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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only answers available on this forum are from the CS reps that moderate this forum. If you are looking for a Community Manager (the ones that communicate with and for the Devs), you will want to post in General.
That’s already covered in the support article and the latest announcement.
“Multiboxing, or playing multiple World of Warcraft accounts at once, is not a violation of our End User License Agreement.”
Any further explanation beyond what’s already been posted/linked is simply not at all likely. If Blizzard wanted to be more specific in their wording, then they would have chosen to do so.
Just so we’re on the same page - OP asking this question is completely reasonable. Any customer who pays a company a monthly fee should expect to be able to ask questions and should expect a response from the company. We pay $180/year+box price for the game, and it’s not unreasonable for someone from Blizzard (not a fellow player) to answer him, whether that’s the ticket, forum etc.
At the very least, a blue could post “Open a ticket for a response”, close the topic and be done with it. On the other hand, it’s not at all unreasoanble to ask a company what their interpretation of certain wording is. Heck, even Facebook defines their interpretation of “use” in their ToS just for the clarity.
Let me finish by saying I abhor multiboxing and am absolutely glad this is being knocked down even harder, but OP deserves a response either way, whether it’s “open a ticket” or a more detailed response.
You forgot the part where they said they’re within their rights to change their rules with or without notice and folks agree to it. They ain’t own any answer if Blizzard doesn’t want to.
We wouldn’t provide a recommendation like that since that isn’t something that our Support staff would be able to provide.
A lot of helpful commentary and information has already been posted, but it seems we are going in a circle on some matters. I’ll provide a similar response to a thread I addressed earlier and close this one.
As I mentioned previously, there isn’t any further clarification that Customer Support can provide outside of what is in the statement made in the General Discussion post and the available Support Article.
Any further clarification would need to come from Community and our Development team.
