1 guy, opening several clients to control multiple characters at once.
And um. Be real with me here, I highly doubt that anybody is going to control 6 characters at once, having to manually input /follow commands, and tab through each window and tell each character to do things like mine, herb, or skin mobs and/or use abilities.
I can see someone multiboxing a priest, for example for infinite heals to do solo questing or something, because all they’d have to do is just quickly tab to cast heals and stuff, but running a 6+ character setup? You’d need automation to make it worthwhile.
And um.
I would be very… very… very careful with saying “Hardware is okay!” because I’ve seen blues in other threads where people ask about using hardware to stuff like that going “You shouldn’t risk it”.
EDIT: Yeah, using hardware to get around a rule about software is usually bad, and Blues usually warn about that. They don’t like you using hardware to circumvent in-game limitations. I doubt they’d like you using hardware to circumvent a rule about software input broadcasting. The point is, they don’t want you broadcasting input and I’m pretty sure that if you could come up with hardware to do it, that would similarly be against the ToS.
My husband MB and he has a macro that’s set to /follow bob (not saying what his character’s actual name is) on his other four toons. Furthermore he doesn’t have to tab through each window because he uses window mode. That allows him to see and click through all the windows.
Also, most (not all) MB run with 5 because anything greater is a raid and you can’t do most WQ and regular quests in a raid.
But that seems like such a lot of trouble to go through for some smalltime operation that’s not run by a bot.
IMO, I would say that multiboxing should be against the ToS, but it’s obvious why Blizz doesn’t want to do that because they’d lose subscription money, lol. I still wonder just how effective that actually is, for all the trouble it takes to get that many characters, clients, etc going.
multi-boxing is the playing of multiple characters at the same time. You can have all the characters being played at once as long as your not using broadcasting software to automate the ‘extra’ toons your good.
This here shows that there is no hardware restrictions currently from a blue. So saying that hardware solutions should be fine and considering they literally said the only no-no is IB software I think ‘should be fine’ is a reasonable statement.
Using a KVM switch is the first hardware solution i can think of that would probably pass muster. On that note there is a few other cheaper and easier solutions that the multi-boxers of old used that are possible as well such as windowed mode and clicking through everything / using macros. Please also note that it costs a bunch more money to implement a hardware solution so most people wont go that route though and that is more important than anything else for limiting boxing. shrug
My point was that clause where the blue says “assuming they work within our policies”.
They have a policy that says “broadcasting input with software is not allowed.”
So, if you create hardware that can broadcast input, that would be violating policy, therefore, it would not pass “assuming they work within our policies”.
A KVM switch does not broadcast input; it allows you to send one input to one machine, and you flip a switch to determine which machine gets the input. It doesn’t send simultaneous input to 6 machines at once.
As a side note… I would have to look up the exact wording on the broadcasting thing… “Broadcasting Input” could refer to something like Steam Link, or streaming gameplay to another device, because you are technically “broadcasting input”.
They say “assuming it does not violate our policies” and “i.e. do not use the keyboard macro to do something beyond what our in-game macro could do” which implies that hardware should not be used to circumvent software limitations, which is exactly what you’d be doing if you created hardware that could broadcast input to multiple machines.
Yes and I know the ban is on software, because that’s what it says. If someone came up with some hardware that could do it, like someone mentioned a KVM switch, then at the moment that wouldn’t be against the policy because the policy is only for software.
We both know WoW will never switch all servers to warmode all the time. I like my pve space where I don’t have to deal with pvp if I don’t want to. I don’t want to be forced into pvp just because some botters are spamming boomkins all over the place. If I wanted to be paranoid I’d go play EVE and look at my scanner constantly pinging space at range while already facing my warp out destination.
If anything the solution might be to phase out those boomkins from one another if too many are in one area. It’s not an elegant solution but if a raid comp is all one class or vast majority, if they are in a raid group, then they get phased from each other to reduce lag and hopefully interfere with their botting. Or they cannot loot anything, skin, herb gather, or mine nodes, other than a boss for loot to prevent it interfering with normal raid groups in the open world.
One could easily, if they wanted to, bridge the gap to expand that to mean using hardware to bypass any software limitation, not just including to macros, because it says “i.e.” meaning “anything like this”.
“No other restrictions have been announced.” != “no other restrictions exist”.
This means that this could change, easily, especially if people start using hardware to broadcast input.
The spirit of the rule is very clear: “We don’t want you broadcasting inputs to multiple accounts simultaneously to automate inputs.” Maybe clicking through windows is okay, but if they start seeing people with hardware setups running around with a slew of characters… well, they might revisit that hardware thing.
My guess? They are hoping people play nice with this, because they don’t want to ban things like Steam Link because there are valid, non-MB uses for such things.
That’s my whole purpose of speaking out against using hardware to get around the software broadcasting rule.
People will take things too far, and then Blizz will have to react and it will be worse for everybody.
RE:Somalion: that’s not what we mean by broadcasting inputs. What we mean, a Keyboard, Mouse, or other input device sending inputs to multiple machines simultaneously.
Which at the moment is not against the policy. You just think it is.
Also, this isn’t talking about hardware: Keyboards/mouse macros. It’s talking about macros. People were creating some pretty elaborate macros and it wasn’t just multiboxers that were doing it.
Alright then.