Policy Update for Input Broadcasting Software

Plot twist; Actiblizz owns the gold selling websites.

Is there anything better than seeing all of these cheating rats come out of their hole to lie and beg for mercy after over a year of making the game worse for everybody else? “B-but I only used multiboxing to cheat a little bit! I never abused this pay2win garbage I swear!!!”

Bye, cheaters! Bye! Bye bye!

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Game integrity is something experienced by players of the game. What those making money from the game think has no bearing on it.

That’s just wrong. It’s like saying company integrity is based on consumers and CEO’s have no say in the integrity of their company.

I am saying it is based on the perception of the players, not those running the company.

Yes but the people making money from the game that manage it absolutely have an effect and an opinion that influences it.

There was an exploit in vanilla where if you re-equiped and un-equiped an item fast enough it gave you the stats from it without taking them away when removed so you could have basically infinite stats.

Technically that was a design flaw, not a hack. But for integrity it had to be fixed by the people making money from the game and not the consumers.

:facepalm:
Integrity is judged by those perceiving it. I am in no way saying that blizzard is not innocent of turning a blind eye to it or allowing that perceived integrity from being damaged.

Technically that’s a bug. Listen I’d be extremely surprised to see real multiboxers causing any sort of problems in Classic on any large influential scale. I’d be extremely surprised to see any multiboxers in retail causing a big enough issue to warrant the policy change. Real people multiboxing with ISBoxer, takes a lot of setup, patience, and work. It’s actually NOT that simple, and playing 5+ characters at the same time is NOT that easy. The majority of you won’t be doing it, or paying for it, or any of that.

Let’s be real, this change has nothing to do with multiboxers, and everything to do with bots.

Seeing the conversation derail back to multiboxing, and not botting is literally so tilting. This is completely anecdotal, no way are there that many people doing it. Most of the people responding here probably wouldn’t even be able to figure out how to set it up. Call what it is, a key dispatching ban to aid in bot removal. Done.

I played retail a few months ago cause my buddies harassed me for weeks to play with them and leveling through a few zones. I saw hundreds of multi boxers, and a decent amount of botters.

The thing is with something like retail, you don’t see them very often cause of layering and sharding based on quest progress. I could get a quest end up in an area with 20 multiboxer, spamming aoe non stop. Then they would disappear when I finished my quest cause the shard we were on were different.

My guess is it wasn’t as bad in classic but I also can’t tell in classic how many of the UD strat mages are mutli boxxing people actually at the keyboard that sell gold for money or bots.

The misconception that all gold sellers are bots is real. Some of them you can actually sit and talk to. You’d find a decent amount of them at least on grobbulus are from indonesia. They do get banned too for gold selling and exploiting but alot of them aren’t straight botting, they are either account sharing or multiboxing then selling the proceeds for real money as a job.

I should say most of the retail once I reported I got maybe 50% back e-mails that action had been taken against accounts. I’m guessing those were the ones that literally looked like they had 10+ characters looking like they used Glider from back in vanilla.

Yup that sounds like a RMT problem, and not a multiboxing problem, but oh well. It is what it is. Almost 400 posts on this, it’s not going to be reverted.

So we are now down to:
30 run dungeon limit
No key dispatching

Let’s see how many more circling the drain fixes they can add before we land on one that actually hits a bot or gold seller.

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Mutli boxing does feed botting and RMT though. It was never going to be POOF all its’ gone its a process. They’re basically the only MMO that said it was ok for as long as they did cause they wanted to be inclusive. Now its far less so.

Honestrly they could nuke macros, and scripting for most addons and it would also go a long way to combating botting.

A lot of other MMO’s now don’t allow addons at all that interface with their game client.

Don’t care.

It can take out both. The Big PVP servers have at least a dozen, if not more boxers on each side. Both are not healthy for the game.

It is when you have software doing most of the work for you; hotwiring spells and abilities together so when you cast one spell every other person does the same. Borderline cheating. It was never intended. Multiboxing in 2003 meant alt tabbing or having two computers that you were managing. No where near “click one button and 20 other mages cast the same ability”

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I dont know about you guys, but this is one of the most shocking things Ive seen Blizzard announce. Not like in a positive/negative type of way. But just about the last thing in the world I ever expected Blizzard to do.

(I like it obviously, its just never in a million years would I think NOW they would do it. I can only imagine how much better this would’ve been had it been done so long ago)

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Yeah I was super surprised they did it too. It was kind of crazy.

The only thing that would really top it in surprise factor for me would be if they said shadowlands was going to be the last expansion for retail and classic plus was coming instead.

I could see it becoming a problem in TBC’s arena. Maybe Bliz is getting out ahead of things.

Nah, MB’s never did well in arena. Because like people have been saying, individually controlled characters will beat multi boxxed characters.

The closest I recall to MBer doing even okay in arena was multi boxxing a few characters with a pocket healer being controlled by someone else. And even that didn’t end up in a very impressive ranking.

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Warnings have begun

Once again Blizzard we meet.

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions as to what the difference between multiboxing and botting is. Multiboxing is player controlled actions and under blizzards rules only allows for combat buttons to be broadcasted eg. 1-12 etc on your action bars (1 key press 1 action per client, but any broadcasting outside of a combat attack is considered a bannable offense by most GMs which is why there is always a follow target leader). Meanwhile a botter uses pure hands free automation, that being what many would understand in the 2000s as running a sequential script eg. one button handles multiple character actions at once in an order. These days through object oriented programming and automation algorithms bots can do more than just run in a fixed circle loop like a dog on a leash.

This change literally is pointing the finger at the players who are actually playing the game to say hey, due to regulation and needing to look good socially we’re going to ban you multiboxers. (Yes, I’ve read the clarification post too but it changes nothing)

Meanwhile completely automated bot networks are throw away commodities that can and will continue to flourish. What blizzard is actually doing is pushing all the legitimate multiboxers or prospective multiboxers into just going straight to buying botting software or quitting. If botting accounts get banned, who cares; go get more. It is punishing a whole community of players rather than actually addressing the problem of botting. Nearly 1 out of 3 players I’ve spoken to recently have admitted to using botting software at some point throughout their WoW career which I find disturbing. So if most multiboxers care about following ToS why are you hurting the players who want to comply? Because most players if they want to bot will bot and you’re giving a reason for many many multibox farmers to just go bot. Which in the end just hurts everyone playing by the rules because you will never keep up with the dark hats.

If you give people the choice they will always do the wrong thing rather than the right thing so long as it is feasible. Botting software is going to see more revenue as there is no grey or legitimate solution which will in turn drive dark hats to create newer botting software that will continue to spoof your systems.

As usual punishing the real players due to your poor solution design. Rather than recreating your in game tracking systems you go for the brute force approach. This literally ostracises an entire community and YET AGAIN encourages players to smear others the moment they see one account following another with mass auto reports to get players banned.

I mean honestly, the effort going into these fixes are downright disgusting. The decisions lately reflect those of an entry level programmer. It comes across that way because the decisions are so radical and devoid of depth, which shows where this company is going wrong. It looks as if there isn’t enough time for teams going through their sprints that rash decisions or solutions are getting thrown out there and they fruition because it’s the quickest/easiest choice.

The simple player behaviour results in: Timmy see’s Tommy in the world with his second account on follow and due to ignorance will now say, oh that’s botting right? right click - report: cheating meanwhile tommy gets his main account auto banned for 3 months wondering what he did wrong.

How about the millions of dollars that are going to be lost? It’s fairly clear that P6 Classic should be a Jan release but hang on if you release P6 + Shadowlands that means you’re compensating for the expected revenue loss from multiboxing accounts. We all know there needs to be another iteration cycle for retail and a staggered release with classic but you’ve got shareholders to impress with the big 4th don’t you? Too bad your 1st quarter is going to take a huge dive and you’re not going to be able to hide that one from them.

I’m sorry but as in my last post regarding the padding fix, this is another decision that ultimately pushes away an entire community that is investing thousands of dollars into your game and doing it legitimately.

Commit to Quality - “Blizzard polish” doesn’t just refer to our gameplay experiences, but to every aspect of our jobs. We approach each task carefully and seriously. We seek honest feedback and use it to improve the quality of our work. At the end of the day, most players won’t remember whether the game was late – only whether it was great." - It hasn’t been around for a while.

Part of the problem is that thousands of players are going to reply to these threads and think this is wonderful meanwhile, they don’t even have a clue what the difference between a multiboxer and botter is, they’re the same group of people to them. You Blizzard, should be defining the difference between the player groups and supporting them not using one group to get to the other or choosing the cheapest and easiest solutions to implement on your #1 IP. Blanket canvasing is not good for anyone, have you not kept up to date with how great social politics is going at the moment?

I’ve already had reports of many many legitimate players now getting themselves ready to close all their accounts if not in the past 24 hours but in the coming weeks. Players with hundreds of play hours on these accounts which will become bricks. Of course some can’t even get a refund on their subscriptions or game purchases due to some fantastic HR GMs.

You know for some players the game is going into dungeons with a team and soloing them with 5 accounts, pushing the game to it’s limits which requires action bar broadcasting effecting nobody. But because of your instance based design, shared loot/nodes & instant respawns it encourages high volume farming. People regardless of whether they’re a single account, multi account or bot user are abusing these systems to increase their revenue. This change won’t fix the problem it will just encourage the botters to invest more into bot software design and single account users to start either use bot software or use large bot networks. This is a result of poor system design that reflects poorly on the teams developing them. In the first place none of these systems should be exploitable, fix the systems; don’t ban players for legitimately exploiting your bad system design. You did not do a proper assessment if you did not see the unintended side effects.

Multiboxers have always been at the mercy of GMs and many of a GM has been itching to find a reason to ban a multiboxer whether it be poor control, world PvP griefing or group/public chat. We are always watched over and monitored. Most multiboxers follow the rules and invest emotional effort and time into building teams and setups. Farming and dungeoneering is an important of that gameplay but all of the exploits used are the tools you have given players in-game. Whether that be smart-heals like Chain Heal or Starfall as AOE. Perhaps it’s hunters pets abilities to get loot or the loot-a-rang or AOE looting. How about the use of phasing with instant respawn areas or 10 characters being able to use one node. These are all your implementations which you should have strict controls on. Raid teams are AOE looting Songflower in Classic and solo Mages are AOE farming dungeons because of poor mob pathing. So is the invention of the world buff meta in Classic, these are all forms of exploiting the game to get the maximum potential from it and players will always do what’s most beneficial to them if it’s within ToS, regardless of whether they have 1 or 40 characters.

Multiboxers don’t feel as if they have a voice because you have refused to publicly support their gameplay method. There won’t be much if not any push back on this fix and just a whole bunch of echoes saying oh good on you blizzard. Meanwhile the end result and problem won’t change. Players will still buy gold and botters will still profit in cash. Prices for gold will go up and players will pay it because they’re lazy, and once the botting solutions are working as intended the cash gold prices will go back down again.

So here we are once again, it’s time for thousands of players to turn their backs on you blizzard because you’ve decided to cut them out. Once Classic LK has finished it’s release cycle this IP is without a doubt over. Looking at retail and the awful system bloat and infinite bandaid fixes convincing consumers that they’re getting a new product every 18 months is old. These are the signs of the impending end to this IP and a whole generation of Blizzard Loyal Consumers.

It’s clear when you replace human based HR with auto response and chat bots. That every choice this company is making is to cut the human interaction whether it be in-game tickets or with blizzard employees as seen with Paris or being able to count the total amount of classic GMs on your hands. You won’t hear us cheer for you when you do something right but you will hear us when you do something wrong and every step forward you take the players seem to take a step back.

Companies like Lavishsoft (iSBoxer) have always supported the World of Warcraft multiboxing community within the bounds of ToS and desire to continue in providing a product that is deemed acceptable by Blizzard. It is now especially during the Covid Pandemic that small companies like this need not only the support of their consumer base but of the industry leaders they attempt to work with. If you cannot allow input broadcasting as a blanket rule, please allow this company to provide a legitimate broadcasting input option for players that you can support and be managed. But multiboxing without any form of actionbar input broadcasting means multiboxing for PvE is pointless and if this extends to client management then it is well and truly a dead playstyle. Don’t punish players for your poor, lazy systems and refusal to fix them when you yourselves are utilising automation to generate our content or ban players. The so called blizzard polish doesn’t seem to exist anymore because nothing is ever fixed properly, completely overhauled, replaced or made by hand utilising well thought out plans. World of Warcraft is the last big haven for the multiboxing community, please don’t take this gameplay style customisation away from us.

World of Warcraft is a social game with a symbiotic relationship between a player and a designer. Players at every turn are getting slammed in the face for investing relationships, income and time into a world where designers are more worried about shareholders than their customers who generate that profit. The players and designers have not been in a symbiotic relationship since Vivendi was bought out. We play because we have hope that the Blizzard of old we grew up with would hopefully one day come back. That’s why Classic is so popular, it’s pure and designed by the original creators. Retail is the product of trying to flog a dead horse to increase profit without reinvesting in a new project.

Blizzard, listen and accommodate for each unique audience that you intend to effect. Don’t listen to the uninformed but those loyal fans who you’re suppose to be in sync with. The rich will be rich, the poor will be poor but those in between will be punished for all.

Please like so Blizzard may read.

edit: Asmongold has proven my point by encouraging a witch hunt on all players multiboxing. I’m disappointed in you Blizzard, you’ve turned your own playerbase against itself rather than doing the ethical thing and fixing your systems. I think it’s time to throw your relationships with any programming/engineering professional associations in the bin.

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