As a PvE care bear, the biggest gripe an have with multiboxing is that it feels completely in contrast with the spirit of Classic. Obviously multiboxers did exist in Vanilla, but that’s besides the point.
The strongest aspect of Vanilla that we all knew and loved, and which became lost over the years, was the sense of challenge and community in the journey of levelling. The game is intentionally long and difficult, and it forces you to cooperate and make friendships in order to survive. The very existence of Elite mobs are a testament to that.
Multiboxing completely mitigates that. There is no real danger or threat when you constantly have a force multiplier of five, and no need to interact with the community to overcome challenges. And while multiboxing might never be as powerful as 5 individual players, it still allows you to circumnavigate most conventional challenges by having a posse of what are essentially bots at your disposal (even though technically blah blah).
To that extent, multiboxing doesn’t “impact” anyone else per say. But it does detract from the world as a whole. In the same way that Heirlooms and LFD don’t impact you, but their impact is still felt in how it diminishes a sense of community in favour of individualistic, exclusionary playstyle which permeates into the world and indirectly impacts the people around you.
Just food for thought, and curious for feedback. Obviously multiboxing will never be banned and I’m not calling for that, but wanted to highlight an argument which doesn’t seem to be raised very often.
I assure you that triple boxing (lock/war/druid) every dungeon at co-level while leveling was far more of a challenge than getting a 5 man squad together. It was very challenging to beat some of those dungeons. I was stuck on RFD for like a week.
It is quite difficult to dps, tank, and heal with such different characters at the same time.
So… it was part of Vanilla but you’re going to just ignore that so your argument sounds better.
You admit it’s not botting, but decide to call it as such anyway to evoke some feelings on cheating…
Because it’s not a very good argument. People play WoW for a variety of reasons, and Multiboxing is one of them. It has it’s own unique challenges. That is part of the fun for me. Also being able to heal and tank a 5 man with 3 dps from my guild is nice when they are looking for some help.
I’m glad that you put the word spirit in italics. Let’s talk about that for a second.
What is this so called SPIRIT of WoW and by who’s definition is the “correct” one?
Is it my definition?
Is it yours? (not you directly OP, just in general)
Is it Activision / Blizzard?
Or is the so called spirit of the game more subjective?
My opinion is that I don’t care what someone thinks the so called spirit of the game should be. I think that this so called spirit is open to personal interpretation.
I picture this kind of scene playing out
Artist takes my hand and brings me over to their painting
Artist: “And here is my work, do you see the anger? the passion?”
Me: “No, I’m getting a feeling of sadness and confusion.”
Artist, “BUT SEE THE ANGER!!!”
Me, “I’m sorry, I don’t see anger. I see sadness and confusion”
You get props from me for being able to do that. Tanking is usually not difficult, but you definitely need to be able to react quickly, and that reaction can differ greatly depending on the situation. And generally when tanking needs to be highly reactionary is when healing needs to be kicking into full gear, as well.
Very rarely. Almost to the point where it was non existent on most servers. Multiboxing really wasn’t popular until WOTLK. Though there were more multiboxers in TBC than vanilla.
I don’t dispute that. But I do contend that it’s an artificial challenge which comes with benefits that undermine the intended challenge of the game. In that regard, it still is contrary to the spirit of the game.
Maybe. At least dungeon boosting is consistent with the suspension of disbelief in a fantasy game: it still encourages community interaction.
Really taking my argument out of context, there. 1: just because it was possible in Vanilla does not mean it was intended to, nor does it make it beneficial to the spirit of game. 2: I am not invoking feelings of “cheating”, I am invoking feelings that instead of seeing three/five people you are seeing one person and two/four bots/shells/NPCs trailing around them, which is not fun or inspiring for the community as aspect of WoW. 3: see above regarding challenge.
I can’t say definitively what it is, but I feel I can argue fairly competently what it is not. Multiboxing is as “vanilla” in spirit as heirlooms or LFD.
It was intended. There were multiple original WoW devs who multiboxed and would talk about it on the forums. We did it in EQ, and carried that over. So it is in the spirit of the game.
So then who cares? I can’t imagine the multiboxer is interesting in teaming up with you if he wants his own team, so he probably wouldn’t play if he couldn’t MB. And if he is interested, he still will.
Is it really though? I started playing WoW late TBC. Was there multi-boxing in vanilla? I don’t know. All I know from the research that I have done, which in all honesty is seeing people talking about that there was in fact multi-boxing and it just wasn’t as widely used on the various topics when multi-boxing comes up. I don’t know but from seeing enough people say so, and only seeing by chance the comments like, “Not used as much as today.” or “Became more popular in WOTLK.” I haven’t seen anyone say that there was no multi-boxing in vanilla.
The point being that it was at least there in vanilla WoW.
In my opinion I can understand why LFD wouldn’t feel right. The game was starting to change into something that was a bit more casual friendly. So it makes sense to have a QoL mechanic that does cater a bit more for the casual player.
Heirlooms I feel also kind of were one of those more casual friendly QoL. They acted almost like a catch up and a BIS all in one. Instead of players having to farm for those nice pieces of gear, the heirloom made it possible to already have something like it.
I think it all comes down to apples and oranges. If there is a spirit of the game I suppose it would be the mind-numbing grind to max. If a player is multi-boxing this grind can take longer or shorter depending on how they play the game. Just like how some classes level better than others currently. Adding QoL changes on the other hand that don’t really offer any negative sides to the player using them. I think there is a difference between the three.
MB obtains the same amount of XP, as everyone else. Rested or not is irrelevant. Their XP number is still the same. In fact, it’s a little less due to being grouped. I’ve done baby pen stuff with and without friends. It’s more work to gain more XP when grouped vs not being grouped.
Thus, MB does not equal Heirlooms. Heirlooms grant extra XP, regardless if you’re grouped/not grouped and rested/not rested. MB doesn’t magically spawn you in and out of dungeons, from a City, the way LFD does. Sure, they can “spam” dungeons. But, as we can see, it’s only 5/hr and 30/24hr. So, MB is not even close to being LFD.
