Both in Classic and Retail, I have seen multiboxing or botting groups that have significantly affected game play for others, and direct actions that allow farming large amounts of gold. Not all multiboxers do this (I two box characters of different classes - I really dont get any advantage in terms of questing or farming gold). Blizzard really had to take action over using key command broadcasting software, as some are so easy to use now that multiboxing has increased substantially. It is still possible to multibox using a hardware key command broadcaster, but they are expensive.
Besides ruining drastic effects on the economy its likely hard for them to tell a Multiboxer running multiple accounts and a bot running multiple accounts farming endless fast spawning mobs.
This makes it so they do not have to guess the difference, they can take the same action.
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Canât comment on the covenant angle, but if I were to wager, Iâd say they figured out that a vast majority of the multiboxers that use that software, donât actually pay real money to Blizzard to play the game and just buy tokens with gold they farm up (in instances or through selling mats on the AH). Couple that with more and more complaints of multiboxers inconveniencing other gamers and cornering the market on the AH, and they probably felt it was time to make it more difficult to do, without outright banning it.
My thoughts anyway.
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Probably because they are finally trying to do something about the glut of gold in the game.
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yeah right, i guess thatâs why we still have pathfinder. 
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The mirroring software crossed the line of being too automated in blizzards eyes.
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Blizzard has always recognized that multiboxing is bad for the game. The problem is enforcement. They didnât have a way to reliably detect multiboxing and prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt (which they need to do to issue bans).
Now theyâve developed a method for detecting multiboxing via software that they are very confident in. There is no solution for hardware-based multiboxing, which is why itâs still âpermittedâ.
To be clear here: just because you can farm 5 times the gold other people can doesnât matter much when your sub is also 5 times the cost. The cost of MBing is very linear in that regard, but the fact is that after you cover your monthly sub cost everything else is just profits which is where it becomes ludicrous. Whereas one person farming for 10k an hour for a 100k sub still makes 10k an hour after he covers the month a 5 MBer makes 50k an hour after he spends 10 hours farming the 500k he needs.
The bottom line is that the reason why MBing was being used in WoW has warped drastically over the years. Initially it was largely just BG PvP gimmick that not many people could do given technology requirements of that day and the unavoidable sub fee made it very unappealing. The game has changed so much with the introduction of WoW tokens and shared mobs/nodes in addition to technology advancements that allow anyone to get into it in this day and age and the downside isnât all that massive.
The reason theyâre killing the input software side of things seems to largely be targeting the people using it to farm in one way or another. Iâm not 100% privy on everything MB related, but there were ways they were solo farming mobs to get great returns due to not being grouped and then of course with herbing they just got 5-8 times the amount.
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We have reported this many times; the very same software that broadcasts key presses also allows for easy scripts to be run. Hence, it becomes very tempting for mboxers to start automation of multiple bots.
*edit Not all Multiboxers are botters.
As Blizzard themselves have stated, it is the botters that have ruined it for the mboxing gatherers. Other mboxing activities are usually multi-tasked manually, so they will not be affected.
Blizzard still loves the extra mboxed accounts.
I personally believe the only reason it is changing is because it has affected the price of gold and lets face it Blizzards main goal is for stock and share price to increase, they really donât care about players, they care if they can optimize revenue and thatâs the bottom line.
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Money is always the motivator for a corporation like Blizzard. So the reason for the software stance chance is solely due to possibly somehow it was cutting into their profits off the players.
- profits from the token system
- having to fund GMs and customer support agents to deal with the headaches of their detection system (warden) from false flagging too many multiboxers who are caught by accident in their net when they do bot banwaves, so itâs just easier to just ban their software too than having to waste resources to have enough GMs to deal with all the appeals and engineers/coders to constantly tweak that system to keep up with 3rd party software updates/changes, so itâs just overall cheaper to just blanket ban it all.
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more than likely money, but then part me argues that how can they ban botters if mb are step below botting. probably didnât want people making that argument.
The software evolved beyond just sending macros, and were being used by illicit companies to bot and farm. Unfortunately a few bad apples spoiled it for the rest of us.
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It was money.
The software made it too easy for âJoe Non-Expertâ to multibox, and play WoW for free via tokens, cutting down on Blizzâs revenues.
Probably gold selling.
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Extreme Tinfoil Hat Hypothisis.
Thereâs a rogue Activision / finance black project that directs a lot of the Chinese gold farmers you see in the 100âs out side of some instances. They do this to buy and use tokens to artificially inflate and stabilize the in game gold /token exchange rate. This is good because if it drops too low then less people are shelling out $20 at the store for a tokens and more people can easily pay for subscriptions.
Blizzard is getting sick of it and implemented a policy change to combat this.
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I assume its because the amount of RMT from poorer countries like Venezuela
I also would be happy if they just removed the /follow command.
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I am not defending multi-boxing, but they were the goofs that made the token a thing.
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Thatâs a pretty dumb rumor mill. Since nothing stops them from just having their alts set on /follow while the main character does all the work.