They have. They just want as many people playing that game as they can get multiboxing, or not lol. Plenty of videos on the interwebz showing people multiboxing EQ using either hardware, or software. My guess is hardware, because one video shows a dude nerd raging, because he couldn’t get multiple instances of that game to run on one pc 
Surely some people have done that but I suspect they are in the minority amongst multiboxers. The vast majority of multiboxers play for reasons that have nothing to do with pay to win. I no longer have any active subscriptions but I gladly paid for 5 subs for years and I never did it to ruin the economy, farm gold, ruin world PVP, dominate the AH or pay to win.
In fact I feel that your advice to just tokens to enable purchasing our way to the gear and level we want is the very thing that made it possible for multiboxing to “ruin” the game. I’ll explain more of why I think that is later, but first I want to say my piece on why not all multiboxers are the degenerate reprobates everyone makes us out to be.
The fact of the matter is that for me, the game was an entirely different level of fun when running dungeons solo. Those who have never tried it will never understand what I’m talking about. There are a variety of interesting and fun challenges that arise in WoW when you’re multiboxing a 5 man team in a dungeon by yourself. These things happen in a way that is very different from playing a single client.
Group composition and talent selection frequently will deviate from whatever the FOTM is so you have to figure that stuff out yourself. Part of the fun is finding the right combination of classes, talents and macro setups to make a particular type of content actually doable. At times this can be very difficult to pull off and in that challenge lies a rewarding game play style that caused no disruption to the rest of the player base. The problem is that you rarely saw people like me playing, unless you crossed paths with one of us in town. Even when you would see a player like that, you never really knew exactly what we did with our time because we never bothered you.
As I see it multiboxers broke down into a handful of specific player groups. I’ll list them below, from most disruptive to least disruptive. I’m not even addressing bots in these groups but multiboxing software did make it easier for bots to masquerade as a once legitimate type of player. Just know that software multiboxing is not botting, which is why multiboxing was allowed in all forms for 15 years.
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The gold farmers - These are the players that optimized software multiboxing and macros to nearly automate item farming for gold. They normally played in the 10-30+ client range. As paying for that many subs requires a ton of expendable income, they would have never existed until Hyperspawns and the WoW token were both in game. Certainly some players in this category were associated with sites that sell gear or gold. Others probably were just addicted to the random dopamine hit you get when sweet gear drops. This was a marginally better use of time than going to a casino, I suppose.
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The resource farmers - These players would run 5 to 10 clients at once and are the people you hate for hoovering up all of the herbalism and mining nodes. Contrary to uninformed comments, there are no resource farmers using more than 10 clients as nodes do not allow more than 10 taps. Generally the WoW token made this class of multiboxer far more prolific than it would have been otherwise. Not every resource farmer would be part of the first group listed, but certainly many were.
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The PVPer that gets off on griefing - These players would PVP with anywhere from 2 clients to as many as they could afford to run. They love the unfair advantage of strength in numbers and have no reservations against attacking a lone player with as many characters as they had active. This group is not to be confused with multiboxers who like to PVP but actually care about at least trying to play fair (yes those existed). Anything above 5 clients likely involves overlap with the previously listed groups (#1 and #2) to make it easier to keep that many subscriptions active.
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The solo multiboxer - This group of players most often involves 2 to 5 clients with lower client counts use for making leveling a little easier with a pocket healer or additional profession resource. Once we get up to 5 clients these are the player who typically want to level up with dungeons and eventually push mythic keys. Some would PVP but if they do not qualify for group #3 they’d only world PVP when the odds were even or the other side struck first. (Edit: this is the group I fell into when I multiboxed retail, I never had a hivemind mount so I never did PVP)
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** The AH junkie** - These folks play the game normally in one window and run the AH in another. Currently this is the only sanctioned type of multiboxing as far as I know. (Edit, does anyone care about this type of multiboxer? I seriously hope not but when you say mean things about multiboxers, just know you’re talking about these people too)
To be clear, the largest problems with multiboxing in WoW came about because of changes to the game that let people of dubious intentions exercise their lesser personality traits in game.
Groups 1 through 3 would not be possible to the level they ended up getting to if the WoW token did not exist. It is simply too expensive for most people to pay for more than 5 clients a month. Surely some people might do that but ultimately there were way more people playing like this than there were people with the expendable income to do it with real money.
Hyperspawns definitely made it possible for group #1 to be the scourge that it ended up as. This feature does not exist because of multiboxers, they just took advantage of it. I imagine somewhere on the internet there is some mention of why it was added to the game but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the fact no one wants to pay money to sit in a video game waiting for some quest mob to show up. Whatever the initial reason was, the bottom line is that our own impatience teamed up with Blizzard’s desire to keep us moving toward end game to create this game mechanic. The game did not always have this “feature”.
I’m bringing those last two items up because the reason multiboxing got so out of control is because Blizzard wanted a way to get more than $19/mo out of your wallet. The very thing you’re saying we should do instead of multiboxing is the exact reason multiboxing got so bad.
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Yep, playing in one window and alt tabbing is the way I do it now. Input Broadcasting was never like a huge feature for me, it was there so I used it, it’s not there now so I just have one character with 4 others leashed to him mooching
This right here, shows just how out of touch you are with everyone else.
Blizzard isn’t going to carefully weed whack the bad ones.
Most of them don’t bother, it’s there for the eco. A good chunk of them do RMT’s and boosting services.
Are you saying that 5 players don’t need 5x the amount of resources to stay competitive?
Not saying that they should or would just merely pointing out that it would be possible.
Can you substantiate this? RMT and Boosting is still going on.
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Not when they can literally bend the AH and eco to their will with the amount of resources they gain compared to a normal player.
Then it’d still have a massive effect on wpvp, bgs, server crashing (dk spam was real when it was possible)
There’s still multiboxers roaming the land free as a bird. A good chunk of if not the majority do this. Outside of that yes it’s called M+, raids, and pvp boosting.
So you disagree that 1 player picking up 1 herb vs 5 players picking up 5 herbs is not a 1 to 1 exchange. I can’t help you with the math there if you disagree with this. Has the wow economy corrected itself now that mass farming is gone? Most will tell you it hasn’t. The reason for this is there are still bots not running around solo doing the same thing. My argument is that each character should have resources to do something in game and if there is an abundance of resources then I would chalk that up to a game design flaw rather than singling out a group of players most of which were not trying to flood the economy.
Nobody is saying there couldn’t be a limit. In fact I even suggested that. Turn off warmode or make changes to it.
I can’t really say anything to his other that it is just incorrect. Is it possible sure… Do you realize that many of the top Multiboxers make it to +9 give or take depending on the dungeon. With everything going their way. I can’t speak to the pvp boosting part as i never participated but for you to say that we had an advantage in pvp boosting or raid boosting is a bit far fetch. Again I cant tell you about PVP because I had not experience there but definitely not raid boosting. I would venture to say that is being done by over geared solo players due to the shear mechanics of the raid and mythic content. I would love to see an example. I have welcomed most responses in this thread but I’m struggling with your last point.
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Blizzard isn’t going to take the time or resources to manage something or do changes to their game when they can shut it down and save their time.
The 1 player picking herbs is still only 1 person. When there’s 1 person multiboxing 5-20 accounts, or botting, means they can’t even make a decent profit off of it let alone compete. If you can’t do the math there then oh well.
RMT’s and boosting happens in other aspects of the game without the multiboxing is what I was getting at. I was saying that RMT’s happen with the freaking Multiboxers.
You might be the first or second person I wasn’t able to find common ground with. I appreciate your feedback on the topics though.
I agree, ban all multiboxers and botters.
LOL nice. You agree what who what when where why?
With banning multiboxers.
I remember when this video was released. If I am remembering correctly it was right around the time the first software input broadcasting changes went live. Even if input broadcasting was being used here, there was a bot behind it.
The evidence for this is obvious if you know what to look for and understand how the /follow command works in game. When a multiboxer is playing, characters move around by using that /follow command. Generally each game client is referred to as a slot and then a number. For instance: slot 1, slot 2, slot 3, … slot N. In a 5 client setup there are 5 slots. The multiboxing software has an addon that automatically creates macros that change who is “the leader” when the player takes control of a different client.
By default, followers trail the leader in a straight line. ISBoxer uses the plain game follow command in it’s macros. With no third party addon macros involved, slot 2 through slot 5 will be clumped on top of each other, occupying the exact same space.
While it is possible to use a separate WoW addon to make characters follow someone other than the leader, this still looks different than this video. In fact it looks like a train. Basically slot 2 follows slot 1, slot 3 follows 2, 4 follows 3 and 5 follows 4. There would be even spacing between each character and when they stop they would be spaced according to normal /follow distance.
In that image loop you can see multiple groups of boomkins moving in different directions, many are so close to other toons that they can’t be following. There are at least 3 different groups of boomkins operating in different areas of the map. Some run in a circle, some run back and forth across a non-linear arc. It just is not possible to do this if you’re only using input broadcasting software. The movement clearly violates the expected behavior if this was a case of input broadcasting ONLY.
This is a botter, plain and simple.
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They seem to be capable of carefully weeding out players that exploit game mechanics while not punishing those who did not. Just look back to the Scarlet Monastery exploit that happened in WoW classic in Sept of 2019. Don’t kid yourself, if they wanted to do it they could. “Weed whack” is not the only approach available either. At
Earlier in the year I wrote a very well thought out post advocating for a multiboxing only server. I had a series of suggestions that would result in a server that bots and multiboxers could be “banished” to and never transfer off of. I specifically included bots because I know some multiboxers who would love to take the gloves off and PVP the bots while they were on the server. Least
Despite my constructive and well though out idea, there was the typical wave of mouth breathing forum trolls just spewing the same anti-multiboxing tirades. I suspect that because my post was less than 20 words, they didn’t bother to actually read it. The people who did read it and were clearly not also multiboxers tended to support it if they weren’t blind with rage against the idea of multiboxing in some over simplified form. Some
Here you can read it for yourself. Oh wait, no you can’t. The same forum scabs that furiously vomit on every multiboxing post reported it so many times the system automatically delisted it and now it was removed entirely. Private
Every time I post in threads like this one, no matter how good or bad, I realize it is such a waste of my time. Too many people in threads like this one are only here because they know multiboxing is a topic where they can post pretty much whatever they want and get away with it. Servers
Let’s be honest, too many of the multiboxing haters just thrive on outrage. They either live for the outrage or they get off on the illusion of occupying a moral high ground. Most cannot spare the energy or mental stress to read an argument and consider the merits of the thread’s perspective (if any). They only have energy to read the word “multiboxing” and then vomit out the same tired diatribes against a bad guy they feel safe lashing out at. Allow
It really is quite sad. So is the fact that I bothered typing this out. Why do I even bother? Oh yeah, because I had a lot of fun playing my way and I never was never doing things that everyone associates with multiboxers ruining the game. Multiboxing
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Your thoughts and ideas are welcome here. And the conversations here I feel have been productive. If you want to repost the now “private” post feel free to do so.
Yeah, that is on me, I did not mean to go off you or anything like that. I’m sure you know this is a well worn topic and there is just so much misinformation out there. I appreciate you sharing that animated image because it gave us an opportunity to point out the specific ways this is not just multiboxing. You can consider my energetic response as being targeted at the general forum audience and not specifically at you.
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I like your qualification of how botters can also multibox. To them I say: ruin and misfortune to all Mutibotboxers. Long live the true multiboxers (just not in this game).
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TL:DR: multiboxer is sad that he can’t get away with cheating anymore.
playing a vulpera warlock is cheating too. how do you sleep at night?