That, of course, is not correct.
No artificial assistance in simplifying multiboxing is all the farther the current rules go.
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The entire point is to not push the limit of the rules in the first place. If it’s not clear that what you are doing is 100% allowed, then don’t do it. Trying to push the rules to their breaking point IS risking your account, and while it’s easy to blame Blizzard, YOU are the one making the choice to play fast and loose.
This is incorrect. Multiboxing is allowed, though an unsupported playstyle. These policy changes underline that. These changes are to try and put a stop to the continuing problem of botting. Being unsupported means if the policy change has an adverse effect on multiboxing, then so be it. It’s not a factor in the decision.
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Panacea,
Hopefully blues will provide at least some clarity at some point. To me they likely just meant to exclude the new crop of software work-arounds to input broadcasting software. I think it is very ambiguous whether using 2 monitors and having two games open and clicking between them entirely manually is “streamlined”, vs needing 2 completely separate computers, and there isn’t really any way to come up with an answer to that without blizzard’s help.
I think that is a reasonably basic enough question that hopefully blues will answer it at some point directly, but you’ll eventually find out by seeing what people actually get actioned for.
I would presume for now that doing anything that allows blizzard to detect that you are multiboxing is not allowed.
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Hardware options are included too
“We will now additionally prohibit the use of all software and hardware mechanisms to mirror commands to multiple World of Warcraft accounts at the same time, or to automate or streamline multi-boxing in any way.”
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They do not offer any “clarity”. They did not make this decision, and were not likely included in the process. The developers made the decision. You can contact them directly at @WarcraftDevs on Twitter, or indirectly through forums like General.
Besides, this “clarity” you seek is exactly what botting engineers would love to know, so they can continue to avoid detection.
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This was just posted in a locked thread.
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To be fair, automated bots were always disallowed, and continue to be disallowed. These changes make it easier to detect botting in that they don’t need to pin looking for action duplication on detecting the use of specific software, and now they can just look and see, “are these ten accounts doing the same thing at the same time over and over again?” And if they are, they can take action without having to engage in the eternal arms war of pinning the actions to specific disallowed software and hardware and scripting methods.
Legitimate multiboxers are just the collateral damage. Legitimate boxers were never the ones botting.
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Yes, but they are not out of the game. These are proactive steps to try and remove options for people who create the botting software. Is it going to have any measurable impact? We’ll see. But Blizzard doesn’t rely on what things “look like”, or if they “think” an account is botting. Their detection methods are much more advanced than anything a player like you or me can “see”.
Sure, but that comes from it being an unsupported playstyle. They want to make a change to the game, and that it may impact a subset of an unsupported playstyle is immaterial. They do not make decisions to protect that playstyle.
I think that is a very subjective statement, and well beyond the scope of this discussion. All I will say is that if everyone takes a step back and looks big picture, I believe Blizzard is acting in the best interest of what the majority of the community wants. Right or wrong (I think wrong), multiboxing is seen as similar to botting and rather unfair, and I think Blizzard is trying to take the community view into consideration.
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With this change, though, they don’t need to dig that far. Time is money, and investigation takes time. If they have to dig in and prove that there was a specific piece of software instead of hardware being used to duplicate actions across multiple game clients, that takes time, and even more time to explain it to people, and even more time to have an inevitable “no I didn’t” back and forth until their appeals are exhausted. If there’s a blanket prohibition on using any kind of action duplication across clients, that makes it much easier to detect and apply actions, because they don’t need to nitpick. I don’t think that they’re wrong to make this clarification, it was clearly part of the intent of the original change. I just think that it’s regrettable that we can’t have nice things.
It was always part of the risk, yeah.
Oh, sure, this they take the community view on. No, I think that Blizzard is pretty immune to the rabble-rabble of the grievance du jour on the forums. I do wonder what will happen, though, when the community as a whole starts to realize that the bot problem didn’t suddenly go away due to these changes. Most likely they’ll continue to complain that Blizzard “refuses to do anything about them” when actually it was that the action that was taken for the most part only affected people who were already following the rules and trying to not get their accounts banned, instead of going for full disallowed automation and counting in the churn of banned accounts into their overhead.
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Obviously, I do not know this for sure. But I would be VERY surprised if they have changed their investigation methods to do less diligence than before. I don’t think the change means they can work faster. I think what it means is that there is less grey area for people to operate in. It’s more clear cut as to what constitutes an account action, and there’s less leeway for excuses, or less doubt in what they are detecting.
They certainly are not. Some grievances do not get addressed just because the community complains, but there are many changes/additions to this game over the years that started because of player feedback and community complaints.
Sadly, this is accurate. The community will never be satisfied, it seems.
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Well, actually the detection is automatic. Always has been. Reviewing is just reviewing the logs which is pretty quick as the logs are read by those that manage the software so they know exactly what it is. And they’ve never engaged in the back and forth. Its always been “You did this. You want a review? Okay, we’ll have another person review that log to avoid any issue” and then a firm yes or no.
Actually, you are wrong about this. The bots were multi-boxing using input broadcasting software to up their yield. That is why Blizzard took action on input broadcasting software. It had nothing to do with multi-boxing itself.
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I’m preeeeeettty sure they don’t automatically issue bans. I imagine that they were doing a pre-investigation to make sure that false flags were eliminated and that what the logs say was caused by actual software before they issued an account action. It saves a lot of time to not have to drill down and say, well, yes, this looks like ten accounts doing the same thing at the same time, but did Warden also find software running? Or is it possible that this was done with a wireless keyboard? What if they’re running a macro in Word?
With the clarification, they don’t need to care how it happened. Only that it was clearly happening.
I’m sure that the reviews with fresh eyes will still happen, but when you don’t need to worry about the specifics of how the guy pulled a rabbit out of the hat, only that you clearly have a guy, and a hat, and a rabbit came out of it, that process is simpler too.
Now that’s possible. It’s just unfortunate, then, that the multiboxing aspects were the less-stealthy part of what the bots were doing. I imagine it’ll only take them ten seconds to figure out workarounds since they don’t need to care about operating within what the game allows, meanwhile the people who had the skill - to be clear, not me, I am incredibly lame at shadowboxing my two accounts - to basically play a bunch of accounts at the same time, something that was really pretty impressive when done legitimately, have had their tools taken away.
An unsupported playstyle is always at risk of having these kinds of changes made. It’s just a bummer.
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Due to the presence of the word “streamline” everything is against the rules 
Streamline just means anything that makes it easier than manually alt-tabbing between client windows while manually initiating one action per client. One example would be a system that automatically alt-tabs between clients upon activation (press 1, cast Corruption and alt-tab to next client; press 1 again, cast Pyroblast and alt-tab to next client; and so forth and so on).
There isn’t going to be any clarification because, as always, Blizzard isn’t in the habit of helping those who break the rules find ways to skirt those rules.
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To be clear, though, multiboxing still isn’t in and of itself against the rules. It’s just a “we’re not going to help you do it, and you can’t use any outside tools to do it” situation.
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That’s not what Teufelgott meant. They meant that any clarification from Blizzard (this is/isn’t allowed, this is how we investigate, this is how we detect, etc) is the kind of information bot companies want to know, so they can make their botting software undetectable.
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This is not clear by what they said. Is using alt-tab a software means of streamlining multi-boxing? What if each game is on a separate monitor? This is exactly what OP is questioning.
They often do offer clarity, just not always and not in all situations. OP’s question is reasonable and basically means is multiboxing allowed at all, because you could interpret basically any action required to multibox as “streamlining” it. If blizzard ultimately does not clarify, it does not mean that asking is unreasonable.
“Blues” does not refer just to customer support but any blizzard employee including devs and other representatives who sometimes share this sort of information. I was generally hoping that OP was offered an answer, not necessarily by moderators of this forum or in this thread.
Sharing whether or not playing two accounts on two monitors is allowed would help botters how exactly? This isn’t something where hiding the rules would help botters circumvent some sort of gray area. Either you can play on two monitors or you can’t.
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