. I also don’t believe that a multiboxer being bored and camping the quest NPCs for the dailies in vale is the norm or something that’s truly an issue, it’s just a thing that has happened to me in the past.
Also I don’t believe a single good player would’ve been similarly impactful, because no matter how good they are, surviving a single good player by simply running away is much more likely compared to surviving 40 characters instantkilling you.
Exactly.
I agree, the issue does not only lie within the multiboxers. It’s a combination of errors on Blizzards side.
First of all it’s Nazjatar being badly designed due to the fact that Zin’anthid is used for literally every pot and flask.
Then there’s sharding, which means no matter how dead your server is, there’ll always be people from other servers around inevitably despawning things you could mine / herb.
And the multiboxers increasing the rate at which things despawn is only the third of the issues regarding said statement. Also the least bad, imo. However, Nazjatar and Zin’anthid being badly designed is sadly irreversible and sharding, while mostly accepted as a bad thing, doesn’t seem to be something Blizzard wants to retract.
I would assume a majority of players has a character with gathering professions that they use to gather materials. But such as you, it’s an assumption without any non empirical evidence to back it up, so there’s really no point in arguing about it.
That being said, most of my gold comes from boosting, even though I might get lynched for admitting that, because people do seem to hate everything revolving around boosting services, due to advertisers being quite obnoxious. And well, people from my guild, as well as my m+ team, who all are in a similar boat regarding gold income, universally believe this change is beneficial as well. But again, empirical evidence, so not really worth a lot, I understand that. Also a belief is a belief and not a fact, so only time will tell for that matter.
I don’t believe the players I’ve met during my adventures in Nazjatar have been bots. And yes, multiboxing will still exist, but the reduced efficiency will hopefully enough to give other players a shot at getting a piece of the herb cake as well. There won’t be a flock of druids going around and instantly despawning herbs anymore, it’ll take at least a few seconds now. And the decreased efficiency makes the entire process several times more tedious, so people will be less willing to spend their time like that. It requires a lot more attention and a lot more time with third party programs being banned.
It is, I agree. If it weren’t for that, multiboxers would’ve not become an issue.
Also agreed. Bribing people into warmode has been an issue ever since its implementation.
Disagree, without consumables, there’s no need for money, outside of the occasional enchant and repairs. It’s a detrimental part to the economy.
That’s actually very true and I’m glad you brought it up, I was kind of just flashed by this entire announcement because I never would’ve expected something such as that.
I just genuinely hope the change, that I don’t believe to be of symbolic nature only, to be relevant to my personal experiences. Of course only time will tell. Of course it may be similar to the “oh guys we banned the LFG advertisers for one day and have not yet banned the umpteen advertiser accounts that keep popping up in the LFG window” where they don’t follow up their words with actions, but sadly I am a gullible human being that keeps believing the words of a multi billion dollar company who’s hired a lawyer as a game director specifically to lie to their fanbase.
And this case is no different for me, I’ll keep being gullible until I get disappointed once again. Or perhaps, this time will be different? That’s what people in abusive relationships tend to think and I guess it’s the same for me here.
Which hopefully fixes the issue of druid flocks instantly despawning herb nodes. If it doesn’t, well at least it made the entire act a bit more tedious. I know, I shouldn’t indulge in other people having to work more for the same results, or rather “indulge in the suffering of others”, but I can’t help but think it’s a lot more fair to the average player without them duplicating a buttonpress to multiple accounts.
And I honestly believe that most of them aren’t part of the issue. I believe that a lot of multiboxers simply have found a different way for them to enjoy the game. Whether that be running dungeons, raids, or farming transmogs. But sadly, a few black sheep ruin the fun for everyone.
Oh yes, I am. I personally believe they should’ve made nodes clientsided and be done with it. But perhaps that would allow some sort of cheating to happen? Who knows.
I’m honestly just glad they announced anything, or even acknowledged the issue. I would’ve never expected Activizzard to do anything that could even remotely go into the direction of them making life more difficult for multiboxers. They earn almost 50% more per multiboxer account that pays through gold. If a single multiboxer permanently quits the game, it’s at the very least 3 times the regular amount of subscription money lost.
I guess I’m just surprised Blizzard has done anything about it, positively.
Do I believe this is the best solution? Most definitely not, but it’s a beginning? It’s similar to how they’ve implemented a corruption vendor in 8.3. Sure it was way too late for the corruption vendor to be introduced, but at least they’ve acknowledged the issue at hand and decided that something had to be done. That’s more than what we get usually.
With Blizzard, you can’t expect them to hand you an entire loaf of bread when you’re asking for one. They’ll give you microscopic crumbs of bread at best. And this time? They gave us a slice of bread. That’s insane!
But yes, you’re right for a lot of your statements, there could’ve been better “fixes” and if they didn’t implement thing such as Nazjatar, Warmode and Sharding, we never would’ve had the issue become so large either, but again, it’s something.
Please do keep in mind that everything in my statements is obviously very subjective and every evidence or statement is solely empirical. I don’t believe I’m even close to being an average WoW player, so my own experiences probably don’t make for good examples.
It’s going to be interesting to see how far they will go with this because you can still check whether a process runs under a VM, IP, configuration and whatnot but really at the end users are going to report people and regardless to the setup one uses they are going to ban people so it should at least reduce the amount of multiboxers just because now the setup is also a technical challenge.
Or rather; “not thanks for all the fish because you ruined the fish economy”
You’re still using some sort of software layer/function to get a single input sent to more than one process/alt hardware, so I’ll have agree to disagree with you.
This is probably the best change in wow for a while now. Just the multiboxing ban and the 2h frost reintroduce alone makes shadowlands one of the best expansion since wotlk.
Yeah, but there’s perfectly legit reasons to run Wow in a VM or container. If they don’t want to ban people who use multiple accounts and put them on follow, they won’t go after those who run in VMs or containers.
Yeah, like they ban botters. Sure, they ban some of them, but they keep popping back up again in no time. If it involves manual work, it’s not going to be enough to noticably reduce multibox farmers.
They’ll still need to update the policy first, and… it took them how long to even get here?
I wouldn’t call plugging a device in, and running a batch file a technical challenge. If you can plug a keyboard in, and install a driver, you can also install a hardware multiplexer.
Granted, most won’t build one. But if there’s a demand, ready-made devices will be made available (if they aren’t already).
I don’t. Each keyboard is bound to a different container, they receive all input from the keyboard, regardless of whether they’re the active window or not. None of the software I use (Win10 + Docker, or Linux+wine+containers) broadcast anything. I do not need any custom solution to route keys to each client, so the best WoW can do, is try and detect the container, which… isn’t really helpful.
Yes there is. VM your accounts if you want. But ALT-TAB between them. Configuring your VMs in such a way as to perform like keystroke mimicing will put you into the same ground as those ‘isboxers’.
A PC on the otheside of your room with a different account open won’t know if you pressed forward - unless you mirror to it.
A different process won’t know if you pressed forward unless you set it up to read all the key strokes going into it like it was the active window (which it isn’t) - again mirroring.
Some people I am sure will try to rationale away suspensions or perma ban to Blizzard support by saying “Bu… but… I don’t use isbox.”
It’s still automation of multiple accounts at a single key press whatever way it is sliced. And don’t expect to not get mass reported when we see you and your fleet of 50 alts flying about resource gathering. because you will and you will have to learn to alt-tab and press keys manually.
I think you’d be surprised but more to the point… it’s interesting how you pretend it’s a “Plug and Play” when it’s really not and I’m still not sure how you synchronize everything atm you’re just throwing buzzwords.
I’d love to actually see a working setup, I mean you say it’s a walk in the park… after all. 
The thing that confuses me the most is multiplexer, you pass N input and it produces a single output how does this make any sense? what synchronizes the input between your VM instances and stuff? when you have multiple VMs open only a single one get the physical input not all of them at the same time.
In your mind, yes. According to the letter of the policy, no.
I’m as much against mb farmers as anyone else. All I’m saying is that this policy change in itself is not enough to completely remove them from the game. Those farmers that ruined the economy, and the gaming experience, will easily find a way to continue what they’ve always done, and still abide the letter of the policy, even if they don’t abide the intention of it.
All the update says is that software based brodacasting will be bannable. Well, multiboxing is doable without software based broadcasting. If they want to remove it completely, the wording needs an update.