Fun for who? Is it fun for the people getting 1 shot? Is it fun for the people trying to use an inflated auction house?
I’m confused, are you concerned with the fun and good of the game, or the fun of the 1% who run around ruining the game for the other 99%?
Sigh. Once again, you’re addressing a problem by not actually addressing the problem.
Before I get piled on with hate, let me first say that I agree with making things harder for multiboxers, if not impossible in most scenarios. And that’s coming from someone who occasionally multiboxes. But…
Multiboxing has been allowed by Blizzard since the beginning of the game. Full stop. For most of WoW’s history, the extent of their impact on other players in the game is occasionally you’d head into a BG and see that all DK team. Which was trivial to troll and keep sending them back to the graveyard. You’d get a good laugh out of it and continue on with your day.
The landscape changed, however, in Legion: when resource nodes were able to be collected by multiple players. Multiboxing was suddenly no longer a niche, but something a much larger number of players had interested in doing because they could reasonably profit from it. The people who just wanted to do solo 5 mans or level multiple characters simultaneously kept doing their thing.
Suddenly the markets were flooded with resources and it was near impossible for solo players to earn reasonable profit from gathering. The problem was compounded in late Legion and throughout all of BFA (especially in 8.2) by requiring stupid amounts of raw resources to craft anything in the game because there was too much supply, so they increased the demand. Unfortunately, without tackling the core problem (too much supply), they made the problem worse by artificially inflating demand. No longer could solo players even hope to “keep up.”
And that’s the key: This doesn’t even address the core problem because, as you specifically mentioned, people are allowed to have and play multiple accounts simultaneously. Using /follow on multiple accounts is still allowed and Alt-Tabbing between windows is still allowed. For resource multiboxers, it adds a few extra seconds to each node. An impact, sure, but DOESN’T ADDRESS THE PROBLEM.
So TL;DR:
That being said: I’m glad Blizzard is trying to do something to fix a huge problem in the game. They’re just fixing the wrong thing and not really going to change much in the end.
Precisely what Knee said. Their detector picks up the third party program, not the multiple accounts. In the article, it states specifically that people running multi-accounts will not be targeted as long as they’ve manually input all the controls/keystrokes for each account. Third party = bad, third finger = good.
c) alt+tab to switch between acocunts
Your salt fuels me.
Yeah gonna guess that fly hacks and teleport hacks and all the crap that goes on with those types of automation isn’t going to get changed in the least.
Oh my goodness that name. And I thought mine was scary. 
Whales are sad they are losing their little P2W scheme. Nothing to see here.
Unpopular opinion but here goes…
Blizz makes no mention of doing this because multiboxing is harmful to the economy or otherwise is harmful to the game. They mention doing this because key replication software is often used to facilitate botting and automated gaming.
They’re effectively saying they can’t tell the difference server side between someone steering 8 druids around picking flowers and bots literally teleporting to nodes and picking flowers so rather than continue to earn 8x monthly subs from some players they’ll instead shut it down entirely.
It’s nonsense to say multiboxing impacts the game more today than it did 15 years ago. If anything its LESS impactful if you look at the legit concerns people raise in classic - resource nodes are not shared, /follow is not disabled in PVP combat, etc. On retail WoW its not a race to beat someone else to a node and it’s not possible for multiboxers to instagib people in BGs - it’s a simple matter of Blizz not being able to tell the difference and deciding to err on the side of overinclusiveness rather than improve their detection or continue to listen to all the crying.
If anything everyone is going to wonder why suddenly consumables are so expensive again when you don’t have multiboxers putting tons of resources into the economy anymore in a time where the game sure doesn’t have the population it did 10 years ago. Everyone will have to spend more money in a world where they’ve spent the last expansion rolling back all of the ways to earn easy money. You can argue its all about making the economy less passive (which makes sense to a degree) but I don’t think people who complain about multiboxers farming herbs fully understand what it will mean for them to all go away.
Sorry, i’d love to continue but I just ran out of my prescription Copium.
The reason: Druids farming imps in Val’sharah for 500k Gold an hour on 14 phases of Chromie time with WM on/off
Probably not, that should probably be addressed, but hey, it’s Blizzard, let’s be happy they got one thing right. Half expected them to give exclusive titles to MXers at this rate.
It’s about time you guys decided to do something about this crap. Only took 16 years, but hey it’s something.
I’m curious what their subs will look like in a year from now. Obviously many of them are on 6-month subs or wow tokens so it’ll be a while before the numbers come down for those players.
They can’t/won’t ban you just for having keycloning software installed. There are legitimate uses and a number of games that permit multi-boxing. All they can do is attempt to detect if you are using keycloning software to broadcast simultaneously to multiple WoW clients.
There are a number of ways around it, like using mechanical setups as was done in the early days of multi-boxing. Mostly it will cut back on it from people like me that were just doing 3-5 accounts, and who most people may have never even notices, and are too lazy to set up a mechanical multi-boxing, or another method of multi-boxing.
P.S. And they haven’t said they are banning multi-boxing, just key cloning software when used to control multiple WoW clients.
What started playing in my head after I read the news:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZanZRU14o_Y
Maybe that’ll clear out some of the bots who hide under the pretense of just multiboxing. (Sure, you’re multiboxing for 3 days straight doing the exact same patterns on repeat while some of your characters do separate, equally scripted actions.)
Bingo. people assuming that they’re trying to get rid of the legit multi-boxers when it’s probably just a “throw out the baby with the bathwater” situation with getting rid of bots who do use that kind of software.
I’ve got a sudden craving for popcorn.
Ya it’s really made professions feel worth it knowing I can get an epic gem and sell it for like 15 gold on my server
I’m not concerned, what about you? You alright mate?