Can you PLEASE clarify a few things regarding multiboxing

[Deathwïng-tol-barad]

"Multiboxing, or playing multiple World of Warcraft accounts at once, is not a violation of our Terms of Use. Please note, however, that use of input broadcasting software may result in account penalties.

Will any keyboard broadcasting be allowed at all?
Hardware broadcasting is?
In Software
follow macros?
Movements?
Mount/dismount?

I do understand that this is done because of people farming(mostly botting) standing still stuff, but blocking us from using follow and simple movements is A LOT and pretty much breaks multiboxing due to the inability to move.

Also knowing that isn’t that easy to spot a difference between a person using just basic stuff(at least i think it isn’t), as said above, to someone botting, couldn’t blizzard create their software to do such thing with limited functionality?

Because I mean, if blizzard were to create such thing, even boxing to do quests and doing small stuff could be easy to check and compare against someone botting as this software(blizzard one) would have to be controlled by someone and not by another software, therefore botting would be pretty much impossible.

[Húntrèss-frostmourne]

basically anything done within the game engine itself is fine, any use of external software etc will be banned from my understanding.

[Atalanta-trollbane (Atalanta)]

There’s an often stated idea, that I believe blizzard posters once used as an example on the old forums, that it’s all gravy if one key press results in one action, and nothing more.

Multiboxing typically argued itself as fine because it was one button, one action, per client. No individual client was doing things that were automated from its perspective. Blizzards stance that we may not use broadcasting, now, would imply that it’s one key press, one action, per person.

I’m not clear on how deep they’ll be looking, that is to say if you had a hardware broadcaster, could they see that directly or just that your clients all get commands precisely the same way and timing which would be impossible to do manually.

For now your best bet is to manually do everything. Alt tab to your alts, slap each follow macro manually, and then go. This is likely to mean that while multiboxing isn’t against the rules all the tools you need to do so efficiently are and therefore this puts a stop to roving teams of 5-10 mages nuking people, and makes it more tedious to farm (but doesn’t strictly stop role players, or people who do a dungeon queue in one client while farming on the other client).

That all said I’m aware that there’s an understanding that physical macros on keyboards, buttons that mimic a bunch of buttons, are not supported and are considered automation. This could be an argument against hardware broadcasters.

[Deathwïng-tol-barad]

Right now I’ve been avoiding those spot farming and everything bots usually farm, had problems in the past, so i’m trying to avoid any possible misunderstanding at all, i’ve even been recording most of the stuff i do, even though some said that it is worthless.
The thing is, follow command, if hit once(per account), in most maps only works for some time, phasing breaks A LOT, i mean, really a lot.

If using some kind of broadcasting in which i had to press, for instance, 0 to 9 in my keyboard to mount up every account, that would be fine, i don’t really care if I have to press 10 times, i’ve been alt+tab’ing to mouse click herb/mines already, that isn’t that much of a bigger effort.
The problem lies in the fact that follow breaks so often, that the need to alt + tab to re-follow gets massively increased, in some zones, from 1 x 10(accounts) to 2~5x10(in most zones), to even every few yards(some spots in uldum, several around Icecrow, pandaria in general).

I read about people talking about KVM and hardware broadcasting, but that feels way too close to doing an exploit, because it would be a clear attempt to bypass a rule.
So unless some official info comes from blizzard, that shouldn’t be taken as a rule.

[Tolna-veknilash]

They’re not really going to list A, B, C, etc. of things on what falls under the new ruling other than what’s already given as folks will try to tip toe around ruling to get away with things. More to the point, the blues here isn’t able to tell any internal info.

[Rufflebottom-bloodhoof (Rufflebottom)]

There is now a Support article to clarify this

Multiboxing

[Troodrood-zuljin (Troodrood)]

@Atalanta-trollbane

Alt tab to your alts

I’m not understanding. No one is forced to use full screen. There’s a setting that makes it possible to have multiple instances of wow (as well as other windows like a spreadsheet, discord, browser) resized and visible at the same time, so no one is ever required to “alt tab” while playing multiple instances manually. Which is what I’ve always done, as I never did figure out how to key clone using that free software and am too cheap to pay money.

[Atalanta-trollbane (Atalanta)]

Alt-tab can also just mean swapping between apps that are open and present. Just because the windows are there and up doesn’t mean they’re in the foreground.

Windows treats the application you’re using as the primary application. All other apps on screen are not prioritized. For example if you had “set FPS to 15 in background” and “set FPS to 30 in foreground” then only the WoW you’re engaging at the moment would have priority and thus be foreground.

For people who used software to broadcast their key presses it was much easier to just have one primary WoW with the others sort of tucked under. You get a better view, more space for game world details, and you can direct your focus more towards one thing and not monitoring a bunch at once.

I dabbled in multiboxing to RAF myself at one point and, honestly, I preferred having one main instance and all the secondary instances just being behind the scenes doing their own thing. Even on a 28 inch monitor having multiple WoW games up made it small enough to be uncomfortable for me.

That said you’re not wrong, you don’t have to alt tab as an action. It was more a call to “manually input everything into each client” than it was a commentary on how you’d change priority between them.

[Troodrood-zuljin (Troodrood)]

@Atalanta-trollbane

Alt-tab can also just mean swapping between apps that are open and present.

Alt-tab means using the keys alt and tab together to cycle through open applications. For people who do not use window full screen, using “alt tab” is never necessary. You simply click the window you want to use from its exposed portion always visible on the screen. I suggest you guys check your wow settings to see how they actually work.

[Tolna-veknilash]

It’s rather unnecessary to be fighting about terminology about it as the idea is rather clear what Atalanta meant. More to the point, fighting about it won’t really change anything what it deals with the theme of the thread.

[Troodrood-zuljin (Troodrood)]

No. What’s clear is that people who support these changes don’t even appear to know how windows works. It just seems very odd that so many people are using the term “alt-tab” to describe clicking between fully visible open windows when that’s not what alt-tabbing does at all.

[Tolna-veknilash]

Again, it’s wholly unnecessary to fighting about this as folks around here ain’t really going to change their term use because you dislike it. More to the point, it’s going off-topic as is.

[Troodrood-zuljin (Troodrood)]

Words have meaning. Using words to mean something they actually don’t mean says something about the people who are using it that way. That so many posters are using “alt-tab” to describe a function that is in every way not “alt-tabbing” is, well, curious.

[Vrakthris]

Alt-tabbing is generally an easy way to describe folks selecting different clients. I’m not certain why this word debate is becoming the focus here.

@Deathwïng-tol-barad

Will any keyboard broadcasting be allowed at all?
Hardware broadcasting is?
In Software
follow macros?
Movements?
Mount/dismount?

The focus of the announcement yesterday was prohibiting Input Broadcast Software, no other restrictions have been announced regarding hardware. Keyboards/mouse macros and functionality, assuming they work within our policies (i.e. do not use the keyboard macro to do something beyond what our in-game macro could do), is generally fine.

[Atalanta-trollbane (Atalanta)]

I understand what it physically means. I’m saying that an entire generation grew up using it to say “swap applications” in general. My friends regularly use it even when they’re not even in fullscreen mode or necessarily using those keys. It’s a bit like how Kleenex became synonymous with tissue but referred to a brand originally.

[Rotindots-zuljin]

All those 10 plus character multi boxing griefers / gold farmers did was ruin things for everyone else who enjoyed dual boxing characters. The ones that liked questing, and leveling alts together without having to alt tab, or click back and forth constantly between windows on a monitor. Instead of banning the boxing software outright, they should of just limited the accounts you could have actively running at onetime on joined accounts. I don’t have any sympathy for the folks who were multi boxing 10 or 20 character teams just grief other players in pvp, or node farming for mats. But it does suck for the folks who never bothered anyone, just minding their own business leveling toons together on joint accounts. Pretty sure they will go after the folks using hardware eventually like switches also op. This move they made is one of the reasons I moved back over to EQ2 today.

[Ekon-wyrmrest-accord (Ekon)]

@Rotindots-zuljin

Pretty sure they will go after the folks using hardware eventually like switches also op.

Just to clarify, this decision was not about multiboxing, so I hardly see a reason for them to go after hardware boxers in the future-- they’d have gone for them all at once, if it was.

This was specifically towards the software used for both multiboxing and botting, and since it’s easier to distinguish and doesn’t lock multiboxers out of their other options, going for the software was the better option.

[Beastkets-area-52]

this new rule actually killed the game for me, first time i havent logged on since june day to day. no more SL or wow for me. Wasn’t even one of the people who abused it, just felt it was my right to enjoy the game how I wanted to, doing dungeons with my own groups to get various appearances. Removed that, remove me, one perma lost whale player

[Mkali-thrall]

If you’re truly a whale, you can pursue one of the other boxing methods like a hypervisor etc that doesn’t qualify as “input broadcasting software.”

[Nightdrakon-tichondrius]

I think things have been made clear to the OP about the change of policy, and the thread can get locked up or moved to GD.