That’s what I am hoping to solve. Just need the Devs to start reading this thread. I think it has been a pretty cordial and insightful conversation so far on both sides of the issue.
Would you like to list a few. Maybe we can think of ideas/ways to solve those negative effects.
I’m going to school for game design, and most of the reasons at least in wow, people multibox are to do dungeons and pvp before they implemented the changes in legion to gathering and to hyper spawns. It then shifted to people using it to make gold then it flowing into youtube. People that had never boxed before were bragging about getting the bruto and doing a whole bunch of stuff in BFA. I understand why they made the changes they did. Other games (eso for example) do not allow it at all while FFXIV allows it in the same capacity wow does, but gathering materials and everything in that game having multiple accounts gives no advantage.
The only reason you would multibox in FFXIV is to simply do dungeons by yourself or be like the Song birds, who is a multiboxer that is his own 1 man band that plays music with different instruments within the game. I think there is somekind of pvp but that game is mostly rping and pve content from what I can see.
Issue comes in is wow has many flaws cause of it’s age along with the attitude of the player base changing too. All the ones that used to make up parts of the player base in a positive way are gone and you got a lot of the try hards running the show to an extent. I’m sure there are nice ones out there, but I don’t pug dungeons anymore because it’s too stressful and toxic, same with raids. Reason I box is so I can help bot bust when I find bots out in the world and because I have to have different things going on cause of how my brain works. Even playing on the ps4, I have FFXIV loaded or wow loaded or minecraft on the PC and I swap back and forth. I used to play a solo account for the longest time, and once I found out that I can have two or 3 characters for whatever I wanted (mainly RP, RP is fun) I could do that. Or I can’t get a group for a low level dungeon I just make my own group.
I understand where you’re at and understand why you would be against it. There were some aspects that were heavily abused because of the mindset of some that had the capability to box and abused it.
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As a former Lead Community Manager I always look first and foremost at the effect it has on the community before I even start to look at the actual technical/mechanical consequences of game play.
Multi-boxing has been a big cause for the erosion of gaming communities regardless of the IP. There have been studies on this effect. The average multi-boxer doesn’t see it because it is outside their perception. Once a communal oriented game begins to foster solo play, most especially in the mmo genre, it inevitably snowballs. The more solo players in the game means less and less community building.
The average multi-boxer doesn’t see this, and does not agree with it. But it doesn’t make it any less true. When a sub-based, competitive game like WoW allows multi-boxing the effect is multiplied. When analytics land in the hands of game designers who use these metrics to design content, decisions are made based on inaccurate data. The metrics are skewed by multi-boxers. You see where I’m going with this.
The biggest argument is: “Millions of players, come on Ehlissa. There’s no way a few muilti-boxers can skew those numbers!”
Wrong on both points. There are more multi-boxers than you think, and yes it takes less than you think to show up on metrics.
This causes one of two directions to be followed:
- the game is designed under the assumption that those multi-boxers are actual real players. Content is designed but is now more difficult than intended because real players are finding it more difficult to experience the content because multi-boxers are beating them to the content or there aren’t enough real users to go around to fill out groups/raids that were designed for x number of players when in reality there are y number of real players.
- content design is streamlined to satisfy multi-boxers as well as social players. But this almost always comes at the expense of more engaging social content.
Once you start to erode the community base, a game begins to decline. Precedent has shown that there is a threshold that once passed there is no returning. Many mmo’s have fallen into maintenance mode because of failure to foster the community. Others, which WoW appears to be currently succeeding at, have tried the approach of transformiing into less of a mmo and focused on solo play. SWToR for example saved itself when it failed to deliver end game social content by turning itself into more of a solo rpg.
I’ll stop here for fear of tl/dr (tl’dr is a symptom of a failed community). A later post I may go into more reasons why I feel as I do regarding multi-boxing.
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My friend, you’re hitting the nail on the head with that hammer as I see it. I don’t understand how in 17 years Blizzard hasn’t learned how to avoid exactly what you said. A properly focused design team should have had this game running so efficiently by now despite coding limitation of a 20+ year old core. It’s an excuse for lazy awareness and attention to detail on their part to blame it entirely on the code. It’s the design 100%, not the code that has gotten us where we are today in WoW.
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When you say you were a former community manager, was it for this game or was it for a different entity entirely if you don’t mind me asking? What you said is pretty fascinating and it’s interesting to see the perspective how you said it. I’ve been in both fronts where I was a solo player and went to playing multiple. Someone starting off multiple and going to solo may see things differently too, which I never really thought of it like that either.
I’m glad you went into detail like you did, and kept it civil in the conversation. =) It’s interesting to see different perspectives, especially from someone that was a community manager.
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It wouldn’t be proper for me to give out that information here. I’m sorry. Reasons 
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Understandable =) all good! Never hurts to ask 
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Multibox apologists stay on ignored.
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Very interesting points. As you can tell by my original post the TL;DR doesn’t really apply to me lol. I am going to reply to you again when I have time to address each of the points that you made. But I appreciate the perspective.
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TIDR (Too incomprehensible, didn’t read).
Reinventing the wheel is see. Thanks for stopping by.
Who cares? You are wrong about your made up facts. In fact, let me know if you ever come up with any thing that has some substance against multiboxing.
Now one thing I DO want to add before this thread gets too long: I’m not saying the transformation from a social mmorpg to a more solo, lobby based play style is good or bad. Blizzard needs to do what they need to do to keep the franchise marketable (read: profitable).
The mmo demograph is not what it was 10 years ago. It just is what it is. This is why you don’t see the term mmorpg used anymore. I enjoy community driven mmorpg’s. It’s what drew me to mmo’s in 1999 when EQ released. The lack of community is what drives me away from mmo’s. I seem to be an aging, growing minority in the marketplace.
So I’m speaking clearly in the context of mmorpg’s as opposed to the contemporary, commercially successful mmo’s of today.
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Not reading all that until you make paragraphs.
Its one paragraph. Problem sovled.
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Multi-tap nodes were created to make things easier for single players, so the solution is to take it away from them? 
No, the solution is to discourage multiboxing. (Which is what they have been doing)
Alright, you win
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The community is what drew me to the game too, along with knowing the unknown and discovering things and when more and more of the community started becoming a massive cesspool and I was alienated from a guild because “I was too annoying.” I just made my own little set of characters and started playing in my own way, which it’s different but fun and helps me relax. I do miss though some of the communities that were found in game though and not just joining a discord. Discord is nice and all that, but in a way it takes away from the community aspect of some games.
I hope you are joking about that. If you are saying it was to make things easier I’m not sure how that makes sense. All they did was increase the number of mats required to make certain items in game when they increased the node tap.