Policy Update for Input Broadcasting - May 2021

[GreenJesus]

Good. Fuck multiboxers that had 40 characters all do the same thing with a single click.

[Couchpotato2013]

16+ years too late. But better than never. Really wish they would retroactively remove progression people got using multiboxing. So annoying to see people afk in epic BGs and they have 400+ honor level. So you know they have multiple characters doing the same thing ruining the game. And hell people were triple boxing islands too. So no doubt blizzard always wanting people to not be “done” with their game likely used those people in their progression metrics, which in my conspiracy driven anger likely prevented us from getting the island vendor at an earlier patch (maybe like 8.2 or 8.2.5).

[Varitok]

My question is, Who gives a fuck if someone multiboxes? Botting is the issue but I can count on one hand how many times I've seen multiboxers in BGs. This just seems to be solving a non existent problem.

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16+ years too late. But better than never. Really wish they would retroactively remove progression people got using multiboxing. So annoying to see people afk in epic BGs and they have 400+ honor level. So you know they have multiple characters doing the same thing ruining the game. And hell people were triple boxing islands too. So no doubt blizzard always wanting people to not be “done” with their game likely used those people in their progression metrics, which in my conspiracy driven anger likely prevented us from getting the island vendor at an earlier patch (maybe like 8.2 or 8.2.5).

You don't have to be a multiboxer to get 400 honour level, You can AFK to 400 with one or 50 characters, same result. Again, Who gives a shit if you triple stack an island? It's an island, not a Mythic raid dude. What is this even helping at all and not only that, why are people acting like it even moves the needle in either direction on game quality?

What exactly is this going to change? "Oh yay, now I can get 10 more silver per herb". People have the weirdest priorities in this community.

[shoegazing]

So if I have 2 copies of WoW open and I use the built-into-the-game features to have one character /follow and /assist another character, and I use my mouse to switch between the 2 games and give commands to both, does that count as using "software and hardware mechanisms" to "streamline multi-boxing in any way" ?

How can you actually tell who is playing 2 accounts legitimately without using any tools outside of WoW, vs who is using some tools to "streamline" it ?

[Stickiler]

So if I have 2 copies of WoW open and I use the built-into-the-game features to have one character /follow and /assist another character, and I use my mouse to switch between the 2 games and give commands to both, does that count as using "software and hardware mechanisms" to "streamline multi-boxing in any way" ?

Of course not, don't be ridiculous.

How can you actually tell who is playing 2 accounts legitimately without using any tools outside of WoW, vs who is using some tools to "streamline" it ?

Easy, a single person playing 2(or more) accounts legitimately will be a radically different input pattern to someone using command echoing. For example, only one command will be entered at a time for a legitimate person, vs command echoing where you're going to have multiple accounts receive the exact same inputs at the same time(Even if they put a delay on the multi-boxing software to get around this, it'll massively slow them down, which will help make multi-boxing less viable).

[Duese]

My question is, Who gives a fuck if someone multiboxes? Botting is the issue but I can count on one hand how many times I've seen multiboxers in BGs. This just seems to be solving a non existent problem.

Because Blizzard created a problem for themselves by making it extremely beneficial to multibox for gathering professions. Rather than fix this problem in a hundred different ways that would all improve the gamel, they instead chose to ban multiplex software and hardware. The absolute dumbest thing about it is that this doesn't even fix the problem they were trying to hit. It's still extremely beneficial to multibox without software and do gathering professions. Clicking 5 times takes no effort but it's 5 times the reward.

On top of that, there are a vocal minority of people who are completely toxic to the game and the community who go around accusing people of all sorts of vile and disgusting crap presuming they are breaking the rules. I've seen this literally destroy games in the past (anyone remember Asheron's Call).

The worst part is now you are scaring the shit out of normal players because now they think they're going to get banned if they have two accounts open. This is just another in a long list of really stupid ideas from Blizzard that is only going to make the game worse. Now they have committed to enforcing it and you know that there are going to be shitheads running around reporting anyone and everyone for it. Good luck getting a ticket resolved where it actually matters.

[Couchpotato2013]

My question is, Who gives a fuck if someone multiboxes? Botting is the issue but I can count on one hand how many times I've seen multiboxers in BGs. This just seems to be solving a non existent problem.

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You don't have to be a multiboxer to get 400 honour level, You can AFK to 400 with one or 50 characters, same result. Again, Who gives a shit if you triple stack an island? It's an island, not a Mythic raid dude. What is this even helping at all and not only that, why are people acting like it even moves the needle in either direction on game quality?

What exactly is this going to change? "Oh yay, now I can get 10 more silver per herb". People have the weirdest priorities in this community.

Tell me where you manage to trip in this line of thinking:
1) Blizzard doesn’t want you to be done with their game.
2) Why? Because depending on the conditional state of “done” they believe people will unsub.
3) So what does blizz do in this situation: assess the entire subscription base and determines endpoints (aka state of being done) for players.
4) Simple way is to length time spent for activity in modern game in comparison to equivalent activity in prior expansion. Aka longer sub time.
5) Purposely withhold quality of life adjustments (does not mean click a button and be done), people requested since alpha/beta throughout initiation iterations of the game until participation metrics drop.
6) Adjust content frameworks using points 4 and 5 to design the game as an arms race between the upper echelon of players vs devs. Which then necessitates upper tier of players to compensate accordingly. Which then results in a progression treadmill for the community.

You can then see that for no matter what the state of winning/“being done” blizzard will shift progression to prevent people from being able to complete. And thus being able to multibox (throwing more money at the “problem of you not being done”) you can see how that rubs people the wrong way. Why? Because it shows that blizzard is designing content consumption rates with people paying extra in mind. And you not paying extra are thus at a disadvantage.

As a quick example. Why is each honor level 8800 honor? Why not 5000, 8000, or 10000? Seems much cleaner to have those breakpoints than one we have. Sure a computer can crunch it out all the same but to the player it looks odd. And I’ll tell you why. Well before their announcement to make honor levels account wide they obviously did an assessment of the population and what projected levels would be after consolidation (and then sprinkling in the rewards). They were likely shocked to see people already being done with their new system from day 1 if they were to put in account-wide honor at that moment in legion (whenever that was). So they then tweak the honor per level, stretch the upper tier of rewards from prestige levels over wider honor level gaps. All to prevent people from reaching 500 on day 1 and likely several months into bfa.

And as for the concern about these things, cosmetics matter the most people cause they have permanence unlike gear that gets mulched in the next tier. Chasing gear for gears sake is the rattiest thing you can do for these past few years. You go after it as tools in order to more effectively go after the meta- progression (inb4 nihilism about stuff getting deleted when servers shutdown).

[Garretdejiko]

One more "too little too late" to add to the pile

[Nokami]

My question is, Who gives a fuck if someone multiboxes? Botting is the issue but I can count on one hand how many times I've seen multiboxers in BGs. This just seems to be solving a non existent problem.

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You don't have to be a multiboxer to get 400 honour level, You can AFK to 400 with one or 50 characters, same result. Again, Who gives a shit if you triple stack an island? It's an island, not a Mythic raid dude. What is this even helping at all and not only that, why are people acting like it even moves the needle in either direction on game quality?

What exactly is this going to change? "Oh yay, now I can get 10 more silver per herb". People have the weirdest priorities in this community.

I give a fuck so a good change I guess.

[Hitei]

Clicking 5 times takes no effort but it's 5 times the reward.

It is literally five times the effort, i.e. exactly what it should be for 5 times the reward.

[carlos9949]

Policy Update for Input Broadcasting - May 2021

On November 3, 2020, we posted an update to our policy for input broadcasting software, and soon thereafter, we began taking action against accounts found to be using third party software to automatically mirror keystrokes to multiple game clients. We find that, like full automation of play, multiple-account mirroring disturbs the gameplay experience for the vast majority of players who control a single account at a time.

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. Players found to be in violation of this policy are subject to account actions. These actions can include warnings, account suspensions and, if necessary, permanent closure of the player’s World of Warcraft account(s), as activities which effectively replicate automated gameplay are contrary to the terms and conditions of the Blizzard End-User License Agreement (EULA).

We urge all players to cease using any means of mirroring gameplay across multiple WoW accounts immediately, in order to maintain uninterrupted access to World of Warcraft.

I have an idea, lets blame multiboxer for all the shitty design in wow latest expansion so players focus on multiboxer instead of the game flaws.

[schwarzkopf]

Up front - I'm against multi boxing of any kind, but then again I'm against sky diving too.

I think they should allow it for up to 2 or 3 simultaneous accounts, that's barely going to impact anyone else, it is the one man raids they need to ban.

[Gurg]

it sounds like you know the tech, bot multiboxers aren't multiboxers, they're just bots running simultaneously, you know this, why would u have bots interact with each other or even grouped? when ungrouped they dont collide due to not being in a party

Fair point. Back then Honorbuddy, while advanced bot at time, it had its own limitations tbh. It had pretty much everything with option to add additional routines/addons.
Fishing, gathering, farming and in the end combat rotations (way before PQR, Soapbox and short lived original Probably Engine).
You really dont want me to go into details about combat routines and how advanced they ended that they had collision, facing, enemy cooldown and buff detection, debuff detection and so on.

Short video of one of first iterations, all and only actual player input here is movement, everything else - Honorbuddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4zBx0cG3Ak

This particular combat routing ended up so advanced on other platform that is one of main reasons for one of biggest banwaves ever:
https://nosygamer.blogspot.com/2014/...kills-bot.html

Not quite 510k, but around 300k were affected. Cant track down official bluepost.
In 2017 second biggest wave, around 200k hit Honorbuddy and officially killed the bot and company it self.

Honorbuddy was paid per license to get all features unlocked. Dont hold me for my word since a lot of time passed since then but i think that bundles went up to 20 licenses at once. So the more licenses you had in the bundle the more they were pricey but you were able to run more instances of bot simultaneously with different configs/pathing scripts. There were also options to pay scripting authors for personalized scripts with different pathing and features instead of using public ones - again to minimize detection.
I was kid back then, 18y, so any major investments in this were out of the question. What i did was simply bought one license for the bot and used it on main character then simply copy inputs to other characters in the box.

Not the most elegant solution i know but eh.. tbh i just went with it while it lasted. And tbh it lasted more than 2 years, almost 3 with nightly bot farming and i ended up hit in massive banwave that Blizzard had fighting Honorbuddy and Bossland (company that created it).
Ended up banned for 18 months on all my accounts, including main (which i still use) and tbh never looked back. It was tempting but by the time i finished studies and my ban expired life took a twist. I married, got a kid and started my own design and tattoo shop (something that i personally never dreamed that will do).
Currently thinking of starting free mini art school with my coworkers for the teens that are into street art, tbh i have the room in the shop and want to keep them off the street and most things that are easily accessible on them in my country. Its a long term project tho. A story for it self.

Honorbuddy back then had routine/addon that added feature which allowed that bot logs out after randomized window of time, wait on character selection screen random window of time, switch script, log back in and do something else. I was usually gathering in jade Forest, Valley of 4 Winds (avoiding farm zone) and occasionally in Townlong Steppes and Krasarang Wilds (as that zone became more active and daily hub past 4.2 patch) and Dungeon running in Temple, Brewery and Gate.
Kung Lai Summit was difficult to navigate for bots, Vale was active a lot with both main hubs being there and later on became nasty with introduction of some nasty mobs after Garrosh's corruption, Dread Wastes was out of the question for obvious reasons.
There were some advanced addons that even allowed storing login information for full logout's-login's.
I never tried raid botting, however i heard a lot about successful runs close to the end of expansion with super personalized scripts - parts of Vault and whole Terrace. Normal's ofc.

Im not saying that all multiboxers are bots, far from that, but some of them are.
This is just my experience, im sharing it because i used to bot a lot and know what i need to look for.
Tbh, it just crossed my mind, but this could also be a cleanup before TBC since Classic was plagued with farming bots even more than SL was due to high value of resources.
Again, im not saying that all multiboxers are bots, but i think that blizzard finally reached the point where they dont want to mess with it anymore on a "small scale" and individual cases but simply do big swoop that hits both the innocent and guilty ones.


Maldraxxus was super full of multiboxers and i can say for sure that large part of them, at least on EU servers that i mentioned, were bots.
Burning Thicket, Sepulcher of Knowledge were most filled zones. Usual stretch was circle in Burning Thicket - The Spearhead - left (west side) of Theater of Pain - circle in Sepulcher of Knowledge and back.

I used to stay in place that crossed multiboxers path turned on stopwatch and waited. Reseting it every time when they passed trough me.
Or just follow them and pay attention is pattern of movement and "node" order the same.
I was honestly that much bored before it hit me that im spending again 2-3h (sometimes more) daily in game just literally running around and chatting with friends and guildies neglecting a bit my life.
I can do that without being in game.

Ranting now. Just checked old Honorbuddy forums, it looks like after several years of fighting in court they gave up and shut down all bots that they had for blizzard games (WoW, Diablo 3 and HotS).

I could talk about it for days, sorry for wall of text. it was big part of my life back then.

[Deathtalk]

Up front - I'm against multi boxing of any kind, but then again I'm against sky diving too.

I think they should allow it for up to 2 or 3 simultaneous accounts, that's barely going to impact anyone else, it is the one man raids they need to ban.

Yeah the good players finding unique ways to solo raid bosses need to get the ban hammer.

[Crimpson]

Just hire 5-10 GMs per region to hunt these fuckers down and whack them.

HAHAHAHAHAH You really think that 5-10 GM's is enough? You really think this is only happening to like 3 realms? It is happening on almost all realms so that would mean, they would need 3 per realm, per region. I did the math with my friends and I can't recall it, but I can promise you that they aren't going to pay to have these GM's just sit there watching and waiting to see if they appear. By the time they get rid of them, within mins, they are back with new accounts with characters they leveled. That means within 8hrs each GM with that like few mins.

Also, they have done this before and it didn't work and they had to take those resources and use them elsewhere.

[Unholyground]

Good, get utterly fucked fuckers lol. This was mostly an issue in Classic but it is good to see all around. Your salty tears feed me!

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Up front - I'm against multi boxing of any kind, but then again I'm against sky diving too.

I think they should allow it for up to 2 or 3 simultaneous accounts, that's barely going to impact anyone else, it is the one man raids they need to ban.

Even though nodes are shared they still have a limit and when you have multi boxers herbing and mining it actually makes them disappear until the timer resets which hurts everybody who's doing legitimate farming. They can get fucked lol.

[shoegazing]

Easy, a single person playing 2(or more) accounts legitimately will be a radically different input pattern to someone using command echoing. For example, only one command will be entered at a time for a legitimate person, vs command echoing where you're going to have multiple accounts receive the exact same inputs at the same time(Even if they put a delay on the multi-boxing software to get around this, it'll massively slow them down, which will help make multi-boxing less viable).

Right now, without any input broadcasting, software tools, or non-standard hardware (I mean, I have some extra buttons on my mouse??), I effectively multibox a 5 character party with 5 different classes and all 3 roles, and complete all endgame dungeons within WoW classic.

I have a high mouse sensitivity to swap quickly between WoW clients and I use only the in-game macros to /follow my tank and /assist my tank before casting damage spells ; macro'd heals and dispels targeted at my party members by name, using e.g. control 1-12 on my naga ; on my Mage and Lock I use polymorph and fear with /targetlasttarget macros as a makeshift "focus target" (/focus doesn't exist in classic, this would be even easier in retail) by targeting two enemies in a specific order prior to the pull so that I can seamlessly CC a different target from the one I am assisting tank to dps.

For a pull like Captain Kromcrush in Dire Maul North where there is a bad AoE fear and an add phase that spawns 2 elite ogres, I preposition casters and healer apart on the pull, run in with Rogue following Warrior, and position the boss where both can hit it. I swap to each of my casters starting with Mage to sheep an add if applicable or start casting Frostbolt then Warlock to Shadow Bolt all on the enemy I am focus firing using simple macros the game allowed me to make. If I know the fear in the encounter will go off after a certain number of seconds, I will watch a timer and swap to my Paladin healer and HoJ (Not on Kromcrush but on similar mobs or encounters this is useful... and yeah I have both /assist and /targetlasttarget options for this as needed) to prevent it from happening on the timer and buy time to burn the prio target with the scary mechanic down. If that's not enough I have muscle memory to swap to my Paladin and dispel any magic Fears. With physical I'll plan ahead and swap Stances on my Warrior to break it immediately with Berseker Rage then swap back to Defensive and taunt, or I have binds to cast Blessing of Protection on either melee and can then swap and immediately /cancelaura it.

For other pulls and situations in the dungeons and tasks in the game, I have more macros and keybinds to do the activities that I want to do ; for example to cast Drain Soul on weak targets and have other party members /assist the Warlock and finish kills to farm up soul shards. Summoning my guildmates out to the cleared dungeon to get buffs is easy peasy, and of course they get a complementary portal to wherever they need to go.

This is the level of game knowledge and preparation that can be applied to multiboxing even a single boss encounter in World of Warcraft. If that is still doable, then for sure this isn't gonna stop the people who are doing the far more easy and repetitive stuff just to make a bunch of gold.

[Unholyground]

Right now, without any input broadcasting, software tools, or non-standard hardware (I mean, I have some extra buttons on my mouse??), I effectively multibox a 5 character party with 5 different classes and all 3 roles, and complete all endgame dungeons within WoW classic.

I have a high mouse sensitivity to swap quickly between WoW clients and I use only the in-game macros to /follow my tank and /assist my tank before casting damage spells ; macro'd heals and dispels targeted at my party members by name, using e.g. control 1-12 on my naga ; on my Mage and Lock I use polymorph and fear with /targetlasttarget macros as a makeshift "focus target" (/focus doesn't exist in classic, this would be even easier in retail) by targeting two enemies in a specific order prior to the pull so that I can seamlessly CC a different target from the one I am assisting tank to dps.

For a pull like Captain Kromcrush in Dire Maul North where there is a bad AoE fear and an add phase that spawns 2 elite ogres, I preposition casters and healer apart on the pull, run in with Rogue following Warrior, and position the boss where both can hit it. I swap to each of my casters starting with Mage to sheep an add if applicable or start casting Frostbolt then Warlock to Shadow Bolt all on the enemy I am focus firing using simple macros the game allowed me to make. If I know the fear in the encounter will go off after a certain number of seconds, I will watch a timer and swap to my Paladin healer and HoJ (Not on Kromcrush but on similar mobs or encounters this is useful... and yeah I have both /assist and /targetlasttarget options for this as needed) to prevent it from happening on the timer and buy time to burn the prio target with the scary mechanic down. If that's not enough I have muscle memory to swap to my Paladin and dispel any magic Fears. With physical I'll plan ahead and swap Stances on my Warrior to break it immediately with Berseker Rage then swap back to Defensive and taunt, or I have binds to cast Blessing of Protection on either melee and can then swap and immediately /cancelaura it.

For other pulls and situations in the dungeons and tasks in the game, I have more macros and keybinds to do the activities that I want to do ; for example to cast Drain Soul on weak targets and have other party members /assist the Warlock and finish kills to farm up soul shards. Summoning my guildmates out to the cleared dungeon to get buffs is easy peasy, and of course they get a complementary portal to wherever they need to go.

This is the level of game knowledge and preparation that can be applied to multiboxing even a single boss encounter in World of Warcraft. If that is still doable, then for sure this isn't gonna stop the people who are doing the far more easy and repetitive stuff just to make a bunch of gold.

Most people aren't doing it manually so they can get fucked.

[Mirishka]

I fully understand their decision to shut multiboxing down, but I think its shitty that they very openly allowed it for nearly 16 years - only to be like 'ok we changed our minds its bad, stop or else'.

[vian]

Just hire 5-10 GMs per region to hunt these fuckers down and whack them.

I could probably do that job.