So, I found out about the new policy Tuesday evening around 4 or 5 pm and immediately stopped playing my characters. Went to cancel my second account and get a refund for my recently purchased 6 month subscription but was declined twice. Tried on my main account and was declined again. The GM who handled my request also had the balls to offer to possibly credit me the remaining time “when” I reopen my account in the future as long as I don’t log in between now and March when the subscription actually expires.
Today, about 6 hours ago, I get an email from Blizzard warning me active broadcasting software had been detected in use on my machine and they may have removed items etc. from my characters. Obviously, this was surprise to me since I hadn’t played since late Tuesday afternoon.
So, somehow, they can’t detect bots for weeks and months at a time but within a few hours of maintenance being completed they were able to detect my use of the software, give me an infraction, and possibly remove items from my character.
Conveniently, based on posts in this very thread, that’s also the same amount of time it took the botter’s to come up with a way to circumvent this policy change. There’s a nice balance there in me being infracted for using my 48 hunter to run my 29 Warrior through Gnomeregan while the people who are supposedly the target of this change have already shrugged it off and continued on their way.
But it’s okay because I do have that possible promise of a gift card as long as I agree to not play their game. Oh, and they knew this wasn’t the response I was hoping for and they just feel so gosh darned bad about doing it.
Please make sure you’re adding hardware broadcasting to this policy too. You can just use a keyboard that broadcasts all inputs to every window. Otherwise you’re back to square one with people just swapping to that.
It should have been this way since the beginning. I have no idea what they were thinking letting this cancer fester for over a decade as if it wouldn’t get worse.
To cover all aspects you should include a notification in the blizzard launcher news feed because not everyone reads the forums, people like to jump into game ASAP and not deal with the forum politics. I would suggest pinning this on the forums as well
Man I would love, LOVE, to see someone provide any form of substantial evidence that multiboxing is the problem you’re all suffering from so horribly. I promise you, not only is this anecdotal idea trite, it’s so widely incorrect and unsubstantiated that touting it as gospel just makes it look ridiculous.
If you can’t differentiate between what bots are doing, and what boxers are doing, then I’d suggest you start there.
edit: And by substantial I mean more than your 1 off “there’s a guy boxing 20 accounts that just ran by me” argument. Let’s see the numbers of X boxers inflating the economy X amount.
I’m simply saying it should never have been allowed in the first place.
WoW was designed, specifically, to play one character at a time. Again I ask, what if everyone were allowed to play all their toons at once? What kind of an MMO would that be? Allowing this in some circumstances and not others - all dependent on real money, is a scummy business practice. It goes against the very design, intent and spirit of the game.
Boxers may or may not be affecting my game or my server’s economy. In the end that doesn’t matter much. The core design of the game does.
RMT is against TOS, and should be corrected. I wouldn’t conflate RMT problems with in-game economic problems. RMT also doesn’t affect you. It may affect a very small subset of people, and I am in no way defending it. But again, that doesn’t really affect you, the economy, or much of anything.
The core game design is to play with other characters. Multiboxing is playing with multiple characters. It doesn’t break the core design of the game at all, it’s literally exactly how the design was intended. If you care about the core game design as an originalist…then how about we focus in on the bot software that’s literally teleporting, fly hacking, etc. The things that are quite literally, BREAKING, the design of the game
No one is arguing this. No one is saying Activision is anything but lazy and inept at maintaining their game.
Nope. The core game design is to group with and play with other people. I’m not playing with other characters because I also control a PET. That’s just me. The same when you control other characters. That’s just YOU.
Come on, Lyssen. I agree with much of what you say but this is just out there.
I think you’re mixing design, and intent together. The intention was to play with real people, working together, and have a memorable experience. The design is actually having multiple characters to complete the content. That’s not semantics. Do I think you’re wrong? No, as a game designer myself I love that intention. If someone wants to do it by themselves with a multibox crew, honestly who cares.
They don’t need to own the gold selling websites. They are a gold selling website… aka the WoW Token. Currently, the WoW Token is more expensive on a $ per 1k basis, so people who would have been buying gold via WoW Token are instead buying it cheaper from gold farmers. Ban multi-boxing -> less profitable gold farming -> Gold Sellers have to raise prices to keep farming/selling worth it -> Price goes above token price -> Blizz sells more tokens to gold buyers.
It’s quite simple math since every item gathered grows the economy by the value of the item.
Assume: 1 million players and each gather 1 item at 1 gold every 1 minute. That’s 1 million gold added to the game every minute. Now let’s assume the server’s 1 million player economy is worth 500k per person, so 500 billion. So every minute, the economy inflates at .0002%. Now, let’s assume 100k of the the 1 million players multiboxers 8 toons to max out the gathering node. The effective number of players on the server is now 1.7 million players (900k players + 100k multiboxer + 100k*7 multibox alts). Now, the economy grows at 1.7 million gold every minute, so that’s .00034%, which is 70% faster.
Let’s look at this from a different way. Now, consider that the game is designed to be mostly balance in terms of number of people who consume versus the number of people who produce, netting a goal inflation of 0 g. So let’s assume the balance is for every 10 players, 7 net consume (raiders/pushers), and 3 net produces (farmers), and that balance = 0% inflation. If 1/3 of your producers multibox with 4 alts, the balance becomes 7 net consumers to 7 net producers, which means more is going into the economy than going out.
Of course, overfarming causes the price of the item to drop, so then inflation is based on the vendor price, not the market price. Even then, 1 player with 7 multiboxed alts adds 700% more value into the economy per gathering than a solo player.
I mean how do you know this is not the intention? My understanding is this change was specifically made due to how it effected changes in shadowlands. The very open way they word the announcement almost makes it seem like they are letting you know you can continue to multibox and they don’t care you just cant use the software that creates issues for them in shadowlands.
I approve and I wish blizzard still cares about economies in their games. But they mostly stopped with TBC and the daily gold inflation. It’s also when they fired all their economists.
That’s a player theory. It may or may not be true but nothing blizzard said supports that theory. This is what Blizzard said.
We’ve examined the use of third-party input broadcasting software, which allows a single keystroke or action to be automatically mirrored to multiple game clients, and we’ve seen an increasingly negative impact to the game as this software is used to support botting and automated gameplay.
What do you think? Based of the language of the announcement above seems to suggest to me at least they are PRO multi-box and ANTI mirror keystroke software. They even goout of their way to mention as you quoted not liking botting or automated game-play and went out of there way to use the language to suggest its not something the care about. “(often used for multi-boxing).” is a lot different.
TLDR this reads as " you cant use this software to multibox because we are banning this software but we dont care if you mutilbox using a different technology.