I posted earlier on the situation that Blizzard has created with their policy change regarding input broadasting software. Blizzard has handed a cudgel to people who really have it out for multiboxers, and as expected that has been creating a lot of open-world /say messages as people see me running around with my five-toon hunter or druid teams. I’m to the point where, if they will talk to me at all, when they threaten that they are “reporting all those toons” I tell them “go for it.” Thus far I have not violated the ToS and received no notices or account actions. Despite what I expect is a long list of reports, it seems that Blizzard’s Warden program is working as intended and letting Blizzard know that I am doing things legitimately.
I am not using any third-party programs. All that I do is alt-tab and hit a “/follow [target=party1]” macro, loot and mount up on each toon as appropriate. The lead toon gets first all on any tradeable gear, but the “secret sauce” that makes it nearly as effective for gathering as it used to be is that I finished the campaign with my hunter team and then XP-locked my druids at 50, in their heroic Nyalotha gear with R15 cloaks and sockets galore. Any of those toons can smash through most of the standard mobs they encounter in Threads of Fate “leveling” process, and I will let them start gaining XP again once I am done with the farm thing, probably in another week or two. So, there is a bit of advice for any and all players who still want to make some gold before the xpac really gets underway: don’t level your gatherer, park 'em at 50 if they’re decently geared, and use that to your advantage. I’d estimate that my gathering is almost 4x as effective as a single toon would be able to do it, in comparable gear, whereas my gathering could be as much as 6x more effective if I were still able to use the broadcasting software, due to the increased rate at which five toons could cut through any mobs in their way faster than a single toon trying to gather on its own and encountering mobs.
So the software ban amounts to about a 35% nerf to 5-way multibox gathering.
Most multiboxers were “2x4” (two parties of four toons each to ensure loot for all characters when they tap a mob), but the nerf hits them in much the same way. Another way to say it is that I add an extra 2.5-3 herbalist / miners to the pool on my realm, which was medium pop and was just revised to “low” pop. If one were to look at the materials that flow through the AH, my guess is that you could see my portion of certain herbs and ore in a pie chart, but that is just as much a factor of the multiple clients as my decision to go all-in on farming during this premium time and push back any other content, and my use of TradeSkillMaster to automate cancel scans every 1-2 hours and repost the handful of critical mats. (There’s a second bit of advice for anyone looking to make some gold as a gatherer right now–use TSM.) Given that the ban has soured the milk enough to make most multiboxers quit (I knew several, all of whom have either quit entirely or deactivated all but one account to play for the story content), you could even argue that I have an outsized effect as one of the last standing multiboxers on my little realm. The prices of the mats in question have done pretty much what they did everywhere else, perhaps even remained a little higher on my realm as it tends to have higher prices than the big realms.
Do I feel any regrets? Well, I do have some sympathy for players who were hoping to make their fortunes this week, but only in the sense that the manager of a WalMart may realize that his store is killing off some of the local businesses while helping others to thrive. Blacksmiths and alchemists are going faster because of what I do, which means raids may get off to a better start. Either way, I don’t feel sorry for the guy I was bidding against on the Swift Zulian Tiger that fortuitously popped on our BMAH tonight. After six days of hard farm I had just enough to edge him out.
As it stands, then, Blizzard’s policy change has effectively removed most multiboxing from the game. The effects on the overall economy, in a qualitative sense, are not that significant, and if a person really wants to run multiple clients they can still do some multiboxer things under a nerf. As for the open-world “report this guy” and “%@^# off multibox trash” chats, they seem to have died down along with mats prices. I do still miss the key broadcasting software–it made things so smooth, and as I posted earlier had the counter-intuitive effect of taking me out of activities that tend to affect the economy. Rather, it helped me get into five-man content or previous raid tiers faster, so I spent more time gearing my teams and seeing what I could do with them. But, in the new content, it would mean there would be literally no place I could not go as a team of geared, level 50 druids–not even the areas with level 60-locked mobs would keep me out, which is far from what the game design intended. So, overall, I have to give Blizzard’s policy decision a thumbs up, even though I wish there could still be some provision to let us use broadcasting software in instanced content.