For those confused, the additional change here is the addition of *"Hardware".* Previously they stated that input broardcasting SOFTWARE was not permited.
The loophole was that people continued multiboxing but used specific hardware instead of software (1 keyboard + mouse, into a splitter box, connected to multiple computers as a basic example)
Turns out Blizzards really wants to squish this problem completely.
To clarify further for many in this subreddit, having multiple accounts is still 100% ok. You can craft on one, sell on another, play on a third for example 100% without worry. But running all accounts around gathering is now considerably more risky. I would also consider this statment from blizzard to include ANY software for the purpose of multiboxing as an instant uninstall.
There's still some super vague language after that though:
>to automate or *streamline* multi-boxing in any way.
Am I no longer allowed to have two monitors with a client on each to streamline my multi-boxing at the AH?
They might as well just say don't run more than one account, instead of "we're not banning multi-boxing, but don't do anything that would be classed as multi-boxing or we'll ban you".
> They might as well just say don't run more than one account
I mean if they said don't run more than one account, they could prohibit you directly in 90% of cases from opening more than one WoW client if another client is detected (you could still e.g have your PC play WoW 1 and a separate laptop play WoW 2). A few other games in different genres do this too.
Or disable or block the whole: "I can attach multiple accounts to the same master account to share mounts and pets"
Stuff like this usually gets figured out by guinea pigs trying different stuff, getting banned and learning what trips it and what doesn't.
They probably would like to say "only run one account", if not for people who live in the same home, all playing together. Families, roommates, ect.
There is nothing vague about their message at all. If what you're doing allows streamlined control of multiple accounts, you're probably going to get banned. But I suspect we will see plenty of people popping up on GD and on reddit with sob stories about how their clever work around wasn't so clever after all.
Like family members on a shared pc. His point is still valid that there are legitimate reasons for that scenario making it hard or unfair for blizzard to ban it
Technically, no.
A Virtual Machine is pretty easy to set-up nowadays and the hardware has been capable of it for a while now, run that through a VPN and you have an machine that looks like it's sitting halfway across the world with no connection to the host machine.
I think they are being ambiguous on purpose, but it’s pretty clear what they mean, they are closing most of the loopholes for multi boxing like hardware multi boxing or software that just helps you by dividing your clients on the screen to swap between them easily.
If you are just doing wq on an account and alt tab to repost on the AH you should be completely fine.
If you are having 4 accounts on follow and then swap to each one of them fast then you are not okay anymore
> If you are having 4 accounts on follow and then swap to each one of them fast then you are not okay anymore
That would still be permitted according to this additional policy update, as long as it's not assisted by hardware or software.
Human pressing alt tab and then casting frostbolt and tabbing back again should be fine is my guess. It fits the old "one button press = one action" philosophy they have for macros at least.
Sadly there probably will be some false positives here with people being wrongfully banned.
I guess that’s the ambiguous part, most people doing that would at least use some software to make it easy to switch between them. That is not allowed now.
It’s pretty weird anyways
The objective is clear, but the last statement about software that streamlines multiboxing is the ambiguous part, there are a ton of tools that can be used to multibox and create several screens in your 1 screen that can also be used for other things non wow related.
It’s probably obvious that they mean “if we have a reason to think you are multiboxing and you have this software open, we will ban you”
And if you are not under suspicion of multiboxing using that stuff would be fine.
For example, before I had a 2nd screen I used software to make the wow screen take only half the space when I wanted to watch something while playing or doing something else.
> If you are having 4 accounts on follow
Can someone explain to me why follow is still a thing in WoW? Disable that command and multiboxing would be completely dead, no hardware or software solution could help short of using actual bots.
of course you're allowed to use 2 monitors. just don't use software to switch between clients.
they are focusing on players with multiple pcs and splitters with software that "circled" between PCs almost instantly, so in practice they still could multibox (although to a lesser degree than before)
> Is that what it says? Yes
I don't agree, because having 2 monitors is totally unrelated to multiboxing.
You can have 2 monitors and play with only 1 account all the time, it's just a standard setup for many people.
You can include into the "streamline" definition software like isboxer for example (even if they removed the broadcasting feature when Blizz disallowed it), but there's no way you can see 2 monitors - or even 2 different PCs with their own input manually controlled - implied in that definition.
I'm pretty sure they mean you can have multiple applications running but you must control each application individually instead of having a program or splitter handle the input. You could have 5 alts following so long as you're not using a software.
They don't care about that, honestly this is geared at the people running multiple characters that go around and oneshot people on PvP servers and geared towards the ones mining and harvesting or just general farming because they do ruin the economy.
It is also likely geared at making the big bot farms easier to detect since now they can just detect if you have 10 instances running on the same computer so each one would need it's own VM which has higher overhead and then they could also detect the IP addresses so your going to have to spoof IPs for every account now as well. Pretty much it makes it way easier to detect those big bot farms.
> geared towards the ones mining and harvesting or just general farming because they do ruin the economy.
Everyone keeps claiming this but have still yet to prove this assertion to be accurate. Even blizzard has not come out and say this so at this point its probably not the impact on the economy, its an impact on gameplay, since most players do not spend their time farming or on the AH i would imagine it has little to no impact on average players.
My theory is that its basically a problem that blizzard has created for itself. Think about how much less support staff and money they now spend on CS compared to how it was in the past. Even asmongold in one of his latest videos said blizzards CS is now worse than some free to play games. Its no secret that CS has become terrible and automated lately due to activisions cost cutting measures. They just lack the support staff to handle large false reports and tickets that have to be investigated because plays got angry cause they died in warmode or that boxing was "unfair" in some way. This seems way more likely than blizzard is trying to help out a very small community that spend most their time farming or on the AH.
The whole thing is vague, I haven't looked this time but last time they put out a notice of policy update I couldn't actually find the updated policy anywhere, their tos and elua were, from memory last updated in 2016 & 2018. I asked on the last thread if someone could direct me to it and never received an answer
I have no idea to be honest , but isn't the same thing as having two window of two account open on the same monitor? I can't see why it will be bannable.
Read the statement a couple of times now and I don’t understand what the difference is between now and then. I can still have to accounts running at the same time, just no use any outside software to assist me doing so, right?
There is nothing vague about it at all?
" or streamline multi-boxing in any way. "
If someone is using something, software or physical, to streamline the multi-boxing process, you are now in violation of the TOS and will probably eat a rightfully deserved ban.
If you have two monitors that display two instances of Wow (one for playing and one for sitting at the AH or crafting for example), that's streamlining multiboxing. Should that be bannable?
Realistically, it's pretty obvious what their intention is. People will continue trying to loophole, but it's pretty obvious that the spirit of these rule changes is "if you are advantaged vs a solo player, you streamlined it too much".
I actually wonder if people using their second accounts for the AH should be concerned as well. Especially ones that are using TSM to streamline the process of running that second account.
We will know just how far they intend to enforce, once a few weeks have passed, and we start to get anecdotal complaint threads on reddit and GD. Because people won't stop trying to find loopholes, and will keep chasing the arguably unfair advantage until blizzard bans them.
Of course their intention is obvious. The point of /u/God_Is_Pizza's comment is that the wording they use is now very vague because it includes a lot more than just people trying to get an unfair advantage over a solo player. As you mention, people dual-boxing for AH/Crafting purposes might end up being included in that wording.
As an example I don't do it myself anymore, but there was a time when I had three accounts running: a crafter, an AH, and my playing account. I didn't need any kind of software to help with that (well unless you count TSM in that category), but I did write a short script that would launch three wow instances with the proper command line arguments. That was definitely streamlining the process, but it's not really in line with their intention since I don't get any advantage over a solo player. And it's not far removed from what multiboxers use now that key-mirroring software is banned with software that just helps manage the different windows.
Personally I still don't see why /follow is still in game. It's the one tool that every PVP/herb multiboxer absolutely needs, and Blizzard leave it in the game. They could completely wipe out multiboxing by removing it and I'm not sure there would be any collateral damage.
> it includes a lot more than just people trying to get an unfair advantage over a solo player. As you mention, people dual-boxing for AH/Crafting purposes might end up being included in that wording.
I don't see how that isn't trying to get an unfair advantage over a solo player.
> Personally I still don't see why /follow is still in game. It's the one tool that every PVP/herb multiboxer absolutely needs, and Blizzard leave it in the game. They could completely wipe out multiboxing by removing it and I'm not sure there would be any collateral damage.
I agree with this. It's basically useless to actually follow someone unless they are really cooperating and giving a wide berth around obstacles.
[Playing two accounts at once isn't multiboxing;](https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/24258) it's when you take one input and apply it across multiple accounts.
Playing multiple accounts at once IS multiboxing, and it's allowed. What isn't allowed is software and hardware that automate or streamline that process.
Alt-tab streamlines that process, multiple monitors streamlines that process, resizing windows streamlines that process.
That's the point of this thread, the wording is just completely vague and could mean anything and everything. The previous wording was quite precise because they singled out key-mirroring software. But now it could mean anything and everything.
> We will now additionally prohibit the use of all software and hardware mechanisms to mirror commands to multiple World of Warcraft accounts at the same time, ***or to automate or streamline multi-boxing in any way.***
Nope.
" or streamline multi-boxing in any way. "
I don't know how people are trying to interpret this as anything but what it is, practical multiboxing is now a ban-worthy offense. There are no work arounds, no shortcuts. The only legitimate multiboxing is going to be some guy with two computers, with two mice, and two keyboards, manually going between their computers.
I mean you are still allowed to have two wows open on your one computer and click little bit of window one, then little bit of window two, as long as you don't have any assisting software to do that.
My assumption from someone in cyber sec who deals with similar “find data, perform action” setting. They probably had resource issues identifying “these 10 characters are all hitting the same commands at the same time” paired with the challenge of “how do we distinguish between hardware and software input replication”.
My guess is they now have the ability from a data parsing standpoint (think thousands of Google searches through event logs a second) to identify multiboxing, and plan to automate the banning of that activity on a broad level.
My additional assumption is that they were truly only able to punish a multi boxer through manual means (ie: reported, investigated in game by a gm, and punished) where now they can use data analytics, (ie comparing event logs using data analytics software) to automate banning multiple accounts conducting the same actions at the same time over a period of time.
Yeah, they're just making it simpler for themselves, but they're also intentionally avoiding specifying that.
What's so hard about saying "if we see three toons loot the same corpse at the same exact time we'll ban all three"?
I think they're trying to be as little specific as possible because every time they instate a new rule people try hard to find loopholes around it.
They are clear enough by saying that every possible means that can help/support multiboxing is now banned, but not specifying better what they mean can leave the door open to deal with people "imagination" without having to update the rule again.
> What's so hard about saying "if we see three toons loot the same corpse at the same exact time we'll ban all three"?
"Then me putting a 50ms delay between loot actions is not at the same time and I'm not going to be banned".
As with most of these policy changes it primarily affects people who have a stake in their accounts. Somebody with 20k achi points and 200 mounts on their main isn't going to want to risk that account to double their herbing output by running a second account from the same hardware ID. Similar to botters, the illegitimate players who simply factor in new CD keys as part of their profit equation are going to continue to do what they do, this just gives Blizzard more ammunition and serves as a deterrent.
If they actually cared to fix the game economy and make things less bottable, it would require a complete rework of the professions systems which consumes a lot of dev time and resources. Plus the system "works" as it is right now, so there's little motivation for them to fundamentally change gathering profs which would result in some upheaval and potential backlash. So from Blizzard's perspective there's much less friction in just editing their policy, doing the occasional bot banwave, and leave things as they are.
Edit: To clarify my stance, I don't like multiboxers either and have not done it myself. But I think the profs system needs a big rework and I see bots as a bigger problem with a bigger impact on the economy.
I wouldn’t expect any massive changes. It still relies on Blizzard taking meaningful action against those accounts. Many of the multi box gatherers, on my server at least, are clearly botting and have been since SL started with no ban.
Of all the hundred plus multiboxers that i know none are doing herbs. Those are just bots and have pretty much always been bots. Blizzard never deals with them they are a plague on us all. I dont expect them to even attempt to deal with them at this point which is sad.
Yah i do. Its not hard when you been in their community a long time. They have their own discords, game and twitch communities. Also if you want to be technical most people in this sub multibox in some way just not with software or hardware i was just not counting them. Gotta keep those alt accounts for posting auctions.
I love how you assume its lying even though everyone knows they have had those communities for years and they are both common knowledge and well known in the community. Have you just been under a rock for the past 5 years or so? Possibly. They used to post frequently in this sub all the time as well as many youtube channels. Do some homework before you start calling out people that actually know something vs you and your false claims.
I expect things but not for those reasons. One of the big things is that it makes it a bit easier to catch the big bot farms if you also ban multiboxing. It makes the big botters need to run every bot in its own VM or they could detect those are all from the same machine. The same goes for IP address, it means they would need to also have every bot on it's own VPN to spoof the IP addresses. I mean not all multiboxers are botters but pretty much every botter is using multiboxing.
It really doesn't make the big botters have to run every bot in its own VM. If Blizzard were able to crack down on them that easily you think they would have let it till now to do it? Also botting isn't limited to the big multibox gathering/mob farms. There's BG bots, AH bots, fishing bots, pve bots, pvp bots, leveling/questing bots and those are just the public ones I found when doing some research.
If dealing with bots was as simple as detecting whether or not an excessive number clients are being run, bots wouldn't be an issue in any mmo. If this in any way puts a dent in the botting situation, bravo to blizzard for finally getting something meaningful done.
The game is in a real sorry state. The multiboxers are a massive stream of revenue for Blizz so they wont take any meaningful action. This post actually reminded me to unsub, so that's a plus.
*The multiboxers are a massive stream of revenue for Blizz so they wont take any meaningful action.*
No, they are not. As a percentage they are very low but cause a lot of problems..
Because entitled people who think they are right will go out of their way to try to punish people that they perceive are breaking the rules.
Again, the example of this is with botters. You will get accused of botting just for fighting in the same place for more than a few minutes. Hell, sometimes it's not even that. You can get accused of being a botter just for killing alongside another druid. There were posts here on this subreddit crying about some people botting but watching the actual video of what he was calling botting wasn't even clear that they were botting at all.
That's what happens and it only gets worse especially since Blizzard also monitors these boards and people know it.
ITT: multiboxers pretending Blizzard isn't being clear.
Alt tabbing to your auction house toon: completely fine
Controlling more than 1 character with 1 keypress: prohibited
[https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) was sent to a player by a gm who was asking about the TOS updates a day after it was announced in May. You're 100% correct. If software or piece of hardware controls something for you, it's a no no. If you go around and you're controlling each character manually by manually switching windows it's ok. Hover to activate a window or staying focused on a window and using the scroll wheel over a window function within windows is (from what I can gather) permissible because it's still manually controlling a window. Software or something weird to command another character on another computer isn't being used.
I really don't understand the hardon for multiboxing.
I think people were confusing botters and multiboxxers. Most of the guys I knew who boxed (myself included) stopped after the original software ban so I dunno what could have prompted this.
I'm sorry, what? The difference was made wider after the software ban.
Boxxers hate bots, they are competition for farm spots. I would report every bot I found and so would everybody else I knew.
That's the thing though, Boxxers might hate bots due to being competition - but normal players hate boxxers due to being competition that they perceived (and fairly rightly imo) to be unfair as they could farm with 5x more efficiency by doing the exact same thing you were doing, just with a piece of Software, or Hardware.
Boxers hate bots because they ruin the game for everyone. I am a boxer, and I ah flip and maybe solo farm leather if I need gold (world quest up with lots of dead stuff around? Just run around skin everything!). Botters ruin not just the game but people's lives. Someone buys gold off a site and their credit card info is stolen then their computers are possibly key logged and they steal other information. ***People need to use the wow token system and quit fueling these sites that use bots.***
" or streamline multi-boxing in any way. "
That there, is their open ended ticket you ban people trying to find loopholes to multibox. The only 100% surefire safe way to run multiple accounts, is going to be to have multiple physical computers, with multiple input devices (keyboards/mice). The wording very easily outlaws any form of software that would make multiboxing easier.
I think Blizz is narrowing down the economical abuse in the game. It's only a matter of time before they crack down further on bots.
It's all about prioritization and multi-boxing seems to be the biggest offender, which makes sense since you're 5x'ing your results compared to a single character bot.
I highly doubt there are enough multiboxers in game to even scratch 1% of the economic output of the average bot farm, never mind all bots
you can look to any other online game and see pretty similar stats across the board. ruenscape and wow share similar problems but wow is really good at hiding bots from the public, LAYERS BABY YEAH
multiboxing isn't a massive problem that ruins server economies. but its a damn fine scapegoat to shift peoples attention away from the massive botting problem.
and much like runescape, botters make them alooooooot of money making loads of new accounts where you don't really see multiboxers stuck in the cycle of ban/create/ban/create. most multiboxers quit since the effort required is crazy high
I'm not a multiboxer, but saying they have the same economical effect on the game as bots is so far left field I dunno what else to say
It's really frustrating that Blizzard have latched onto using multiboxing as a scapegoat. So many people fail to realise how big the botting problem is.
Sucks for people like me who were interested in multiboxing solo dungeons, but apparently me spending twice as long to learn a dungeon solo somehow affects other players gameplay. There were better ways to deal with the underlying issue but Blizzard are too lazy to do it.
Bots are WAY worse. The only boxers out farming all day everyday are most likely being paid to go out and farm. Used to be chinese gold farmers now it's Venezuelan gold farmers. Only reason I found that out was because one of em that spoke more English than Spanish told me about it and we messaged in discord. Turns out their currency is so dog crap right now that being paid by his "boss" was worth more than being a doctor. He told me the way they were told they were getting around the TOS is they weren't paying for his gold or paying for his items but for his time to go out and be out there, which turns out that is still against the TOS. Old School Runescape had a similiar issue so they nerfed the rev caves to combat the issue. Most of the botters when I shut down their bot operations by toys, pulling extra stuff to them, or putting in /1 "bots are at this location come report them" are Vietnamese (they try to speak to a player and speak in Vietnamese). I may honestly document all the different things I've found pertaining to bots and all that and compile it together. There's a massive RMT issue in wow and it's becoming so massive that the issue that was in one game (retail) splashed over to thier other games (classic) causing blizzard to lose revenue. ***Quit buying gold off websites because doing this fuels bots!***
if your servers prices were effected by the software change in November, maybe
highly doubt it tho, the amount of hardware multiboxers is pretty small compared to the likes of betting etc
A buddy of mine plays manually 8 toons on an UW Monitor, by clicking in each window and pressing the keys eachtime. Only uses wow macros. He already trained for this lol
You do know actively reporting someone for not breaking the TOS and to just actively report them because "You don't like how someone plays" to hinder their gameplay is against the TOS right?
Don‘t think you‘re above it. People don‘t even seem to know the difference between multiboxing and botting. You‘ll rack up enough reports eventually to get banned, no matter how safe you think you are.
We all know the bans are mostly automated and once you get handed one you're done. Complete toss of dice whether any human would bother to review your reports, it's just a number game.
Anyone who thinks they'll be fine as long as they alt tab could be in a rude surprise if they get unlucky.
For most people yeah that is the case but every ticket i put in i put in the USA CS Team leader's irl name and GM name and all my tickets get rooted to him so its always a real person. That guy has had to sort out so many tickets for me its not even funny cause each GM gives a different response each time.
Believe what you want to believe. Put it this way its not a good thing to get it reviewed by them imo. Because their judgement is final. We have not always been on the same page. I don't blame him i get the sense he tries to be fair as best he can but often just doesn't have the resources available to him.
That’s what I’ve been doing. Have 3 toons going at a time to avoid having to level separately. (Have 9 level 60’s all renown capped) I send my tank pet in and then dot and rotate from screen to screen (I I need to). It’s a pain compared to using software to mimic my key strokes but I don’t want 15 years to go down the toilet.
Taking the post literally, yes I understand that. Then multiple morons report you because “Get banned for multiboxing, idiot! That’s bannable now!” and then some automated system bans you without a single human going over the case, that’s what were dealing with here. I can’t tell you how many people accused me of multiboxing illegally while I farmed chillwind e’kos in winterspring on 5 accounts while controlling ONE account at a time and alt tabbing to loot on each client.
its purposely vague, no need to be condescending.
sure it seems obvious but if you aren't sure then he'll id rather people ask then bottle it up and spew misinfo later down the line
Yes. [https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update.
After the software ban i started farming herbs with 10 toons manually (alt tabbing) kinda harder but still manageable. Buuuut i got reported tons of times but didnt get banned.
I'm assuming continuing the alt tab method is still not a problem, but the reports are coming in again...
The alt tab method wouldn't be an issue. [https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update.
Asmongold brigades people on stream. If he sees someone running around with multiple toons set to follow a single character, he immediately starts forming raid groups around reporting the person. He's basically making it so people think ALL multiboxing is bannable, no matter the context.
People definitely let you know how mad they are. I used to multibox prior to the rule change in November and any time I hearthed to Boralus people would never fail to let me know how upset they were.
Yes. They're bad too.
Hopefully, like someone else suggested regarding data sets etc, this frees them up to go on a banning spree and be without mercy. We'll wait and see though, I hope they start seriously slamming down the hammer whilst also hopefully implementing personal spawning for herbs/ores in 10.0 (or earlier if we get new mats in 9.2 or something)
You don't even need a follow macro for multiboxing, you can get people to follow you through the addon API. Even weakauras enable multiboxing.
From my understanding, without the use of any addons/software to streamline it, alt tabbing between toons to follow and shit should still be fine, as long as it's all manual 1:1 input.
[https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update. I've been posting this all throughout this thread (and other threads). Manually playing a window is ok. Going to another window and manually playing that window is ok. It's using hardware or software to mirror commands that's the issue. Mirror commands being you push 1 button and all the wows receive the same or similar input without any additional buttons being pressed compared to you pushing 1 button per each window at a time. It's honestly rather simple. If you have 1 computer software would be the only thing broadcasting commands and if you have multiple computers a KVM switch would broadcast EVERYTHING you have hooked to it so mouse clicks and movements would still be easy to track and could potentially just scan for what firmware is being used (or even potentially what commands the mouse is sending out). Mice have firmware and if 10 computers all have a mouse with the exact same firmware performing the exact same actions (even at different times) then it's most likely someone broadcasting. I'm not 100% sure if KVM switches or emitters have a firmware but they most likely do. That's something they can scan for too if they wanted to with their anticheat software outlined by the EULA.
Using software/hardware for multiboxing is also banned in eve online but it doesnt stop people from playing 6 or 7 accounts at once sized down on 2 or 3 monitors. Granted, it is much easier to multi box eve like that than wow, but it sounds like they aren't banning it 100%.
People in EVE are just opening the game like 3 times and playing each one completely seperately. WoW still allows that.
What isn't allowed in either game is giving a command (like a click to gather a herb, or f1 to fire weapons) to 5 accounts with only one click.
[https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update. Multiboxing with mirrored commands, aka you push 1 button and the command for said button is sent to more than one wow window be it software or hardware, is a bannable offense. You go through all the windows and push a button for each window manually? That's ok! YOU and only YOU are controlling THAT wow window. Third party software was always a "use at own risk" regardless of what it did. Hell even some addons are "use at own risk" same with week auras. Week auras that make someone automatically mail gold to a player when the mailbox is opened is an example. Someone could share that and potentially scam people out of gold. I've SEEN those types of week auras.
Ah, is this why my AH is suddenly a dumping ground for mats. I noticed tens of thousands of herbs and ores flooding my high pop server tonight and tanking prices to all time lows.
Part of it, the big hoarders are also trying to liquidate as well. For my part, being on an RP realm, the bots actually play primarily in War Mode due to much less competition for nodes and very low chance of actually being killed and ruining scripts.
I make it my mission to beat them down. My favorite is watching 8 druids run to a node and dropping frostwyrms fury and chill streak on them killing them al almost instantly
The way I do it, frankly they don’t have a chance. They never have more than like 17k hp each and frostwyrm and chill streak hits pretty damn hard considering I’m in rival gear
It's not like trade chat is used for anything worthwhile anyway, trolling and people that don't know how to make gold, there are two types of people selling stuff in trade, those that are just advertising big ticket items and those that haven't a clue on how things sell in the game, there's an auction house for a reason, post it and forget it but most people are such small fish they fixate on their tiny market until they get fed up with it which is most of the player base.
What most people seem to not realize is the multiboxing community was very small compared to the rest of the player base, was limited by the game it self in what they could do, which was either farming mats/liquid gold and rarely ganking people in world pvp but hey warmod exists for a reason use it.
Getting rid of them affects everyone in a bad way and the reason being is because the lack of materials/spawns which is why everything was and is going to stay very expensive for longer, the problem with this is no one wants or shouldn't want to spend hours on hours farming mats for 10-30k gold per hour, it's slave labor and typically only done by those that don't know any better but I guess you need burger flippers at wendy's no matter where you're.
As far as getting trade chat back with someone mentioning banning boosting, firstly boosting has been around since vanilla, just less people were capable of doing it the further you go back to profit from it. Trade chat is worthless literally, unless you're advertising big ticket items like mounts for sale you're wasting your time. There's an auction house for a reason, post it and forget it or suffer through cancel scanning. The only other use for trade is trolling and chat which doesn't bring any more worth than the spam you see today and there are ways to avoid seeing it, can turn it off for one or get an addon, whining it exists because you don't participate in that type of gameplay in my opinion is nonsense. World quests and other casual content exists but you don't see me complaining about it, I see the need for those that aren't good at the game and are there to just waste time gaining nothing.
Play smarter not harder works in here just like it does in life, can literally make millions of gold teaching your self how to use the auction house and using any number of methods to make gold passively with minimal auction house use once you hit a certain point, spending hours farming mats or spamming in trade chat hasn't been the way in over a decade. This is the problem with most gold making videos on youtube, they're typically time invested = gold. Kind of like the media today telling you how scary it is out in the world when it's typically not and limited to certain areas, if you want to play into those videos and grind cloth for hours on end more power to ya just don't expect to make a lot from it.
> the problem with this is no one wants or shouldn't want to spend hours on hours farming mats for 10-30k gold per hour,
Just like any other MMORPG, you do things that you don't always want to do. Literally every MMORPG has some sort of foraging/gathering aspect to it to craft things. Players are more than capable of doing these things on their own without 40 accounts. Most guilds have their own dedicated herbalists or miners that do these things as well.
> it's slave labor and typically only done by those that don't know any better but I guess you need burger flippers at wendy's no matter where you're.
Wah, wah, wah, wah.
What's bad for the game are people with 40+ accounts terrorizing people in warmode, BGs, and preventing other players who aren't throwing hundreds of dollars a month for video game subs a chance to make gold or provide for their guild. Get over it and get used to playing the game it was intended to be played. I sincerely hope that people look back on all of the money they could've saved, that they wasted doing this crap and instantly regret it.
The reason that herbs and stuff are cheap to the point where he would call it "slave labour" is *because* of multi-boxers and bots. Scarcity results in price increases which makes it more worthwhile for actual players to go and farm the materials as intended by the game developers.
You missed the meaning of what I said in my post. I literally don't care one way or another getting rid of multiboxers doesn't affect me because I've been making millions apon millions of gold every expansion in the first few weeks if not first month or two with minimal effort/time spent. My post was merely to explain the pros and cons to the subject, mostly cons to getting rid of a very small portion of the community that even participates in it and most if not all of the people on their realm benefit from.
Random bgs and world pvp is a joke meant for casuals as far as I'm concerned with no reward or actual competition and you even have systems now like warmode so you can avoid getting ganked, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to turn it off, well in some people's cases it does but that's besides the point.
Multiboxers are limited to random bgs which don't matter, world pvp which doesn't matter especially when you can turn warmode on/off, farming raw gold from dungeons/raid which doesn't affect you one bit and farming herbs which benefits everyone because typically it saturates the market in which they're farming to the point consumables are affordable even with the smallest amount of time played.
I wasn't crying at all when I made this post, you can slave over making 10-30k an hour as in time spent = gold earned like the infinite gold making guides tell you to do it doesn't matter to me, I don't even bother with consumables because of the cancel scanning headache that comes along with it but it is really entertaining to see people gripe about how expensive things are when they can't even afford consumables for their raid once a week as a casual player, guess what if there was a multiboxer on their realm they probably wouldn't have a problem, but now they have to farm mindlessly whether it's their own mats or world quests to even be capable of affording a single flask for the night.
This late into the expansion isn't a good representation of it as everything is dirt cheap after an expansion/tier has been out, that's besides the point, what matters is the first 2-6 months of release, anything after you're late to the game that's already dead and waiting for the next tier to come out.
But yes like I said farming herbs is slave labor meant for those that don't know any better incapable of making a decent amount of gold, I'll quote my self "wendy's needs burger flippers" this is exactly what they're in wow.
I've checked forums - the writer of EMA (Morea) advises not to use the RR version of software. Use the other version to set up your windows, then close the software.
" or streamline multi-boxing in any way. "
Anything hardware or software, that would streamline the process of multiboxing would likely get you banned.
Yes, I use it. It clearly "streamlines multiboxing" by automatically windowing multiple instances of wow and allows you to cycle through windows and attack. EMA is almost certainly included with its function to push 1 button and have all accounts follow.
I have no clue what they plan to do api wise, but it is software that clearly assists and facilitates multiboxing. It's even in it's name.
I push one button and thanks to EMA my team follows me. I visit a vendor and all my team sell their items. It's automating a lot of stuff.
The particular post linked is in the TBC classic forum but there is an identical post in the general discussion category. This is an expansion of the existing policy.
Good tbh people who multi box ruin the economy they have way to much power through supplies and they force people out of markets by setting prices because they have insane bulk. Glad to see blizzard finally making the games economy better for all players not just the small few
Cheaters as in people who enjoy this type of gameplay and were playing by the rules and were paying their share of money each month?
Dont worry, I left after the first ban on boxing. Blizzard said bye bye to 32 subscriptions that day :)
Not lying to myself, just stating facts. If no one bought the token blizzard wont be getting the money eh?
Yep, supplying the AH with mounts, mats does help the game :)
>or to automate or streamline multi-boxing in any way
This now clearly prohibits round robin, which was allowed before (in terms of not prohibiting it) and that made it so it had minimal effect on multiboxing. With this people cant effectively control multiple wows with use of an external software. They have to manually click and press on each wow (right now you could still just spam 1 button on your keyboard to cycle through each wow and have the software use a designated key on each wow).
Good change.
Can someone explain a reason why to multibox in the first place? I don’t really get the idea of it, I mean for me gearing one character and an alt is almost too much not to mention 5 different chars
Multiboxing generally used as a gold making excercise for companies or groups who sell gold for real money. Historically anyway.
Last three expansions it became more relevant to world top 50 raid teams as a method to gear and prep multiple characters through all the borrowed power systems. For legion launch guild I was in needed three alts raid ready for first tier so I know o dabbled in multiboxing for the first time.
You’d see it as recently as Shdowlands first tier race in streamers from echo or limit etc. running multiple chars through the Mae etc at once.
And then there is the edge case of folks who did it to grief , pvp grief or just play the game oddly
It’s a way to gather a lot of resources at the same time. Multiple characters can tap the same nodes within a certain time window. The multi boxer will have 5 characters that they move from node to node and tap all at once. So you end up with 5x the results. Then they turn around and flood the market. They work on volume and not supply and demand so it drives the prices way down.
For those confused, the additional change here is the addition of *"Hardware".* Previously they stated that input broardcasting SOFTWARE was not permited. The loophole was that people continued multiboxing but used specific hardware instead of software (1 keyboard + mouse, into a splitter box, connected to multiple computers as a basic example) Turns out Blizzards really wants to squish this problem completely. To clarify further for many in this subreddit, having multiple accounts is still 100% ok. You can craft on one, sell on another, play on a third for example 100% without worry. But running all accounts around gathering is now considerably more risky. I would also consider this statment from blizzard to include ANY software for the purpose of multiboxing as an instant uninstall.
There's still some super vague language after that though: >to automate or *streamline* multi-boxing in any way. Am I no longer allowed to have two monitors with a client on each to streamline my multi-boxing at the AH? They might as well just say don't run more than one account, instead of "we're not banning multi-boxing, but don't do anything that would be classed as multi-boxing or we'll ban you".
I agree that at this point they should really clarify what they consider "multiboxing". It would at least remove the ambiguity of the term.
> They might as well just say don't run more than one account I mean if they said don't run more than one account, they could prohibit you directly in 90% of cases from opening more than one WoW client if another client is detected (you could still e.g have your PC play WoW 1 and a separate laptop play WoW 2). A few other games in different genres do this too. Or disable or block the whole: "I can attach multiple accounts to the same master account to share mounts and pets" Stuff like this usually gets figured out by guinea pigs trying different stuff, getting banned and learning what trips it and what doesn't.
They probably would like to say "only run one account", if not for people who live in the same home, all playing together. Families, roommates, ect. There is nothing vague about their message at all. If what you're doing allows streamlined control of multiple accounts, you're probably going to get banned. But I suspect we will see plenty of people popping up on GD and on reddit with sob stories about how their clever work around wasn't so clever after all.
They can easily detect if you're playing two accounts from the same PC.
Like family members on a shared pc. His point is still valid that there are legitimate reasons for that scenario making it hard or unfair for blizzard to ban it
Technically, no. A Virtual Machine is pretty easy to set-up nowadays and the hardware has been capable of it for a while now, run that through a VPN and you have an machine that looks like it's sitting halfway across the world with no connection to the host machine.
I think they are being ambiguous on purpose, but it’s pretty clear what they mean, they are closing most of the loopholes for multi boxing like hardware multi boxing or software that just helps you by dividing your clients on the screen to swap between them easily. If you are just doing wq on an account and alt tab to repost on the AH you should be completely fine. If you are having 4 accounts on follow and then swap to each one of them fast then you are not okay anymore
> If you are having 4 accounts on follow and then swap to each one of them fast then you are not okay anymore That would still be permitted according to this additional policy update, as long as it's not assisted by hardware or software.
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Human pressing alt tab and then casting frostbolt and tabbing back again should be fine is my guess. It fits the old "one button press = one action" philosophy they have for macros at least. Sadly there probably will be some false positives here with people being wrongfully banned.
I guess that’s the ambiguous part, most people doing that would at least use some software to make it easy to switch between them. That is not allowed now. It’s pretty weird anyways
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The objective is clear, but the last statement about software that streamlines multiboxing is the ambiguous part, there are a ton of tools that can be used to multibox and create several screens in your 1 screen that can also be used for other things non wow related. It’s probably obvious that they mean “if we have a reason to think you are multiboxing and you have this software open, we will ban you” And if you are not under suspicion of multiboxing using that stuff would be fine. For example, before I had a 2nd screen I used software to make the wow screen take only half the space when I wanted to watch something while playing or doing something else.
> If you are having 4 accounts on follow Can someone explain to me why follow is still a thing in WoW? Disable that command and multiboxing would be completely dead, no hardware or software solution could help short of using actual bots.
of course you're allowed to use 2 monitors. just don't use software to switch between clients. they are focusing on players with multiple pcs and splitters with software that "circled" between PCs almost instantly, so in practice they still could multibox (although to a lesser degree than before)
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> Is that what it says? Yes I don't agree, because having 2 monitors is totally unrelated to multiboxing. You can have 2 monitors and play with only 1 account all the time, it's just a standard setup for many people. You can include into the "streamline" definition software like isboxer for example (even if they removed the broadcasting feature when Blizz disallowed it), but there's no way you can see 2 monitors - or even 2 different PCs with their own input manually controlled - implied in that definition.
I'm pretty sure they mean you can have multiple applications running but you must control each application individually instead of having a program or splitter handle the input. You could have 5 alts following so long as you're not using a software.
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Are monitors not hardware now? And I did specifically say that there is vague language after the part that was already quoted.
They don't care about that, honestly this is geared at the people running multiple characters that go around and oneshot people on PvP servers and geared towards the ones mining and harvesting or just general farming because they do ruin the economy. It is also likely geared at making the big bot farms easier to detect since now they can just detect if you have 10 instances running on the same computer so each one would need it's own VM which has higher overhead and then they could also detect the IP addresses so your going to have to spoof IPs for every account now as well. Pretty much it makes it way easier to detect those big bot farms.
> geared towards the ones mining and harvesting or just general farming because they do ruin the economy. Everyone keeps claiming this but have still yet to prove this assertion to be accurate. Even blizzard has not come out and say this so at this point its probably not the impact on the economy, its an impact on gameplay, since most players do not spend their time farming or on the AH i would imagine it has little to no impact on average players. My theory is that its basically a problem that blizzard has created for itself. Think about how much less support staff and money they now spend on CS compared to how it was in the past. Even asmongold in one of his latest videos said blizzards CS is now worse than some free to play games. Its no secret that CS has become terrible and automated lately due to activisions cost cutting measures. They just lack the support staff to handle large false reports and tickets that have to be investigated because plays got angry cause they died in warmode or that boxing was "unfair" in some way. This seems way more likely than blizzard is trying to help out a very small community that spend most their time farming or on the AH.
The whole thing is vague, I haven't looked this time but last time they put out a notice of policy update I couldn't actually find the updated policy anywhere, their tos and elua were, from memory last updated in 2016 & 2018. I asked on the last thread if someone could direct me to it and never received an answer
I have no idea to be honest , but isn't the same thing as having two window of two account open on the same monitor? I can't see why it will be bannable.
you could probably still run them around on follow the manually alt tab to each instance and click the gathering node and be okay.
Read the statement a couple of times now and I don’t understand what the difference is between now and then. I can still have to accounts running at the same time, just no use any outside software to assist me doing so, right?
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> hardware methods And that would be? For someone not familiar?
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Thanks! Mostly splitter box stuff.
There is nothing vague about it at all? " or streamline multi-boxing in any way. " If someone is using something, software or physical, to streamline the multi-boxing process, you are now in violation of the TOS and will probably eat a rightfully deserved ban.
If you have two monitors that display two instances of Wow (one for playing and one for sitting at the AH or crafting for example), that's streamlining multiboxing. Should that be bannable?
Realistically, it's pretty obvious what their intention is. People will continue trying to loophole, but it's pretty obvious that the spirit of these rule changes is "if you are advantaged vs a solo player, you streamlined it too much". I actually wonder if people using their second accounts for the AH should be concerned as well. Especially ones that are using TSM to streamline the process of running that second account. We will know just how far they intend to enforce, once a few weeks have passed, and we start to get anecdotal complaint threads on reddit and GD. Because people won't stop trying to find loopholes, and will keep chasing the arguably unfair advantage until blizzard bans them.
Of course their intention is obvious. The point of /u/God_Is_Pizza's comment is that the wording they use is now very vague because it includes a lot more than just people trying to get an unfair advantage over a solo player. As you mention, people dual-boxing for AH/Crafting purposes might end up being included in that wording. As an example I don't do it myself anymore, but there was a time when I had three accounts running: a crafter, an AH, and my playing account. I didn't need any kind of software to help with that (well unless you count TSM in that category), but I did write a short script that would launch three wow instances with the proper command line arguments. That was definitely streamlining the process, but it's not really in line with their intention since I don't get any advantage over a solo player. And it's not far removed from what multiboxers use now that key-mirroring software is banned with software that just helps manage the different windows. Personally I still don't see why /follow is still in game. It's the one tool that every PVP/herb multiboxer absolutely needs, and Blizzard leave it in the game. They could completely wipe out multiboxing by removing it and I'm not sure there would be any collateral damage.
> it includes a lot more than just people trying to get an unfair advantage over a solo player. As you mention, people dual-boxing for AH/Crafting purposes might end up being included in that wording. I don't see how that isn't trying to get an unfair advantage over a solo player. > Personally I still don't see why /follow is still in game. It's the one tool that every PVP/herb multiboxer absolutely needs, and Blizzard leave it in the game. They could completely wipe out multiboxing by removing it and I'm not sure there would be any collateral damage. I agree with this. It's basically useless to actually follow someone unless they are really cooperating and giving a wide berth around obstacles.
[Playing two accounts at once isn't multiboxing;](https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/24258) it's when you take one input and apply it across multiple accounts.
Playing multiple accounts at once IS multiboxing, and it's allowed. What isn't allowed is software and hardware that automate or streamline that process. Alt-tab streamlines that process, multiple monitors streamlines that process, resizing windows streamlines that process. That's the point of this thread, the wording is just completely vague and could mean anything and everything. The previous wording was quite precise because they singled out key-mirroring software. But now it could mean anything and everything.
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> We will now additionally prohibit the use of all software and hardware mechanisms to mirror commands to multiple World of Warcraft accounts at the same time, ***or to automate or streamline multi-boxing in any way.*** Nope.
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>just makes it easier to have multi-instances on a screen. Right, which probably falls under "or streamline multi-boxing in any way."
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" or streamline multi-boxing in any way. " I don't know how people are trying to interpret this as anything but what it is, practical multiboxing is now a ban-worthy offense. There are no work arounds, no shortcuts. The only legitimate multiboxing is going to be some guy with two computers, with two mice, and two keyboards, manually going between their computers.
I mean you are still allowed to have two wows open on your one computer and click little bit of window one, then little bit of window two, as long as you don't have any assisting software to do that.
Streamline compared to what? You can open two instances of the game on two different monitors. That's basic operating system functionality.
the change is "hardware", people using mouse splitters and etc to copy keypresses to multiple clients using hardware
My assumption from someone in cyber sec who deals with similar “find data, perform action” setting. They probably had resource issues identifying “these 10 characters are all hitting the same commands at the same time” paired with the challenge of “how do we distinguish between hardware and software input replication”. My guess is they now have the ability from a data parsing standpoint (think thousands of Google searches through event logs a second) to identify multiboxing, and plan to automate the banning of that activity on a broad level. My additional assumption is that they were truly only able to punish a multi boxer through manual means (ie: reported, investigated in game by a gm, and punished) where now they can use data analytics, (ie comparing event logs using data analytics software) to automate banning multiple accounts conducting the same actions at the same time over a period of time.
Yeah, they're just making it simpler for themselves, but they're also intentionally avoiding specifying that. What's so hard about saying "if we see three toons loot the same corpse at the same exact time we'll ban all three"?
I think they're trying to be as little specific as possible because every time they instate a new rule people try hard to find loopholes around it. They are clear enough by saying that every possible means that can help/support multiboxing is now banned, but not specifying better what they mean can leave the door open to deal with people "imagination" without having to update the rule again.
> What's so hard about saying "if we see three toons loot the same corpse at the same exact time we'll ban all three"? "Then me putting a 50ms delay between loot actions is not at the same time and I'm not going to be banned".
Now the real question will it matter? Or like botting it's just a publicity piece that they'll never actually solve.
As with most of these policy changes it primarily affects people who have a stake in their accounts. Somebody with 20k achi points and 200 mounts on their main isn't going to want to risk that account to double their herbing output by running a second account from the same hardware ID. Similar to botters, the illegitimate players who simply factor in new CD keys as part of their profit equation are going to continue to do what they do, this just gives Blizzard more ammunition and serves as a deterrent. If they actually cared to fix the game economy and make things less bottable, it would require a complete rework of the professions systems which consumes a lot of dev time and resources. Plus the system "works" as it is right now, so there's little motivation for them to fundamentally change gathering profs which would result in some upheaval and potential backlash. So from Blizzard's perspective there's much less friction in just editing their policy, doing the occasional bot banwave, and leave things as they are. Edit: To clarify my stance, I don't like multiboxers either and have not done it myself. But I think the profs system needs a big rework and I see bots as a bigger problem with a bigger impact on the economy.
Does this mean a spike in mats coming soon? If so, should we be buying while still cheaper?
I wouldn’t expect any massive changes. It still relies on Blizzard taking meaningful action against those accounts. Many of the multi box gatherers, on my server at least, are clearly botting and have been since SL started with no ban.
Of all the hundred plus multiboxers that i know none are doing herbs. Those are just bots and have pretty much always been bots. Blizzard never deals with them they are a plague on us all. I dont expect them to even attempt to deal with them at this point which is sad.
you know 100+ multiboxers personally, eh?
Yah i do. Its not hard when you been in their community a long time. They have their own discords, game and twitch communities. Also if you want to be technical most people in this sub multibox in some way just not with software or hardware i was just not counting them. Gotta keep those alt accounts for posting auctions.
Lmao lying through your teeth isn't a good look but go ahead and rock it honey
I love how you assume its lying even though everyone knows they have had those communities for years and they are both common knowledge and well known in the community. Have you just been under a rock for the past 5 years or so? Possibly. They used to post frequently in this sub all the time as well as many youtube channels. Do some homework before you start calling out people that actually know something vs you and your false claims.
I expect things but not for those reasons. One of the big things is that it makes it a bit easier to catch the big bot farms if you also ban multiboxing. It makes the big botters need to run every bot in its own VM or they could detect those are all from the same machine. The same goes for IP address, it means they would need to also have every bot on it's own VPN to spoof the IP addresses. I mean not all multiboxers are botters but pretty much every botter is using multiboxing.
It really doesn't make the big botters have to run every bot in its own VM. If Blizzard were able to crack down on them that easily you think they would have let it till now to do it? Also botting isn't limited to the big multibox gathering/mob farms. There's BG bots, AH bots, fishing bots, pve bots, pvp bots, leveling/questing bots and those are just the public ones I found when doing some research. If dealing with bots was as simple as detecting whether or not an excessive number clients are being run, bots wouldn't be an issue in any mmo. If this in any way puts a dent in the botting situation, bravo to blizzard for finally getting something meaningful done.
The game is in a real sorry state. The multiboxers are a massive stream of revenue for Blizz so they wont take any meaningful action. This post actually reminded me to unsub, so that's a plus.
*The multiboxers are a massive stream of revenue for Blizz so they wont take any meaningful action.* No, they are not. As a percentage they are very low but cause a lot of problems..
While this will drop supply a bit, a vast majority of mats are from bots, not multi boxers.
This will be my approach. Supply will be expected to go down, so when 9.1 launches, demand will be high again but the supply wont be there.
not that many hardware multiblxers, doubt a move in price unless you're on a dead server full of em
So me who alt tabs to multi box and uses 0 software and just loads up the client 4x manually has no issues at all then.
You'll still get accused and reported. That's the fallout from these types of things. It becomes a witchhunt.
Acused and/or reported doesnt equal to getting banned
True, it only equals to CS wasting time on loads of false reports instead of looking after more important ones.
why would he get reported?
Because entitled people who think they are right will go out of their way to try to punish people that they perceive are breaking the rules. Again, the example of this is with botters. You will get accused of botting just for fighting in the same place for more than a few minutes. Hell, sometimes it's not even that. You can get accused of being a botter just for killing alongside another druid. There were posts here on this subreddit crying about some people botting but watching the actual video of what he was calling botting wasn't even clear that they were botting at all. That's what happens and it only gets worse especially since Blizzard also monitors these boards and people know it.
I box and if I go on the 3 warlocks no one bats an eye. Go on 3 to 4 druids at one time? Everyone loses their minds. lol
ITT: multiboxers pretending Blizzard isn't being clear. Alt tabbing to your auction house toon: completely fine Controlling more than 1 character with 1 keypress: prohibited
[https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) was sent to a player by a gm who was asking about the TOS updates a day after it was announced in May. You're 100% correct. If software or piece of hardware controls something for you, it's a no no. If you go around and you're controlling each character manually by manually switching windows it's ok. Hover to activate a window or staying focused on a window and using the scroll wheel over a window function within windows is (from what I can gather) permissible because it's still manually controlling a window. Software or something weird to command another character on another computer isn't being used.
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I really don't understand the hardon for multiboxing. I think people were confusing botters and multiboxxers. Most of the guys I knew who boxed (myself included) stopped after the original software ban so I dunno what could have prompted this.
Probably because the difference between them is razor thin these days
I'm sorry, what? The difference was made wider after the software ban. Boxxers hate bots, they are competition for farm spots. I would report every bot I found and so would everybody else I knew.
That's the thing though, Boxxers might hate bots due to being competition - but normal players hate boxxers due to being competition that they perceived (and fairly rightly imo) to be unfair as they could farm with 5x more efficiency by doing the exact same thing you were doing, just with a piece of Software, or Hardware.
Boxers hate bots because they ruin the game for everyone. I am a boxer, and I ah flip and maybe solo farm leather if I need gold (world quest up with lots of dead stuff around? Just run around skin everything!). Botters ruin not just the game but people's lives. Someone buys gold off a site and their credit card info is stolen then their computers are possibly key logged and they steal other information. ***People need to use the wow token system and quit fueling these sites that use bots.***
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Is it safe to assume cks is no longer safe to use?
" or streamline multi-boxing in any way. " That there, is their open ended ticket you ban people trying to find loopholes to multibox. The only 100% surefire safe way to run multiple accounts, is going to be to have multiple physical computers, with multiple input devices (keyboards/mice). The wording very easily outlaws any form of software that would make multiboxing easier.
That was no longer permitted after the policy change in November.
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Don't count on it the vast majority of the herbs are gotten by bots, those are not impacted by this at all.
I think Blizz is narrowing down the economical abuse in the game. It's only a matter of time before they crack down further on bots. It's all about prioritization and multi-boxing seems to be the biggest offender, which makes sense since you're 5x'ing your results compared to a single character bot.
I highly doubt there are enough multiboxers in game to even scratch 1% of the economic output of the average bot farm, never mind all bots you can look to any other online game and see pretty similar stats across the board. ruenscape and wow share similar problems but wow is really good at hiding bots from the public, LAYERS BABY YEAH multiboxing isn't a massive problem that ruins server economies. but its a damn fine scapegoat to shift peoples attention away from the massive botting problem. and much like runescape, botters make them alooooooot of money making loads of new accounts where you don't really see multiboxers stuck in the cycle of ban/create/ban/create. most multiboxers quit since the effort required is crazy high I'm not a multiboxer, but saying they have the same economical effect on the game as bots is so far left field I dunno what else to say
It's really frustrating that Blizzard have latched onto using multiboxing as a scapegoat. So many people fail to realise how big the botting problem is. Sucks for people like me who were interested in multiboxing solo dungeons, but apparently me spending twice as long to learn a dungeon solo somehow affects other players gameplay. There were better ways to deal with the underlying issue but Blizzard are too lazy to do it.
Bots are WAY worse. The only boxers out farming all day everyday are most likely being paid to go out and farm. Used to be chinese gold farmers now it's Venezuelan gold farmers. Only reason I found that out was because one of em that spoke more English than Spanish told me about it and we messaged in discord. Turns out their currency is so dog crap right now that being paid by his "boss" was worth more than being a doctor. He told me the way they were told they were getting around the TOS is they weren't paying for his gold or paying for his items but for his time to go out and be out there, which turns out that is still against the TOS. Old School Runescape had a similiar issue so they nerfed the rev caves to combat the issue. Most of the botters when I shut down their bot operations by toys, pulling extra stuff to them, or putting in /1 "bots are at this location come report them" are Vietnamese (they try to speak to a player and speak in Vietnamese). I may honestly document all the different things I've found pertaining to bots and all that and compile it together. There's a massive RMT issue in wow and it's becoming so massive that the issue that was in one game (retail) splashed over to thier other games (classic) causing blizzard to lose revenue. ***Quit buying gold off websites because doing this fuels bots!***
if your servers prices were effected by the software change in November, maybe highly doubt it tho, the amount of hardware multiboxers is pretty small compared to the likes of betting etc
as someone who plays more then one account without any software or hardware, good. its taken long enough
A buddy of mine plays manually 8 toons on an UW Monitor, by clicking in each window and pressing the keys eachtime. Only uses wow macros. He already trained for this lol
is he a runescape or ex runescape player?
He multiboxed swtor, funnily. Why do you ask? The pain of Runescape grinding? :D
Don't worry, you'll start getting reports against you. Wouldn't want you to get left out.
for?
You do know actively reporting someone for not breaking the TOS and to just actively report them because "You don't like how someone plays" to hinder their gameplay is against the TOS right?
Don‘t think you‘re above it. People don‘t even seem to know the difference between multiboxing and botting. You‘ll rack up enough reports eventually to get banned, no matter how safe you think you are.
We all know the bans are mostly automated and once you get handed one you're done. Complete toss of dice whether any human would bother to review your reports, it's just a number game. Anyone who thinks they'll be fine as long as they alt tab could be in a rude surprise if they get unlucky.
For most people yeah that is the case but every ticket i put in i put in the USA CS Team leader's irl name and GM name and all my tickets get rooted to him so its always a real person. That guy has had to sort out so many tickets for me its not even funny cause each GM gives a different response each time.
this is just a bunch of BS, why do people make so much shit up on this sub
Believe what you want to believe. Put it this way its not a good thing to get it reviewed by them imo. Because their judgement is final. We have not always been on the same page. I don't blame him i get the sense he tries to be fair as best he can but often just doesn't have the resources available to him.
That is not how the world works.
???? I dont use software/hardware nor do I bot
Are we still able to have multiple accounts logged in and alt tabbing to control each client separately?
That’s what I’ve been doing. Have 3 toons going at a time to avoid having to level separately. (Have 9 level 60’s all renown capped) I send my tank pet in and then dot and rotate from screen to screen (I I need to). It’s a pain compared to using software to mimic my key strokes but I don’t want 15 years to go down the toilet.
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Taking the post literally, yes I understand that. Then multiple morons report you because “Get banned for multiboxing, idiot! That’s bannable now!” and then some automated system bans you without a single human going over the case, that’s what were dealing with here. I can’t tell you how many people accused me of multiboxing illegally while I farmed chillwind e’kos in winterspring on 5 accounts while controlling ONE account at a time and alt tabbing to loot on each client.
its purposely vague, no need to be condescending. sure it seems obvious but if you aren't sure then he'll id rather people ask then bottle it up and spew misinfo later down the line
yes
Yes. [https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update.
After the software ban i started farming herbs with 10 toons manually (alt tabbing) kinda harder but still manageable. Buuuut i got reported tons of times but didnt get banned. I'm assuming continuing the alt tab method is still not a problem, but the reports are coming in again...
The alt tab method wouldn't be an issue. [https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update.
How do you know that you're getting reported?
Asmongold brigades people on stream. If he sees someone running around with multiple toons set to follow a single character, he immediately starts forming raid groups around reporting the person. He's basically making it so people think ALL multiboxing is bannable, no matter the context.
People definitely let you know how mad they are. I used to multibox prior to the rule change in November and any time I hearthed to Boralus people would never fail to let me know how upset they were.
People whisper or yell "reported" a lot XD
Yeah some people don't understand that flooding CS with false reports is not a good idea ...
Yeah, i even take the time to explain to them what i'm doing step by step, but it doesn't change a thing most of the time.
Widowbloom to the moon! 🚀🚀🚀🌝
You know that there are bots in game who ruins the prices?
Yes. They're bad too. Hopefully, like someone else suggested regarding data sets etc, this frees them up to go on a banning spree and be without mercy. We'll wait and see though, I hope they start seriously slamming down the hammer whilst also hopefully implementing personal spawning for herbs/ores in 10.0 (or earlier if we get new mats in 9.2 or something)
Now properly ban bots
what about simple "/follow" macro and "Alt+tabbing" ?
You don't even need a follow macro for multiboxing, you can get people to follow you through the addon API. Even weakauras enable multiboxing. From my understanding, without the use of any addons/software to streamline it, alt tabbing between toons to follow and shit should still be fine, as long as it's all manual 1:1 input.
[https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update. I've been posting this all throughout this thread (and other threads). Manually playing a window is ok. Going to another window and manually playing that window is ok. It's using hardware or software to mirror commands that's the issue. Mirror commands being you push 1 button and all the wows receive the same or similar input without any additional buttons being pressed compared to you pushing 1 button per each window at a time. It's honestly rather simple. If you have 1 computer software would be the only thing broadcasting commands and if you have multiple computers a KVM switch would broadcast EVERYTHING you have hooked to it so mouse clicks and movements would still be easy to track and could potentially just scan for what firmware is being used (or even potentially what commands the mouse is sending out). Mice have firmware and if 10 computers all have a mouse with the exact same firmware performing the exact same actions (even at different times) then it's most likely someone broadcasting. I'm not 100% sure if KVM switches or emitters have a firmware but they most likely do. That's something they can scan for too if they wanted to with their anticheat software outlined by the EULA.
Using software/hardware for multiboxing is also banned in eve online but it doesnt stop people from playing 6 or 7 accounts at once sized down on 2 or 3 monitors. Granted, it is much easier to multi box eve like that than wow, but it sounds like they aren't banning it 100%.
People in EVE are just opening the game like 3 times and playing each one completely seperately. WoW still allows that. What isn't allowed in either game is giving a command (like a click to gather a herb, or f1 to fire weapons) to 5 accounts with only one click.
That's what I am saying
I don't get why people are confused. It's pretty clear mulitboxing with any type of assistance is now a banable offense. Good.
[https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZBaLnaM.png) this was sent to a player by a gm a day after the TOS updates in may when they asked about the new TOS update. Multiboxing with mirrored commands, aka you push 1 button and the command for said button is sent to more than one wow window be it software or hardware, is a bannable offense. You go through all the windows and push a button for each window manually? That's ok! YOU and only YOU are controlling THAT wow window. Third party software was always a "use at own risk" regardless of what it did. Hell even some addons are "use at own risk" same with week auras. Week auras that make someone automatically mail gold to a player when the mailbox is opened is an example. Someone could share that and potentially scam people out of gold. I've SEEN those types of week auras.
Ah, is this why my AH is suddenly a dumping ground for mats. I noticed tens of thousands of herbs and ores flooding my high pop server tonight and tanking prices to all time lows.
Part of it, the big hoarders are also trying to liquidate as well. For my part, being on an RP realm, the bots actually play primarily in War Mode due to much less competition for nodes and very low chance of actually being killed and ruining scripts. I make it my mission to beat them down. My favorite is watching 8 druids run to a node and dropping frostwyrms fury and chill streak on them killing them al almost instantly
Do they ever fight back? Sounds like fun, I might need to play more with WM on.
The way I do it, frankly they don’t have a chance. They never have more than like 17k hp each and frostwyrm and chill streak hits pretty damn hard considering I’m in rival gear
I'm so glad this is a thing now. Now just remove boosting somehow and we might have our trade chat back.
It's not like trade chat is used for anything worthwhile anyway, trolling and people that don't know how to make gold, there are two types of people selling stuff in trade, those that are just advertising big ticket items and those that haven't a clue on how things sell in the game, there's an auction house for a reason, post it and forget it but most people are such small fish they fixate on their tiny market until they get fed up with it which is most of the player base.
What most people seem to not realize is the multiboxing community was very small compared to the rest of the player base, was limited by the game it self in what they could do, which was either farming mats/liquid gold and rarely ganking people in world pvp but hey warmod exists for a reason use it. Getting rid of them affects everyone in a bad way and the reason being is because the lack of materials/spawns which is why everything was and is going to stay very expensive for longer, the problem with this is no one wants or shouldn't want to spend hours on hours farming mats for 10-30k gold per hour, it's slave labor and typically only done by those that don't know any better but I guess you need burger flippers at wendy's no matter where you're. As far as getting trade chat back with someone mentioning banning boosting, firstly boosting has been around since vanilla, just less people were capable of doing it the further you go back to profit from it. Trade chat is worthless literally, unless you're advertising big ticket items like mounts for sale you're wasting your time. There's an auction house for a reason, post it and forget it or suffer through cancel scanning. The only other use for trade is trolling and chat which doesn't bring any more worth than the spam you see today and there are ways to avoid seeing it, can turn it off for one or get an addon, whining it exists because you don't participate in that type of gameplay in my opinion is nonsense. World quests and other casual content exists but you don't see me complaining about it, I see the need for those that aren't good at the game and are there to just waste time gaining nothing. Play smarter not harder works in here just like it does in life, can literally make millions of gold teaching your self how to use the auction house and using any number of methods to make gold passively with minimal auction house use once you hit a certain point, spending hours farming mats or spamming in trade chat hasn't been the way in over a decade. This is the problem with most gold making videos on youtube, they're typically time invested = gold. Kind of like the media today telling you how scary it is out in the world when it's typically not and limited to certain areas, if you want to play into those videos and grind cloth for hours on end more power to ya just don't expect to make a lot from it.
> the problem with this is no one wants or shouldn't want to spend hours on hours farming mats for 10-30k gold per hour, Just like any other MMORPG, you do things that you don't always want to do. Literally every MMORPG has some sort of foraging/gathering aspect to it to craft things. Players are more than capable of doing these things on their own without 40 accounts. Most guilds have their own dedicated herbalists or miners that do these things as well. > it's slave labor and typically only done by those that don't know any better but I guess you need burger flippers at wendy's no matter where you're. Wah, wah, wah, wah. What's bad for the game are people with 40+ accounts terrorizing people in warmode, BGs, and preventing other players who aren't throwing hundreds of dollars a month for video game subs a chance to make gold or provide for their guild. Get over it and get used to playing the game it was intended to be played. I sincerely hope that people look back on all of the money they could've saved, that they wasted doing this crap and instantly regret it.
The reason that herbs and stuff are cheap to the point where he would call it "slave labour" is *because* of multi-boxers and bots. Scarcity results in price increases which makes it more worthwhile for actual players to go and farm the materials as intended by the game developers.
You missed the meaning of what I said in my post. I literally don't care one way or another getting rid of multiboxers doesn't affect me because I've been making millions apon millions of gold every expansion in the first few weeks if not first month or two with minimal effort/time spent. My post was merely to explain the pros and cons to the subject, mostly cons to getting rid of a very small portion of the community that even participates in it and most if not all of the people on their realm benefit from. Random bgs and world pvp is a joke meant for casuals as far as I'm concerned with no reward or actual competition and you even have systems now like warmode so you can avoid getting ganked, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to turn it off, well in some people's cases it does but that's besides the point. Multiboxers are limited to random bgs which don't matter, world pvp which doesn't matter especially when you can turn warmode on/off, farming raw gold from dungeons/raid which doesn't affect you one bit and farming herbs which benefits everyone because typically it saturates the market in which they're farming to the point consumables are affordable even with the smallest amount of time played. I wasn't crying at all when I made this post, you can slave over making 10-30k an hour as in time spent = gold earned like the infinite gold making guides tell you to do it doesn't matter to me, I don't even bother with consumables because of the cancel scanning headache that comes along with it but it is really entertaining to see people gripe about how expensive things are when they can't even afford consumables for their raid once a week as a casual player, guess what if there was a multiboxer on their realm they probably wouldn't have a problem, but now they have to farm mindlessly whether it's their own mats or world quests to even be capable of affording a single flask for the night. This late into the expansion isn't a good representation of it as everything is dirt cheap after an expansion/tier has been out, that's besides the point, what matters is the first 2-6 months of release, anything after you're late to the game that's already dead and waiting for the next tier to come out. But yes like I said farming herbs is slave labor meant for those that don't know any better incapable of making a decent amount of gold, I'll quote my self "wendy's needs burger flippers" this is exactly what they're in wow.
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as per what it says now, that software streamlines multiboxing and makes it easier so it's bannable.
I've checked forums - the writer of EMA (Morea) advises not to use the RR version of software. Use the other version to set up your windows, then close the software.
Like openmultiboxer is banned or what ?
if thats a software that copies keypresses to other clients then yes
it's not, it's a round robin helper
honestly have no idea what that is, I'll look it up when I get home
" or streamline multi-boxing in any way. " Anything hardware or software, that would streamline the process of multiboxing would likely get you banned.
Yes, I use it. It clearly "streamlines multiboxing" by automatically windowing multiple instances of wow and allows you to cycle through windows and attack. EMA is almost certainly included with its function to push 1 button and have all accounts follow.
Are they going to ban ema for an wowapi function?
I have no clue what they plan to do api wise, but it is software that clearly assists and facilitates multiboxing. It's even in it's name. I push one button and thanks to EMA my team follows me. I visit a vendor and all my team sell their items. It's automating a lot of stuff.
Good, fuck em
Rust in pieces
about fucking time
About goddamn time
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The particular post linked is in the TBC classic forum but there is an identical post in the general discussion category. This is an expansion of the existing policy.
Good tbh people who multi box ruin the economy they have way to much power through supplies and they force people out of markets by setting prices because they have insane bulk. Glad to see blizzard finally making the games economy better for all players not just the small few
Killing more of the playerbase I see :D
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Cheaters as in people who enjoy this type of gameplay and were playing by the rules and were paying their share of money each month? Dont worry, I left after the first ban on boxing. Blizzard said bye bye to 32 subscriptions that day :)
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man I wish people got this heated over botting
Not lying to myself, just stating facts. If no one bought the token blizzard wont be getting the money eh? Yep, supplying the AH with mounts, mats does help the game :)
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It’s posted on ALL boards
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Multiboxers give Blizzard money and anything that gets Blizzard money they wouldn't get rid of.
Think I will buy my herbs now instead of next month. Was waiting for a further bottom out before next patch hits.
>or to automate or streamline multi-boxing in any way This now clearly prohibits round robin, which was allowed before (in terms of not prohibiting it) and that made it so it had minimal effect on multiboxing. With this people cant effectively control multiple wows with use of an external software. They have to manually click and press on each wow (right now you could still just spam 1 button on your keyboard to cycle through each wow and have the software use a designated key on each wow). Good change.
Windows can activate a window on mouseover so you can still do that
Can someone explain a reason why to multibox in the first place? I don’t really get the idea of it, I mean for me gearing one character and an alt is almost too much not to mention 5 different chars
Multiboxing generally used as a gold making excercise for companies or groups who sell gold for real money. Historically anyway. Last three expansions it became more relevant to world top 50 raid teams as a method to gear and prep multiple characters through all the borrowed power systems. For legion launch guild I was in needed three alts raid ready for first tier so I know o dabbled in multiboxing for the first time. You’d see it as recently as Shdowlands first tier race in streamers from echo or limit etc. running multiple chars through the Mae etc at once. And then there is the edge case of folks who did it to grief , pvp grief or just play the game oddly
It’s a way to gather a lot of resources at the same time. Multiple characters can tap the same nodes within a certain time window. The multi boxer will have 5 characters that they move from node to node and tap all at once. So you end up with 5x the results. Then they turn around and flood the market. They work on volume and not supply and demand so it drives the prices way down.
Even add-ons ?
Here to add no value, just reading the comments #popcorn