Multiboxing is OVER

[ReVnX]

Warnings are already being sent

https://i.redd.it/x4ug4t3tklx51.png

[dextersmith]

Why now? Many have wanted this for so long. Is it a good time to lose all those extra subs suddenly?

[loras]

Why now? Many have wanted this for so long. Is it a good time to lose all those extra subs suddenly?

It might be a net gain in subs if the few multiboxxers annoy enough other people either directly or indirectly.
They are, after all, a market disturber as well as a nuisance for any who encounters them on his own.

[Synical123]

Why now? Many have wanted this for so long. Is it a good time to lose all those extra subs suddenly?

They probably noticed that it is actually starting to effect a lot of people with how certain gathering and other systems work in the game. Some multiboxers got to a point where they were making 5 million gold per day.

I would assume they had to do it after the third quarter call to keep the subs but before the end of the quarter for the expansion/nax release just because the sub loss won't really be noticeable with these two big releases.

This is just what I would guess, they noticed during this expansion that it was bad, but they strategically set it up in a way where they would make most of their money. But to be honest if this were true, and knowing blizz, I would find it more profitable to make this call AFTER the expansion releases but before the end of q4 just so the number of expansions bought by these people would fluff the numbers a bit. But who knows.

[DaWonder]

Multiboxing is not over its just harder people need to understand this.

[Deferionus]

Because you are thinking of ways to game the system.
My two friends who did multi-box did get refunded for Shadowlands and have since quit the game.
You likely never saw them, because one of them basically only ran mythic 5mans and the other one did that as well as 10man normal raiding, dabbling in heroic raiding.

They didn’t do it to get an advantage, they did it because to them, this was a fun way to play the game and challenge themselves, playing 10 different classes at the same time in a raid, doing very different things with one keyboard. Because it was complicated, not because they couldn’t join a guild.

They in turn have forums and communities they are part of, who all do the same things. Or, rather, did.
You likely never saw them, you likely will not notice they are gone, but the game they played died very suddenly.

I dabbled in this with my multiboxing set up. Doing some of the 5 mans with more mechanics could be really difficult and would take you getting creative to do the mechanics. I never did much of the herbing though I did farm jelly to give my fiancée the bee mount. I wanted to expand to 10 accounts and do 10 man raids with them but unless I decide to purchase hardware to do hardware multiboxing that will be out of reach.

What you guys aren't realizing is there is software and hardware multiboxing. I used software previously but if I wanted to continue there are hardware based ways to do it since blizzard only made software based implementations against the TOS.

[kaintk]

Its gonna be nice no longer seeing an army of druids with near identical names zooming around picking all herbs clean in a second.

or the f#@$#@$ moonkin with their star shower aggroing 50km of land everywhere, even in bfa lol

f##$ those retards

and multibosing is not over, only the one key to control them all, you can alt tab from account to account and click the spell to launch but who want to really do this ? its 90% death for them

[Yarathir]

Immediately bought 11 Bloodfeaster mounts for 15K gold a piece. Now we wait..

[kek8814]

I'm gonna bet my accounts on Blizzard being unable or not even caring to track global inputs caused by 3rd party addons done with proper random delay scripts, I've multiboxed in eve for years after the same input ban using isboxer input broadcasting and still not banned, I'm guessing as long as you don't do really obvious stuff and piss a lot of people off they just don' focus their attention on you since CCP and Blizzard are almost equally incompetent now.

[kail]

Multiboxing is not over its just harder people need to understand this.

It could mean that those who are obviously multiboxing will be reported by others. If Blizzard's new policy is strict to only IBS software detection, the multiboxer could go on without repercussions. I am curious if any multiboxer without using IBS is receiving any warnings.

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and multibosing is not over, only the one key to control them all, you can alt tab from account to account and click the spell to launch but who want to really do this ? its 90% death for them

I can't see the alt-tabbing working out. To each their own but AFAIK the main appeal to multboxing is generating 5+ times the mats/gold for a single player doing the same thing as a regular player. The alt-tabbing would have to be automated another way (maybe some AHK macro).

[Kaver]

I don't have any gathering professions so I can't demonstrate that since I don't have it on my characters, but I can demonstrate how easy it is to loot mobs (do you seriously not know what IWT is? lol) or mount up without keystroke broadcasting. The difference using broadcasting vs. without broadcasting will be only a few seconds at most....

What is the problem then?

[Drusin]

Why now? Many have wanted this for so long. Is it a good time to lose all those extra subs suddenly?

Rumor mill says because WF raiders were going to MB covenants so they had a character of a certain class in each covenant

[Kagthul]

This will not remotely stop Multiboxers.

There are two easy workarounds

One is a simple piece of hardware that multiplexes your keyboard/mouse. I.E. it has one USB in, and 4+ outs. You plug each one into a USB port on your PC (likely would require a hub). Same for the mouse.

It now reads as 5 physical keyboards.

This MAY still be detectable by the BlizzSpy rootkit - i mean, uh, "Warden", because they will all display the same hardware ID.. but this can be worked around with a few edits to some files. You could probably write a script to make the changes (which would have to be done every time you rebooted).

If for some reason Warden can still detect that (unlikely, but possible depending on just how far Warden intrudes into your shizz)...

There are these things called "Virtual Machines". Tough concept, i know.

But you could easily just run the extra instances in VMs instead of just firing them up in your main OS. The servers will see this as literally 5 different computers. Depending on how deep Warden intrudes, you might have to use the hardware multiplexer (and then assign each "device" to an individual VM via the VM software), but most likely you could just set it to mirror the commands to each VM.

None of those options are particularly more difficult than the current setup - a little more setup time intitially for the VMs (but once you have one VM set up, you can just duplicate it, and then swap in new Windows keys (or not, since you can run it without a key literally forever, and its not like you care about customizing the looks of your VMs or anything).

Its adding like.. one or maybe two steps and a 30$ piece of hardware.

Itll kill of the "casual" MBxers, but lets be honest here - there aren't a lot of those. Most MBxers have CPUs with way more cores than the "Average" gamer - by definition its something of a high end rig, and theyve already gone through all the effort to set up 5 accounts, etc, get the software working right...

Adding one more step is hardly going to discourage them when there are so many simple fixes.

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That’s hilarious because people who are actually KNOWN for multiboxing have been posting all over the forums about how they are cancelling all their subs on multiple accounts because of this change and how it will effect them.

But yeah, let’s go by random forum poster #14632 that multiboxing somehow isn’t going to be effected by this at all. Okay bud. Whatever you say.

Then they are stupid, because the workarounds are easy as pie. Like... Some VM software and an hour to set it up.

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Ya I know, i am just saying you should be allowed to do it but only if you have a unique mac address each account is connecting to the blizz servers from. I don't think people should be doing it at all personally.

The unique MAC address thing can be spoofed easily. Most VM software will allow you to generate a MAC Address. And there are a bunch of simple ways to just spoof it

[Sfr528]

Why now? Many have wanted this for so long. Is it a good time to lose all those extra subs suddenly?

They probably went through the numbers of people who are complaining about Multiboxxing and or quit due to Multiboxxing, ran a simulation to see if it would be worth it to go about severely limiting Multiboxxing potential and banning players who continued to do so, and the math showed that banning them would be a net positive.

What annoys me is this is apparently a half measure. I'm not sure how true this is, but apparently, hardware that does the same thing as the software is allowed. What is the point of that? We consider it cheating if you are using software to control multiple characters at once... but if its hardware doing that then you are not cheating. <sarcasm>That logic makes perfect sense.</sarcasm>

I just wish they go full measure, say we don't care if its software, hardware, or chopsticks... if we detect that multiple characters are acting unreasonably similar in a time frame then you are getting a warning and then banned.

[kaminaris]

Snip

Probably the most accurate comment here.

It stops casual multiboxing but nothing else.
Blizzard doesn't disallow multiboxing but as someone here already explained, they are disallowing key broadcasting software because bot developers used those as proxy-spoof for their bots thus making it indistinguishable between bot and multiboxer.

Technically it doesn't really solve the problem because you can actually write a hardware bot, however it is much more complex than just a piece of software.

[Stickiler]

Then they are stupid, because the workarounds are easy as pie. Like... Some VM software and an hour to set it up.

I think it would be silly to assume they're only going to use Warden for this. If I had to guess, they'll also be adding analytics to the events they're already capturing server-side, and they'd just be looking for indicators of multi-boxing. For example, 4+ accounts logged in at once from the same IP, in the same location, issuing nigh-identical or identical commands at the same or similar time. I'd assume they'll build an analytics package that gives each account a value based on how likely it is to be a multi-boxer based on their analytics, and then any accounts over a certain value will be assessed by a tech to determine if they are multi-boxing or not.

[LucyEliza]

Probably the most accurate comment here.

It stops casual multiboxing but nothing else.
Blizzard doesn't disallow multiboxing but as someone here already explained, they are disallowing key broadcasting software because bot developers used those as proxy-spoof for their bots thus making it indistinguishable between bot and multiboxer.

Technically it doesn't really solve the problem because you can actually write a hardware bot, however it is much more complex than just a piece of software.

There are definitely ways around this, though I suspect most casual multiboxers simply won't bother and will quit, whilst the herbing 20 boxers and bots will simply carry on as usual replacing any banned accounts as they already do.

The truth is that Blizzard themselves are to blame for the current issues, as they have actively encouraged multi boxing by allowing 8 wow accounts on each battle.net account and have actively pushed the Recruit a Friend service which was clearly aimed primarily at multiboxing. I would love to know how many RAF accounts were actually new players compared to existing players.

[Synical123]

I love how all these experts are coming in here claiming how everything is going to be okay for multiboxers, yet literally every multiboxer who is well known for having 20+ accounts all say this change is forcing them to quit.

You can speculate all you want, when the people who actually multibox are quitting the game, it’s fairly obviously this is a big nerf. Or be dumb and stick your head in the sand idc

[Tronski]

This will not remotely stop Multiboxers.

There are two easy workarounds

One is a simple piece of hardware that multiplexes your keyboard/mouse. I.E. it has one USB in, and 4+ outs. You plug each one into a USB port on your PC (likely would require a hub). Same for the mouse.

It now reads as 5 physical keyboards.

This MAY still be detectable by the BlizzSpy rootkit - i mean, uh, "Warden", because they will all display the same hardware ID.. but this can be worked around with a few edits to some files. You could probably write a script to make the changes (which would have to be done every time you rebooted).

If for some reason Warden can still detect that (unlikely, but possible depending on just how far Warden intrudes into your shizz)...

There are these things called "Virtual Machines". Tough concept, i know.

But you could easily just run the extra instances in VMs instead of just firing them up in your main OS. The servers will see this as literally 5 different computers. Depending on how deep Warden intrudes, you might have to use the hardware multiplexer (and then assign each "device" to an individual VM via the VM software), but most likely you could just set it to mirror the commands to each VM.

None of those options are particularly more difficult than the current setup - a little more setup time intitially for the VMs (but once you have one VM set up, you can just duplicate it, and then swap in new Windows keys (or not, since you can run it without a key literally forever, and its not like you care about customizing the looks of your VMs or anything).

Its adding like.. one or maybe two steps and a 30$ piece of hardware.

Itll kill of the "casual" MBxers, but lets be honest here - there aren't a lot of those. Most MBxers have CPUs with way more cores than the "Average" gamer - by definition its something of a high end rig, and theyve already gone through all the effort to set up 5 accounts, etc, get the software working right...

Adding one more step is hardly going to discourage them when there are so many simple fixes.

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Then they are stupid, because the workarounds are easy as pie. Like... Some VM software and an hour to set it up.

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The unique MAC address thing can be spoofed easily. Most VM software will allow you to generate a MAC Address. And there are a bunch of simple ways to just spoof it

TLDR; those who go the extra mile to multibox will now multiply their earnings because casual multiboxing dies.

Unless you run 5x BM hunters, alt tab and let the beasts do the work.

[ketsui]

When blizzard steps in and tells me I can't form my own groups for appearances in dungeons its when I quit. I hate being told I can't play the way I want to play because of stupid rules and this was one of those, they just lost one of their biggest whale players. I'm refunding all my preorders now, and only had 4 because I only ran dungeons for appearances with my multiboxing. You force me to play the way you want everyone playing, single file sheep, I'm out