They stated it was to crack down on automation. Their detection systems for classic were way out of date and bots in classic just… oh boy. They needed more solid systems for detection and I think that was touched on in the announcements.
There was the node change + the wow token change. It was both introduced around the same time, so it made the formula for a storm that could be abused. I think 2x4 or 4x4 farming was also a major thing around that time too.
2x4 farming and 10 tap nodes were two of the worst ideas. Single tap personal nodes that can only be seen by the player would have fixed the issue or… OR simply crack down on RMT and bots to begin with. They added that system in because bots were so bad in pandaria and WOD you couldn’t farm unless you were inside your garrison.
If the wow token was just game time a person would see some boxers but not as many I don’t think. It would have been a few but now that bnet credit was added in, which could get 3 and 6 month discount bundles, plus game expansions and other stuff, it opened a can of worms. The thing now is most of the slack off from the lack of boxers is now being filled up by botters and gold farmers.
The economy side of it is on some servers stuff is super cheap. Like on zul’jin go sell flasks. You make 2 gold off each one because there are people here that don’t like the new system of the AH and protest it by dunking prices of stuff. There are some too that keep it low so they can then dunk the herbs and ore lower so they nab it all up and resell it.
I honestly rarely see boxxers but that’s not conclusive of anything, they used to just sit at some spot and farm and those spots were usually places I wasn’t going anyways.
I know that they are out there though, I have seen this
So I know you guys aren’t making anything up but I’ve always seen multiboxxers farming and I haven’t noticed them more.
Let’s whip up some definitions, if you disagree say so
Bot: A computer program doing stuff
MultiboxxING: Multiple wow accounts running at the same time
MultiboxxER: A player playing multiple wow accounts at the same time.
With those definitions a person can be multiboxxing bots and not be a multiboxxer
And that wasn’t the case for me. I realize we all have different experiences in the game. That’s why I responded earlier that the few ruined it for the many. I think most of the players who multiboxed just did it for good clean fun. I know some just did raw gold farming and mostly stuck to themselves. They weren’t the problem.
Legion opened it up to more players. I know you know already, but the tools to multibox also got substantially better. I remember looking into it back in wrath and it was a bit of a pain to get setup and you really didn’t have much reward. Then legion hit and people could actually pay for their accounts with what they were doing. Even in legion it wasn’t terrible. It was annoying for sure, but midway through BFA and it was getting to be an everyday issue.
As I said just a moment ago though, I think it’s safe to say there is more to this then most of us know. They had been doing this for years, so I would wager to say something changed and it was becoming detrimental to the health of the game. In the end, Blizzard is a business. All of the rules are in places to insure the business is successful. That’s it. Every decision. So, all we can do is speculate why. What was it that they were losing money over?
In the end, I can’t definitively say anything without seeing the numbers on the backend. Blizzard controls the spawn rate of everything and could easily manipulate the market. Regardless, seeing mulitboxers tap nodes for hours on end was having some effect.
As far as your bot example, that is bad as well. I report those people all the time. I have rarely gotten a response back for reporting, but I have. I wish it would happen quicker. It surprises me they don’t even have one active admin to just keep the game clean of those bots. I know they say they like to find the tool first rather then simply ban single players. Still seems pretty slow if you ask me.
Multiboxer doesn’t hit “run” and the accounts autonomously do stuff while they sleep or go read a book or whatever they do while the bots run.
Someone has to press buttons and you push 1 button and it would go to the other accounts. Now you have to push 1, go to the other screen, push 1, go to the next screen, push 1. You can’t have more than one command go off, even now on a SOLO account. That’s keyboard macros / mice macros. Like if you hit 1 and you scripted that to be 1 2 3 4 5 on your mouse that is considered automation. You can make a bot out of a keyboard macro set on repeat.
A bot is a bot which is completely autonomous from human input at all. Sure they could have multiple open on a machine but there was on human input and that was “start” or “run” or whatever the software dictated. Also bots sell gold in order to make a profit. They don’t bot for fun. A multiboxer… eh even a solo account could farm gold and sell it and a multiboxer could too depends on the mindset of the person behind the keyboard and their intentions. If they wanted to multibox rp? Ok they rped, dungeons for the challenge? Ok. Arenas? Ok.
I get those bots stuck on cushions with my multiple accounts. It’s hilarious. I get all my druids out there and set down like 20 some pillows and they all get stuck LOL
Yep, there’s a theory out there about that. Prior to SL someone mentioned M raiders looking to multibox to have a class in each covenant to “get around” Blizzard’s meaningful choice and the swap penalty
Blizz said they are going to be informing players more when action is taken due to their report
Reporters will receive a message when their report results in action being taken. Offenders will receive a message of any current and future penalties if their behavior is not corrected.
So hopefully people feel like their reports matter more in the future.
Ding plz, you don’t have to drop a fire totem broski, I multibox everyday, I know there’s a difference but if you agree that at the basest level multiboxxing is simply having more than 1 account open at a time then a person with a bot farm is multiboxxing but they aren’t a multiboxxer because they aren’t playing they are a botter.
And I get that they don’t need the software multiboxxers need because they aren’t playing in the first place lol.
Right and I understand that. Issue comes in when someone is referring to bots as multiboxers the local village idiot takes that as someone refering to multiboxers. I could have easily misunderstood what you originally ment too with what you posted with how it was posted too. It’s the forums / internet sometimes stuff gets mixed up when trying to communicate it back and forth.
lol it’s like “wait is this… that? No that is this… but wait this is there… is there this? Who’s on first… what’s on second… but wait no who is what when that…?”
It’s really amazing it’s taken this long. I used to report bots all the time and then just gave up. Same with people cheating in RBGs and Arena. It felt like nothing was ever done so I just gave up.
It’s so unfortunate because the core of this community is gold. There are so many good players who would love to see this place cleaned up and would gladly offer their time. I know I would.
Oh I think Blizz is going to see a wave of reports when 9.1.5 hits It does feel good when I’m playing Overwatch and someone says something colorful and I report them and login to see this the next day
You make some good points, and correct ones imo. Used to be mostly people dual boxing back in the day. Didn’t really start becoming a problem until they started forming mass box teams. You know the 10, and even 20 character teams. Doubt most people cared, or even paid attention to the casual dual, or 3 character multiboxers in the game world. Those big multibox teams can be mistaken for bot hackers also. Anyhow just wanted to drop a final post in here for the night. Been one of the more pleasant multiboxing threads I have seen lol. They usually end up with a bunch of infantile name calling lol.
heh. I think the reason these threads are better is most of the multibox trolls who defended it are gone (banned) or simply don’t post any longer. They would constantly say “it’s not against the rules so your opinion doesn’t matter.” Well, now they don’t have that so there isn’t much they can defend.
And yea, it used to be rare and it was mostly fine. I remember being in AV back in wrath and having a multiboxer on our team. It was so rare and it was a lot of silly fun. Sure, dying to them was annoying but it didn’t happen often enough to really warrant anything. If it had stayed rare, I think the vast majority of us would have been fine with it existing.
I know quite a bit of em just up and quit wow and are playing FFXIV or playing like diablo. Lot of it went “poof” in the game and sure a few got banned but quite a few are still around. I still play my 4 to 5 on a regular basis. I like to be silly with em but idk I may hang up all my wow stuff for a while. I think some started hardware boxing games that don’t allow software boxing but they allow hardware boxing too. Just moved onto different games with different rules to stay in the rules. The rules in wow are not as straight forward. Sure, no mirroring / software, and there are some that are doing classic and parts of retail all manually, but some felt it was so vague that they were like “nope” and left.
The game has just felt… idk in the last while since the whole lawsuit thing. Game attitude, people have changed, the game isn’t the same game I played when I was younger. Most of my friends quit / moved onto other stuff.
Yea. Game is different. The tone being set is off and there isn’t a healthy line of communication with the community and the developers. There should be blue posts in here all the time. Even if they can’t give us an answer, just saying “we hear you” would be enough. That’s it.
And they really killed a lot of what made the community strong. Servers don’t have identities anymore. Now it’s just a big bungled mess. So many servers had unique ‘flavors’ and you could really target a community that fit you. This goes beyond just rpg or pvp realms but just how the realm felt. A small pop pvp realm was very different then a large pop pvp realm. Now, none of that matters. I see people from every server but my own half the time. All the friends I made in wrath I met because we ran into each other all the time. I miss that. =/
That’s also why multiboxers were more rare to. You weren’t running into them because a single server might have only had a handful. Sharding made zones far more compact. I mean, there is good and bad to it. Some people like being on low realms and not running into people. Some don’t. Now you don’t have much of a choice.
