That would be botting, not multiboxing.
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As a 5-client multiboxer who decided against going “whole hog” 2x4 because he wasn’t interested in just making piles of fake game currency but did enjoy a leg up on some aspects of past end-game content without the hassles of PUG legacy raids full of trolls, I am saddened.
The replies thus far are full of praise, and I can understand it, but I also want to point out the fundamental misunderstandings about multi-boxing. If you are multi-boxing to pay your subs, it is actually not that advantageous. The reason is that, while an N-client multiboxer can pick herbs or dig ore much more effectively than a solo player, the benefit is not N-fold. I am well versed in keystroke and mouse position broadcasting, and I have many teams of toons that are literally clones of one another, exact in appearance, so that I know when they are perfectly aligned to interact with a node or quest giver. I would estimate my herbalism on five clients is about 4x as effective as a solo herbalist, as they are much more agile. If there’s a solo player in my route, I have to take a new route because they’re going to leap ahead of me and eventually despawn all the nodes before I can reach them. So maintaining five accounts with four times the mats production isn’t all that effective.
What IS advantageous to a multiboxer is that one only needs to buy the expensive in-game mounts, or perhaps store items, once for their whole fleet, so overall that is the true advantage of multiboxing. Also it saves time logging between toons if one wants to do crafting shuffles, but this is fairly trivial and I never got into crafting shuffles myself.
I have, now, 150 characters at level 50 and nearly all of them are ilvl 100+. What I used the software for was to run mythic 0’s during dungeon bonus events like we have now. That is no longer possible. I enjoyed knocking over Nighthold with my teams to eventually get both of Gul’Dan’s infernal mounts. That would not yet be possible, I think, but in Shadowlands anything that a solo player could do would start to work.
As I got better with the keystroke broadcasting software, I was able to take my teams into medium-difficulty end-game content such the Darkshore Heroic warfront. I would not have done this with a team on /follow, but with five mirroring my commands I would tell the raid leaders of my capabilities, mostly to soak and defeat incoming attack waves, and I did all the collecting for building the outpost that the characters would be expected to do. I did Darkshore many times this way and never had a bad result. With the ban I will not be able to run things like that, which is basically to say I will not have the pleasure of gearing up my toons to a mid-level of content. But I don’t think any players ever had gripes about me doing that.
While I didn’t NEED the broadcasting to farm legacy world bosses for rare mounts, it sure was helpful. But now I will revert to what I was doing, alt-tab and hit my /follow macros. Keep watching the minimap to make sure no toons get stuck on a brick. I put in over 7k attempts on getting Nalak’s mount, and I consider myself relatively lucky to have gotten most of the others in somewhat fewer attempts than the odds suggest. Occasionally someone would complain to see a multiboxer there, but whenever we would chat they were sore about the mats gathering advantage, not the world boss farming. And when I told them how hard I was hitting the things they would often be like “Oh, whoa. OK, that’s legit then.”
What this ban on broadcasting software will NOT do is prevent me from running my five accounts with /follow active. In fact, I multiboxed without the software, including a double gatherer team, for more than a year. It was only when a chance to roll on the Infinite Timereaver slipped through my fingers that I picked up the broadcasting software to run nearly 250 additional dungeons that week (and I did then get the mount, on Monday night before the event closed). I estimate that I will be able to pick herbs not four times as effectively as a standard player, but probably 3.5x.
There is one aspect of the broadcasting that a lot of people who are not multiboxers also may not realize, and that is forced spawning. A multiboxer with enough clients can make a stand-still farm and force various packs of mobs to respawn over and over, using that loot-a-rang until their bags fill up. Whatever nerf to the loot-a-rang didn’t do much to prevent this style of gameplay. (I was never one to do a standstill farm, although I looked at how they were done.) This was more of what the bots were actually doing, and it’s how most multibox gold farmers actually make their money. Some code to cut off instant pack respawns for legacy content would be an effective way to curb this problem.
So, great job, Blizz, you’ve made things much less interesting for honest multiboxers and you’ve sapped our ability to experience end-game content, but you have made multiboxing nothing more than a means of flooding the economy with mats and crafting shuffles. In trying to curb the behaviors that players gripe about with multiboxing, you have distilled it to precisely those behaviors and nothing else. I am normally pretty upbeat about the WoW devs’ quality of life decisions, but this one is unfortunate.
14 Likes
time to cancel multiple accounts, blizzard dont want us in the game any longer. I just hope people enjoy buying 10k flasks and 8k potions in shadowlands.
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Multiboxing IS and always WAS a problem, and you damn well know it. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.
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Botting is the problem.
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Yeah I know; I’d like to know if the AutoHotKey script I’ve used for the last 14 years playing WoW is going to get me banned. It is keystrokes only; I’ve never automated nor used any type of mouse cloning, and have never been banned.
I have the script linked in this thread I made over a year ago:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/waves-im-that-multiboxing-hunter/272593
When this finally happened, I expected a handful of realms to be flagged as multiboxing realms and all the multiboxers would have to go there, allowing the rest of the player base to avoid them.
Sounds like retail is cross, cross, cross realms now so might not work, or be too hard to limit resources moving from multiboxer realms to 1boxer realms.
I really enjoyed low key multiboxing.
./wave
You can’t mail resources that aren’t BoA across realms.
That’s almost as good news as the big story.
multiboxing with boting, farming to hell, breaking prices, farming expensive items to profit, hoarding 10 or more guild banks with 9999999999999999999 gold and thousands of of gathering items, if you multibox and not farm witha bot, or exploit for pvp, loot etc, good for you, if you drop and item from 20 gold piece to 20 silver piece to hell with you
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Buy a 2,000,000 g pet on one realm, use it, cage it on another realm, sell it. Not really BoA, but still an easy workaround.
The economy has been a joke since garrisons anyway.
“Multiboxing, or playing multiple World of Warcraft accounts at once, is not a violation of our Terms of Use. Please note, however, that use of input broadcasting software MAY result in account penalties.”
So what’s up with the “may” thing? I feel like there’s a list of things that will come that encompasses what “may” means. Like 10 tapping a node, hyper-spawning and hogging mob spawns, or annihilating someone in wpvp with 5+ accounts?
Multiboxers that don’t disrupt the game by their activities: There’s still hope 
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Blizz winning against people wanting to reflexively refund playtime is always hilarious. You paid for the product and played it. Sorry dude.
bye, pelase dont hit yourself with the door
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… which pet is this
Any of them. Doesn’t matter.
Correct if I’m wrong. Blizzard doesn’t create tokens at thin air. Someone buy with real money and sell it for gold, at least was what I read when they lauched, that blizzard want to supply a demand of players who want to buy gold
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I have a hunter team They’re super fun
I think you misunderstood what he was saying. He was saying that it’s good that they can’t refund (they can) as some people have colorful ideas of what should happen to multiboxers.
Well the token is created out of thin air but the gold isn’t 
Buying a token is just paying to move gold from one player to another and it isn’t generating new gold.