Policy Update for Input Broadcasting Software - Multiboxing Official Warning

[Unholyground]

Nah, we'll just pay for mats like we always do, just with inflated prices.

Higher prices is better for the vast majority of the players though because we can sell stuff and not have to grind our eyes out to actually get somewhere or buy a token or whatever you want to do with your gold.

if you look at it from an economical standpoint people were making way too much money by being able to do that, you were actually making more money by multi-boxing with those programs matching your keystrokes in each client than just running bots and have them do stuff separately and that's where the problem comes from.

[Walkerbo]

Majority of people think it's a good change. I am interested why you think it is a move in the wrong direction.

The "majority" of forum users would be more accurate.

I would think that the majority of players have no opinion on multiboxing at all.

[blankfaced]

Cutting edge guilds had 4 accounts multiboxing the same class and then have them join each of the covenants.

That way each of their players will have a class to match each covenantbonus as they are buffed/nerfed.

Essentially it is the devs way to ensure that swapping between covenants is not easy.

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I seriously doubt that the devs will adjust down the amount of mats required to craft items to compensate for the potential reduction of AH mats.

This will just require more players to go out and farm the mats for themselves.

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I do not, nor have I ever tried to, multibox, so I have no skin in this game, but I would like tto point out multiboxing does no affect game desing in any way.

I understand your argument that banning multiboxers will lead to more enjoyment for those that felt that multiboxing ruined their game play experience, though I do doubt that this will increase player retention as game play is king, boring/lazy game design is what reduces player enjoyment.

Cutting edge guilds had 4 accounts multiboxing the same class and then have them join each of the covenants.

That way each of their players will have a class to match each covenantbonus as they are buffed/nerfed.

Essentially it is the devs way to ensure that swapping between covenants is not easy.

So which is it? It doesn't affect it in any way....or they're stopping MB because it negatively affects a new aspect of their game?

Sounds like MB affected the way they design the game to me.....

[Walkerbo]

Only took them 16 years... Bots didn't do it, herbing exploits didn't do it, griefing gank squads didn't do it, 2x4 farming didn't do it, ruining BGs with 1 shots didn't do it... Top end raiders levelling 4 toons for each covenant? Time to ban multiboxing boyz!

I agree.
10/char

[FossilFree]

That guy used a keyboard multiplexor, which would be indistinguishable to Blizzard on their end from the software they've banned - and I highly doubt Blizzard will even think about a process to verify it's hardware, especially as it does the same thing they've banned through software.

You can technically multibox, but it will not be anything close to the same thing it was up until yesterday. You are not going to clear 40 man raids alt-tabbing.

Since it is always an arms race between game devs and cheat devs, they can't really just go off detecting a specific program alone. They will need to try to catch the newest ones that haven't been detected yet too. Which means it's more likely that they will analyze behavior and see if it fits the pattern of key broadcasting. Any behavior, whether hardware or software, will create the same pattern, which they will just assume is a new program that they can't detect yet and treat it the same as ones they can detect.

[Clozer]

Since it is always an arms race between game devs and cheat devs, they can't really just go off detecting a specific program alone. They will need to try to catch the newest ones that haven't been detected yet too. Which means it's more likely that they will analyze behavior and see if it fits the pattern of key broadcasting. Any behavior, whether hardware or software, will create the same pattern, which they will just assume is a new program that they can't detect yet and treat it the same as ones they can detect.

Windows API provides if a key was pressed is coming from actual hardware or was software generated. You don't need anything advanced for this at all.

[Jozilla-Winterhoof]

Cutting edge guilds had 4 accounts multiboxing the same class and then have them join each of the covenants.

That way each of their players will have a class to match each covenantbonus as they are buffed/nerfed.

Essentially it is the devs way to ensure that swapping between covenants is not easy.

- - - Updated - - -


I seriously doubt that the devs will adjust down the amount of mats required to craft items to compensate for the potential reduction of AH mats.

This will just require more players to go out and farm the mats for themselves.

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I do not, nor have I ever tried to, multibox, so I have no skin in this game, but I would like tto point out multiboxing does no affect game desing in any way.

I understand your argument that banning multiboxers will lead to more enjoyment for those that felt that multiboxing ruined their game play experience, though I do doubt that this will increase player retention as game play is king, boring/lazy game design is what reduces player enjoyment.

Bad devs kill games if Multi boxing killed games why is everquest still going they're about to hit their 27 expansion. pretty funny though.

[Kagthul]

However, with the ban of keyboard broadcasting, multiboxing just became so difficult to do, most will simply stop. I used to MB, and I can't imagine trying it without the software, especially in PvP.

Yeah, buying a 25$ piece of hardware or making it yoourself in 10 minutes, just too damn hard.

[Walkerbo]

Cutting edge guilds had 4 accounts multiboxing the same class and then have them join each of the covenants.

That way each of their players will have a class to match each covenantbonus as they are buffed/nerfed.

Essentially it is the devs way to ensure that swapping between covenants is not easy.

So which is it? It doesn't affect it in any way....or they're stopping MB because it negatively affects a new aspect of their game?

Sounds like MB affected the way they design the game to me.....

I am only saying that mutiboxing does not change the game mechanics in anyway, just the same as having a 40 man raid, whether there are 40 individual players playing or 1 player controlling 40 accounts does not affect the game design, story, mechanics at all.

Good engaging game design should be a goal whether you have 1 account playing or 1,000,000,000 accounts playing.

If the devs have to make a change based on the cutting edge guilds that have their raiders levelling 4 of each class, 1 for each covenant, so they can fill raids with the highest damage/mitigation/healing throughput when the covenant abilities are buffed/nerfed that to me sounds like bad game design.

[Drusin]

Enjoying turkey sammich and designing hardware multibox setup as the forums catch on fire

[Gadzooks]

Yeah, buying a 25$ piece of hardware or making it yoourself in 10 minutes, just too damn hard.

Okay, editing my post. A blue posted about it in the support forum:

The focus of the announcement yesterday was prohibiting Input Broadcast Software, no other restrictions have been announced regarding hardware. Keyboards/mouse macros and functionality, assuming they work within our policies (i.e. do not use the keyboard macro to do something beyond what our in-game macro could do), is generally fine.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...xing/707988/19

Since they won't address hardware specifically, and Vraksith said that the post only refers to software for now, I would bet that means they're not going to ban over a hardware solution. (which means they're looking for the software with their bot detection methods) For now. I would read that as they're leaving the option to ban over hardware open, if all the farmers go buy multiplexors.

Well, that's all I've got to say on the matter. I think you'll see a dramatic drop in the number of MBers on the servers, regardless.

[Culex]

YES! Its about damn time, maybe I can make gold farming again.

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I hate multiboxers as much as the next guy. But im looking forward to the million posts coming now complaining how mat prices are trippled or quadrupled

Mwa ha ha ha ha, and Ill be one of the people selling those mats!

[Drusin]

YES! Its about damn time, maybe I can make gold farming again.

Nope, bots will still be there to welcome you, they care not for policy change lol

[GUZ]

Multi-tap herb/mining nodes were added with Legion, the rise of multiboxing farmers lead to the AH getting tanked by a flood of mats from multiboxers. Average players have absolutely no way to compete with multiboxers, and thus were shut out of the easiest part of the AH to make gold from. The only people who could reliably make gold from the AH after Legion were people who relied upon spending a significant amount of time just playing the AH, someone like me who regularly took advantage of raid night price spikes to sell potions/herbs lost any incentive to attempt to participate in the AH because of how shitty it feels trying to compete against people who were practically cheating.

I'm assuming the disruption of the AH is the primary reason they're only now deciding to ban multiboxing, though I wouldn't be surprised if PvP multiboxers were another factor they took into consideration. PvP multiboxers have always been somewhat contentious, and they've been around much longer than 4 years.

i wish they would have done this before they got rid of the long boi

[sensei]

Might have been brought up before, but honestly this probably has little to do with the mat farming and everything to do with all those assholes roaming around the questing areas in Kul Tiras for the last couple of months, basically taking over the zones while they AOE everything in sight on their tauren druids or gnome DKs, over and over, so that anyone trying to quest is pretty much shit out of luck.

[frott]

Pick one:

Cutting edge guilds had 4 accounts multiboxing the same class and then have them join each of the covenants.

or

I do not, nor have I ever tried to, multibox, so I have no skin in this game, but I would like tto point out multiboxing does no affect game desing in any way.

Obviously multiboxing has an impact on game design. Otherwise they wouldn't be banning it. They just realize that their game is in the toilet because of automation inflating the cost for NON AUTOMATED PLAYERS to the point that it's not even remotely fun. tmog costs, inflated mount costs, money sink, etc.

I understand your argument that banning multiboxers will lead to more enjoyment for those that felt that multiboxing ruined their game play experience, though I do doubt that this will increase player retention as game play is king, boring/lazy game design is what reduces player enjoyment.

Boring/lazy game design is having 4 covenants with mysterious power that allows blizzard to nerf something arbitrarily based on meta. Power gamers will have all 4 ready explicitly for this.


You don't see how people playing 4 characters automatically alters game design? Versus requiring someone to play each character individually, group with others, etc?

That's just obviously, objectively, wrong. Removing people who automate the game leads the people who are playing it to be "not automated." Reducing automated gold farms lessen the amount of gold in the economy. Removing the ability to script kill bosses change the frequency of those bosses being farmed and boosts sold.

It's such a basic concept that it really just harms your own credibility to state that having automation in a game doesn't change the metrics by which the game is judged.

Are you saying that 100 people playing manually would have the same gold/second or drops/second as 10 people 10 boxing at prime efficiency? That's flat out absurd.

But just like how everyone on gallywix "had no idea" that people were doing things for real money, I suppose you think the only multiboxers have physical disabilities that need automation and are otherwise sitting there monitoring their screen?

Nobody who sets up automation would eeeeeeeever run their bots with a script... no way, ThAt'D bE aGaInSt tHe ToS


It's like saying "having alts doesn't change drop rates" like some of these idiotic droprates aren't based on the idea that you run the same thing over and over with 10+ characters.

[Kagthul]

The "majority" of forum users would be more accurate.

I would think that the majority of players have no opinion on multiboxing at all.

Considering that something like less tha 2% of players ever hit the forums....

this is dead on.