I’ve never found out why, beyond that it’s income. I’ve never seen it used for anything other than script farming.
The amount of “income” people claim that it brings in as negligible and hyperbolic at best. Multiboxing has been around for decades. As long as it’s one keypress one action Blizzard is okay with it, It’s not a supported play style though, so If Blizzard does something to the game and it impacts a multiboxer, it unfortunate but they learn to adapt.
That’s because you are focused on one tree instead of looking at the forest.
I know quite of few multiboxers. Some like the challenge of playing multiple characters at once, so they like to run dungeons/raids by themselves, some use it to farm of course, some notorious ones like to pvp. You’ll never see the good ones as they usually farming instances for gold and loot.
The honest ones are VERY quite careful about what macros and keycloning software, as they quite a bit invested in their setup. Calling it “scripting” is is showing that some people is misinformed and use it as a dog whistle. Multiboxers RARELY use scripts, if at all to play.
In the end, it’s Blizzard’s game and they decide what’s allowable.
8 Likes
Multi-boxing is permitted but not supported, as long as they follow the same rules as everybody else. One keypress=one action. Multi-boxing has been around since before WoW existed.
Yes, most multi-boxers now use key-cloning software to do it, but it is not necessary. It can be done with multiple computers (where the term multi-boxing came from,) with either wired keyboard and mouse and a splitter to all boxes, or wireless keyboard and mouse with identical dongles in each of the boxes. If done as hardware, it would be almost undetectable.
6 Likes
It’s not about income, as the amount of people that legitimately multibox are not a big percentage of the player base.
To put it this way, there is no way for Blizzard to differentiate between someone multiboxing, or a family or group of friends running from the same location, so running multiple accounts from the same location would not trigger any action, hence multiboxing is allowed.
That usually is done by per bot programs, to be clear a true multiboxer will not use anything beyond things that will broadcast a single action to multiple instances of the client.
9 Likes
I did the math on this a while back. It is not the motivating factor players seem to think it is.
8 Likes
I despise multiboxers as much as the next guy but the reality I think is that it’s nigh impossible for blizz to be able to distinguish between multiboxers, family accounts playing together etc. It’s the same reason why the new MMO AoC will be allowing multiboxing as well. That being said, they’re taking countermeasures (something blizz has thus far refused to do) to try to mitigate them e.g. making nodes be “instanced” for everyone so a node being hit with a team of 8 boxers doesn’t immediately despawn a mining node for everyone else etc.
Edit: And as per usual, any attempt to defend oneself re multiboxing results in said multiboxer abusing the flagging system and mass flagging your post using their army of alt accounts (see my flagged post below that just happened to get hidden merely 2min after I posted it…hmmmmmm). SMH. 
1 Like
Lets try to refrain from speculation, and stick to facts.
Is multiboxing allowed in WoW? Yes it is. Is it supported? No it is not.
The rest is simply speculation
7 Likes
And you fail to understand it as much as the next person who says this. There’s really nothing wrong with multiboxing, it’s just a psychological phenomenon that makes people think there is, because they have the fact that it’s one person in their head and view it as the one person being able to do things eight times (for example) at once, and ignoring the practical in-game aspect of it. Eight characters using a node is eight characters using a node, how many humans are behind the characters isn’t relevant.
7 Likes
Pretty sure it wouldn’t be that difficult for Blizzard to spot the differences, to be honest. Movement timelines on multiboxed toons will have exact (or extremely close) data compared to individually controlled toons.
Not like there’s plenty of other nodes to go around. Never had a problem farming ore, herbs or anything else even with active multi-boxers nearby.
Oh please get over yourself… There is no damn conspiracy…
17 Likes
In reality, it doesn’t. If it did, Blizzard would have put a stop to it long, long ago. The only people that are whining about it are those that cannot price gouge on the AH , or those heroes that think they can solo 5+ players at once.
Pushing conspiracy theories never do well here.
7 Likes
Yes, they do ban waves of 70,000+ accounts, but leave the multiboxers alone because of income. Makes total sense.
Fun fact, way back in the day we often did that without any multicasting, just two, sometimes three computers, each with their own keyboard and mouse. In fact, two boxing was a term before multi boxing was.
8 Likes
Our Devs have made a number of changes over the years that have been made to deal with abuses that do impact multiboxers. Not having a perfect solution is not “refusing” to do something. Additionally, it is a bit easier to plan for something while it is still in development than try to come up with a counter with the tools you already have in place. Truthfully, I’m not sure what you are referring to, I don’t recall anything you described about “instanced” nodes being mentioned in that way within the AMA, perhaps I missed it or it is from a different source. O.o
Actually, it is far more common an occurrence that multiple members of community agree that a post may be considered trolling than someone abusing the reporting system by using alts to report a post. Something I should point out, the person making the accusation has zero evidence of since they cannot see who reported them. There are a lot of folks who lurk and use their voice that way instead of getting into circular arguments.
Of course, there are certainly instances where someone may abuse the reporting option by using multiple characters to do so. Our moderation team actually keeps an eye out for that kind of thing and may take action on those found to be abusing the report option. It would be extremely foolish to do it in the CS forum, where we tend to be very actively looking at what posts are reported and by who.
No, I believe this was well answered 10 or so hours ago, so I’m going to lock this one up. Thanks, all.
17 Likes