It seems to me that the coordinating of teams for this purpose appears to be something that Blizzard doesn’t like. They’ve apparently taken steps to curb it. But it’s not a violation, so they won’t suspend players for it. (There’d really be no way they could definitely prove malfeasance anyway). Just because Blizz may not like the way some players have been “exploiting” the queue system, doesn’t necessarily mean they will make it a violation of the rules. Similarly, I know that some of the developers do not like players Multiboxing. And they’ve taken steps that can make Multiboxing more difficult. But that doesn’t mean they are going so far as to make it a violation.
That said, I would certainly support you continuing to post in the PvP forums to advocate for them making this queueing practice a violation. It may not sway the developers, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.
Literally nothing in the post made by Kaivax over a week ago (and linked in this very thread by Ruffle 3 days ago) indicates that Blizzard ‘doesn’t like’ groups of players queuing together. The undesirable behavior they seem to want to curb is non-participation. To that end, they’re making changes to allow groups of up to five players to queue together.
I’ve never seen any dev anywhere say that. I’d be curious to know where you did, though. The only steps they’ve taken that make multiboxing more difficult is to disable the /follow command when flagged for PvP or targetting a PvP-flagged character.
Also, to add on to this, when that was implemented into the game Blizzard made very sure to say that it was NOT in response to multi-boxing. They came out and said it was in direct response to “follow Bots” in order to break that kind of behavior. At the time that it was implemented most multi-boxers did not rely on /follow to work, while the action did break some crude forms of multi-boxing it was very easily overcome by anyone that wanted to multi-box.
If anything the developers have made it quite clear that they consider multi-boxing to be a part of the game and a valid alternative form of game play, that has been around since well before WoW was even in development. They have never made a statement that they do not like it, nor have they made any changes to the game to make it more difficult.
Hmm… not the way I read it. Seems like they wanted to allow a few friends to be able to play together and made that easier, but added ways to deter 20 player groups from playing together.
Correct. And while the intent was to curb a different behavior in battlegrounds, they did make clear that if it were to restrict multiboxing, that’d be good by them too. Multiboxing is tolerated, but not supported. And I only brought it out as an illustrative example. The devs don’t have to like every playstyle that their diverse playerbase can come up with. If it’s something they want to curb they can take steps to do that. If they really need to eliminate it, they will take further steps. And if they deem a playstyle should warrant account action, they’ll go to that extreme.
I hope the issues that the OP is experiencing will improve with these changes and that he (and all players) enjoy a better overall gaming experience.
I feel you are attempting to apply a tone to our narrative when the feelings about multiboxing seem to primarily be yours.
The intent behind the /follow change, as previously noted, was to deal with the various /follow bots that were working to get around the /afk system in Battlegrounds. That it impacted multi-boxers was a natural consequence of the change, it was unfortunate but it wasn’t celebrated.
To be clear, Multi-boxing is not supported but neither is it prohibited… which is a far cry from “Tolerated”, which seems to imply that we don’t like it but grudgingly put up with it. The fact is, we use the language we do very intentionally to keep personal views out of the narrative. It is a play style some folks enjoy, we simply don’t directly support it.
I think this subject was otherwise covered so I’m going to lock this one up. Thanks, all!
OP has been responded to, no need to argue nuances.