Wouldnt have to change policy if they designed the game right or nipped it a very long time ago before it got to the point of nazjatar levels. Now a person if they farm herbs they alt tab, windowed mode (either clicking between or hover to activate a window) or alt escape. The RMT bots and farmers have no competition and do they care about rules or server economy? No they care about thier wallets. Players arent farming they are selling carries to get gold or buying wow tokens. I may see one other person out herb farming and thatâs it. I solo farm herbs not box herb farm too cause i am herb picking to get sleepy to go to bed which is the only reason to farm for me.
Prices of stuff on my server are abysmally sad if it wasnât for someone doing vendor flips, some stuff would still be stupid low like leather and bones. You can farm for 3 hours of widowbloom and maybe make a little⌠maybe.
Thats creating a null comparison. Anyone can cause an issue in a game if they want to; streamers, people on discord, a guild looking to do something odd, some people getting together in game chat, anyone. In those instances it is a bunch of individuals who are doing whatever it is they want to do. In the case of a single person running a mass of characters using software outside the game, that is an artificial situation. Take away that access to the software and that individual can only cause minimal problems.
Zone disruption is never ok if it breaks the gameâs rules. The problem with massive mboxing disruption is that it didnât at that time break the rules. Now it does.
So they shouldnât fix it ever because they didnât fix it sooner? Nah. Its a good change, no matter what hindsight-laden negative spin you want to put on it.
Tool assisted anything was allowed in WoW prior to the implementation of XInput because there was no real way to differentiate between valid tools for accessibility (required), multiboxing (not required but legal), and botting (not legal and hard to stop because the botters constantly change tools).
With the implementation of XInput third party tools are no longer required for accessibility support. So all other arguments aside, that means that Blizz no longer needs to allow third party interaction with the client. Which they donât.
Tool assisted multiboxing did actually get dangerously close to automation. Iâve read the documentation on two of the most popular tools and they both crossed very firmly into automation in my opinion. However the point is moot, any third party tool sending inputs to a WoW client is not allowed.
Sorry I was asleep. Twisting my words isnât gonna work. Reason being is they absolutely SHOULD have fixed their systems earlier because then they wouldnât have to fix it later.
I am not being negative, itâs absolutely true. Do you keep putting Lucus oil additive in your car if you got a bad lifter to just mute the noise until eventually it causes you massive headache / engine failure or do you either have it fixed by someone or you fix it yourself early on when the problem is first noticed? Sure it isnât as easy but you know the lead up of what could happen if it isnât fixed properly.
Itâs not about being negative or positive itâs about the fact that botting issues ran into people not being able to herb so they put in multitap nodes. This lead to people using multiple accounts to get said nodes then it lead to youtube gold makers blowing a once small community into something crazy. Hyperspawns were also added in which lead to 2x4 farms becoming a thing, which players (solo or multi) and bots abused in zones. RMT Venezuelan gold farmers are still in the LFG with 2x4 farms still going, but no one notices.
Personal nodes introduced instead of multitap nodes would have made the multiboxing issue not even an issue to start with. Additionally removing hyper spawns and or reducing drop rates of items for npcs deemed quest npcs would have fixed hyper spawns. Did you see or hear of multiboxers before legion and bfa? You may have seen one or maybe two if that. You may have encountered one in pvp but it was rare.
Edit: the software itself could have been nipped early on too because people used to hardware box before the software became implemented too however it did itâs thing for an extended amount of time. The thing is the software itself wasnât bad it was whoever it was in the hands of, and it was generally used by people doing maybe dungeons, pvp etc. then it got into the hands of people abusing it to gold farm.
Iâd like to add a few ideas to what you posted as well. I agree that the changes you mentioned would have helped. In addition to that the ability to convert gold into tokens and then cash those in for Blizzard balance where individuals could then essentially exploit gold farming to obtain countless retail accounts added to the issues. This should just be limited to all other services other than purchase of the game. Also It would make more sense if you wanted to have access to legacy versions of the game that you need to have a retail subscription for each. While this might not be a perfect solution it would eliminate most of the so called 10+ multiboxers by creating a gateway to entry. I hope that made sense. Just waking up. LOL
All good. My brain is in neutral right now even though Iâve been up for a little bit. It does but they added the wow token in as a way to prevent RMT and bots but issue came in is it just made it worse. It started off with just game time then they added bnet balance into the mix.
Adding the bnet balance was a mistake. It absolutely lead to things being abused more so and actually made rise to the boosting communities. Boosting was always around, but not in the capacity it is now. Go to google search analytics and type in âwow boostâ and the search term goes way up around the time the wow token was introduced. For a solid little bit before hand, it spiked up which Iâm sure is the announcement from blizzard of the wow token.
It lead to a lot of things and people donât realize it until it started to spill over into other aspects that were before unnoticed. Proper game design wouldnât make it feel necessary to even want to buy gold, run multiple accounts, advertise for boosts for gold or anything of the sort just to have gold in order to raid.
They made several mistakes over the years and they are now having to go back and fix a lot of stuff at the expense of players and their enjoyment.
So Gms I ask about it and they say that multiboxing isnât against the terms of service (which includes griefing and cheating in their tos) say itâs ok as long as everything is manually done are wrong?
Words of a gm response on the topic in a ticket (would post a link with a picture but I canât do that yet due to trust level in the forums):
If all the moves are performed by you manually, then there is no issue with that. If you have other characters on follow, but during the fight you manually switch between the windows and manually cast spells - that is ok.
So thatâs what I do. I manually navigate my windows without software or hardware mirroring. Alt tab, alt escape, or hover to activate a window or clicking the icons on my taskbar. Besides, Iâm too broke to even attempt hardware mirroring. Kvm syncro switches and monitors hdmi splitters not to mention the power bill and other mumbo jumbo. Forget that. I donât have a programable keyboard / mouse with macros either because even with just 1 account, thatâs a no no.
I want to preface this to ensure any readers that I havenât come to this decision lightly, and I really do try to see if from any other viewpoint, but I just canât get there.
No matter how you slice it, simulcast is cheating.