The tl;dr of the situation is botting is illegal. Multiboxing isn’t.
As a multy boxer I strongly disagree that i cause damage to the economy. I’m okay with ban if it means ending the rage. All I ask is that I get the option to move all my Characters under one account and since I do 6 month subs I also request that the time from my second account be transferred to my first account. Again I disagree with the majority here that all Multi Boxers destroy the economy some do abuse it but most of just play for fun and challenge with 2 to 3 characters at once.
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Multiboxing isn’t toxic and it is here to stay.
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Most multiboxers probably don’t do much to the economy, but there are enough that do. For each character that is gathering material, thats an exponential increase in material being gathered.
If I gather 3000 osmenite ore in a few hours, then a botter with 10 accounts can get at least 30,000. If you actually pay attention to the markets, you can see that much ore can destroy a market for a couple of days at least, a week or two at most. They will continue this behavior for as long as they need to, and can do so with multiple materials.
Its not that all multiboxers do this, but that the ones who do can severely hurt the markets on any server, and it does happen. I’ve watched and followed the groups myself.
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If they pay with gold or real money, Blizzard gets real money both ways.
The forum anti multibox mafia mob is back it 
Believe they pretty much killed it anyways op. You are just in overkill mode chill out. The only people that will probably continue to multibox, are just the hardcore boxers. Most are just going to go play other games that allow it, or better yet go box on one of the gazillion private servers that still pop up on the interwebz so they can box to get away from you, and the others mob mentality fanatics. You wont have to worry about legit, or casual dual multiboxers. But have fun with the bot hackers, because they are still going to be around. Those script kiddies don’t need multibox software to broadcast, and never did. They were using hacks long before multibox software became a thing.
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This is true.
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My gripe right now is with the multiboxers posting threads and videos about how to program their keyboards to send the same command to each wow client, claiming “it’s not software”. Such an atrocity violates the spirit of the rule and those types of people are clearly out to ruin the gameplay for everyone else so they can feel superior for “beating the system”, and those are the same types that can easily fly a flock around and tap every node or kill every quest mob or nuke every player in exist, over and over and over. Just get rid of multiboxing altogether and end this trash.
See: This example New way of multiboxxing!
Multiboxers pay for their subs with tokens.
You may want to learn the difference between an “opinion” and a “fact”. Here is some help, your opinion is often wrong and tends to smell like something I should pick up after my dog takes one.
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Likewise…
For sure, that’s why I noted that someone who buys gold with real world money exists outside of that loop. As you noted, to some degree, the raw gold farmers do as well. I know there are plenty of multi-boxers who choose this form of making gold, but even that has it’s impact on the market in both positive and negative ways.
Without empirical data, it does make this tough, but we can see the outcome with prices on the AH. Prices have been lower, but I see them as being artificially low.
So, lets just take what we do know. First, what decides the value of gold in the market? Well, in its inception, it was time to earn relative to supply of raw gold being generated. Be it through selling things to the vendor, drops, quest rewards, etc. As time passed, we started getting gold from even more sources. Paragon chests, mission tables, etc. Regardless, all of them equate to time invested.
Going back to the beginning of the game, one of the most accessible forms of earning gold was through herb or ore farming. Both require basically 0 investment to start earning gold back on the AH. That time spent to farm is what helps decide the price. There is a happy medium to be found in there of those earning gold from the aforementioned items and farming herbs and ore.
For the multi-boxer, they are able to circumvent the normal limitations placed on a player and farm massive amounts with a fraction of the time input. What 10 players were doing prior, now one player is doing… and they are doing it with absurd efficiency. They are ONLY focused on efficiency for that matter. It’s not like its 10 unique classes. It’s often 10 boomkins and they are often pretty humbly geared outside of the main one. Which, doesn’t matter much because 10 of just about anything trumps the solo player any day.
The issue here though is the multi-boxer is not only selling the goods cheaper, but they are also displacing the solo player. When the druids hit a node, they completely deplete it. This leave no opportunity for another player to hit it. These means the solo player not only is contending with lower prices, but possibly less nodes to hit as well.
So what of cheaper goods?
Well, we can look at plenty of real world examples to know it doesn’t always work out. When automation takes a persons jobs, it creates efficiencies and bring some value to the market, but it also creates some potential net loss because a person lost their job. At first, the benefits heavily out weight the negative impact because automation on the whole makes for cheaper goods. Well, eventually though the jobs lost start to add up and the overall impact is a drastically negative one on the economy.
Now, where you define what is and isn’t healthy is up for discussion. In respect to how I see it, I don’t see any level of automation in a game as being healthy in this sense, especially in such a closed market. IF prices are too high for herbs, then that’s on Blizzard to either increase the number of nodes, the yield of each node, the cost for each recipe relative to goods needed to create, or the yield of each recipe after creation. So if the argument is there simply isn’t enough and prices were to high, then we have plenty of ways to fix that without needing multi-boxers.
Either way, going back the beginning, multi-boxers are able to thrive because of how the game was built and because the intent of the game was designed around a solo experience.
This is a tough one. Like everyone here, I would have to offer up some anecdotal opinions relative to my observations. Coming into the expansion I had about 15 million in gold. I always enjoyed playing the AH and would usually spend 15-30 minutes just hunting for good deals or things to flip or craft. I have always kept my finger on the pulse of the market regardless of what I was doing. That said, I also made a lot of gold from doing carries. Be it for arena, challenge modes, or M+.
The market for carries this expansion has just exploded and has really created almost a new type of player. Not that we haven’t always had carries, but not like this patch. I personally have quite a few friends who are professionals and simply paid for their +15 and 5 mask every week. They have better things to do. They use token sales to fund their game play and… why not?
Well, token sales and carries have really started to define the value of gold relative to the market. For the solo player to earn 75-150k+ just from farming herbs is a lot to ask. For the multi-boxer though? That’s nothing. In some ways, the multi-boxer have actually driven the price of tokens up because of their demand. Then to add to that, the multi-boxer isn’t even putting that gold back into the market in a traditional sense. They are just buying tokens to pay for gametime and the gold ends up in the hands of the players doing the carries… often some of the most wealthy players in game. I know, I was one of them and had plenty of friends in that same group.
All the while, the player in the mid to lower earning spectrum in wow is now having a harder and harder time getting what they want through normal means. In many ways, this is great for Blizzard as more and more people are buying tokens. Subs can continue to drop while Blizzard continues to makes the same amount of money. I mean, I don’t blame them at all, but you have to ask yourself, is that taking away from the game? Wow has always had some P2W elements, but these last few expansions have really cemented that.
No frustration at all. I enjoy chatting about this stuff. Not saying I’m right, but I’d gladly provide plenty of examples to back that up. My real world work deals in analytics and world markets.
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They don’t need to. They will get detected and banned. Using software that’s built into the mouse isn’t some magic invisibility cloak. Blizzard has other ways of detecting bots other than scanning your memory lol.
This is a good point. I’m doing a quick response in between my own work, but thank you for taking the time to write a thorough, ‘dissertative’ response.
Just a quick edit update: it appears your basic premise is that “time is money” and that being able to harvest/mine/etc more things to sell in less time translates to the advantage a multi-boxer has. Well, a multi-boxer that ultimately does farm with their multiple accounts.
They don’t want to. It’s a way that people play and enjoy the game. What they want is to finish off bots and gold farmers.
Yea, that translates into every form of gold earning.
For the person farming herbs, in the amount of time it takes to farm the herb and then post it. All of that goes into figuring out what the value is. For the raw gold farmer, it’s how much time it takes to clear a raid or a dungeon and how much they are pulling in each run. Same goes for carries. Even though you might make a decent amount per carry, it can often take hours to find someone to pay and can be a lot of sitting around (partially why I don’t do it much these days).
So in the end, it is all about time invested. The interesting thing here as well is, as more gold makes it to the market from raw gold farming, prices should go up… yet, we have seen the opposite.
It’s hard to say of the exact impact, but we know from the people bragging here that plenty of players are paying for 10+ accounts ONLY from farming herbs and ore and buying tokens. I’m sure the amount they are earning far exceeds that though.
The spirit of the rule? They doubled down on their position that multiboxing is within the rules. I’m going to take an educated guess on re spirit of the new rule.
Every ban wave multiboxers would get swept up in the bans. They then would have to sift through ban appeals and appeal decision appeals until they finally came to a permanent conclusion.
Botters also used the software for true automation adding complexity to ensuring the right people are banned.
Then you have players whining about multiboxers.
Prohibiting the software will make it easier to hand out bans and make the final decision easier to determine. It sets the bar higher for entry to multiboxing which will deter some and calm down the masses while only alienating an even smaller fraction of an already small population of players who enjoy that play style.
This is really the best possible outcome for ALL parties involved and probably the most well thought plan blizzard has enacted in quite awhile. Instead of hamfisting it they went in with a scalpel and precisely hit where they needed to. There are plenty of ways to continue multiboxing and many of them would be near difficult to catch as they would be mostly hardware driven. These setups cost around $4000 so theyre not for your average player or even average multiboxer.
Or they could actually moderate the forums and merge or lock redundant spam threads.
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Aw, must be tough making hundreds of thousands of gold a day doing carries.
It really is its own profession. Making enough gold at the expense of others, to never have to pay for xpacs, subs, etc. (including making enough gold to never have to pay a penny for everything in the shop) - it’s just degenerate for the rest of the player base.
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