When looking back at my World of Warcraft experience, I came to the conclusion that when added up, I've been playing this game for over 3 years already. I've even participated in the very first beta ;)

Over time, a lot has changed, I took a few breaks, leveled plenty of classes to the max level, had my days of hardcore end-game raiding (pre-TBC, Naxx), Reputation grinding, Honor grinding (pre-TBC, Warlord), war effort grinding (our guild opened the gates of AQ).

After a year and a half, I took a break from what had become a huge grind, before TBC came out. I returned a while later with some colleagues on an RP realm however.

I've seen the introduction of Blood Elves, the change in faction balance, the faster leveling, and the lack of instance groups at lower levels due to this, combined with the lack of understanding of game mechanics by an ever increasing number of new players (no time or groups for them to get the experience at a low level).

I've also greatly enjoyed doing all new TBC quests a few months after it came out, with less crowded zones, and now I'm liking the casual side of WoW :)

As part of staying on the casual side (casual meaning no hardcore raiding/grinding) I've given the geek in me more freedom to fool around with anything WoW related.

One of the first result of this was the C# World Of Warcraft Armory Library 0.1 I recently released.

The next thing I'm on, is trying out Multiboxing, which is the subject for today's post. There is a lot of information out there, a lot of misconception and taboo around it. Hopefully you'll have a better view on the concept after reading this, as well as an easy to follow guide to try it out.

Multiboxing

First things first, what is Multiboxing?

Multiboxing is the action of controlling multiple accounts from a central point, where each key press results in a single action or macro on all your accounts.

It is important to note this 1 to 1 relation. It's this relation that seperates multiboxing from botting. Bots combine multiple actions into a single key press, which is not allowed and will get you banned.

What is allowed is for example pressing 1 on your keyboard and having one account perform Frost Nova, while another account has Flash Heal bound to 1.

Creating in-game macros and binding these to keybinds is also allowed, since you are using the existing macro system. (e.g.: Popping a trinket and then casting is perfectly fine when you play on one account, therefore it is allowed)

Legality

Lots of people think that multiboxing is a bannable offense and report it.

This is one of the greatest misconceptions out there, because multiboxing is allowed by Blizzard, illustrated by the following collection of GM and CM responses: Dual Boxing - GM Conversations.

As you can see, there is no doubt about the legality, various blue posts have shown it is acceptable.

There are two main rules which have to be respected however, to stay legal.

First of all, all accounts used to multibox with have to be in the same name.

And second of all, the one to one relation between a key press and one actions, as described above, can not be violated.

Advantages

As soon as people accept the fact that they can not get a multiboxer banned simply for the fact they are multiboxing, a new argument gets raised, about how multiboxers gain an unfair advantage (mostly used as a PvP argument).

While this may hold up on a PvE realm, for PvE actions, GM Belfaire strongly counters this argument by suggesting grouping gives the same advantage.

On a PvP realm, or for PvP action (PvE or PvP realm), Malkorix writes several blue posts stating that it might even give a disadvantage for PvP.

Blue posters are objective on this matter, and clearly see that 5 good individual players are still better then 1 good player controlling 5 accounts and having to think a lot more on coordinating them all together, while also being more limited in dealing with various actions.

Opinions on Fun

We've seen multiboxing is legal, does not give an advantage someone else couldn't achieve, yet there are still arguments, which I categorize into opinions.

One of these arguments is on the aspect of fun, people believing it can't be fun to multibox.

This is an opinion about multiboxing, you are free to have them, but what does it matter to you if you think I'm not having fun multiboxing?

These arguments are the hardest kind to argue with, because they are subjective instead of objective.

You might not like multiboxing, that's fine, I don't mind, nobody is forcing you to multibox, no multiboxer is making you do something against your will, so I would politely like to point out the following as a counter to all subjective opinion-based arguments:

Different people have different definitions of fun. Let each have it their way.

Conclusion

As you can see, multiboxing is legal, provides a real challenge, enables you to learn more about the game (macro's, game mechanics), eliminates dependencies on others when looking for groups at lower levels, and is a great way for a geek to spend his time tinkering with World of Warcraft.

In the next post, I will go through all the steps I performed to set up my multiboxing setup (5 shamans on 2 physical machines), stay tuned!

Resources

Some of the sites I used to learn more about multiboxing:

 

Since I started playing World of Warcraft again, I've taken a bit more of a developer approach to it this time, and after founding a little casual guild, I decided to create a site for it.

However, I'm a lazy developer, I don't intend to update the site regularly whenever someone joins or leaves the guild.

Also because I'm quite geeky when it comes to statistics, and a bit of a theory crafter, I planned to populate our guild site with lots of stats.

Where else would be a better place to get them from then the Armory? It contains everything I want!

After searching a little, I found various libraries for PHP, Perl and Ruby, but nothing for the .NET world. At least nothing that fetches everything I wanted, like Reputation and Skills.

So, I decided to just write it myself! :)

Over the last week, I've been developing ArmoryLib, and decided to release it under the LGPL and use Google Code to store the source in.

You can find version 0.1 at http://code.google.com/p/armorylib/ under Downloads.

Have a look at the Documentation to see more details on the API and some example output.

Please, feel free to beta test it and leave your comments! Let me know when you use it for your projects, and remember... LGPL requires you give prominent notice about using the library! (A link to this post will do)

I will make a future post showing how I've used it to integrate into our guild website.

 
Deze post is geïmporteerd van de oude blog en is nog niet geconverteerd naar de nieuwe syntax.
I strongly advise everbody NOT to buy World Of Warcraft!

My brother bought the game today, I installed it, and then I wanted to create an account for him. And that's when the trouble began...

It seems Blizzard does not care about money, since all it's account creation pages are unavailable, throwing errors everywhere.

Or wait, they get the money from you at the shop, and then make it unable for you to use what you bought an hour ago!

Judging from their own forums (which I cannot post on because I don't have an account, and cannot create either) this problem is going on for some days.

First a normal 'Service Temporarily Unavailable' error, indicating their servers can't handle it. Which is really very bad for their image, a company like Blizzard, which can't keep their main billing pages up and running? Normally it's the other way around, the 'we want your money'-pages always work

And then everything is just falling appart, have some errors:
  • [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp] /WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp(86,18) Unable to load tag handler class "org.apache.taglibs.standard.tag.el.fmt.MessageTag" for tag "fmt:message"'


  • [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/agreementView.jsp] File "/WEB-INF/jsp/base/language.jsp" not found' [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/base/footer.jsp] Error running /usr/local/java/bin/javac compiler'


  • org.apache.jasper.JasperException: Unable to compile class for JSP


  • Error running /usr/local/java/bin/javac compiler



And if you happen to not get an error, it will simply tell you that your session timed out, after 2 seconds...

Slow poke! You took too long to complete the Account Creation process and your session has timed out. You will have to start again from the beginning. Sorry!

If you are persistent and can get through, to step 4, you notice you can select a game-card as a paying option. (After that, it dropped out again) But if you want to use the guest-account that comes with the box, that option is gone... It's a guest account to play 10 days, but they want your credit card info for that...

Don't expect any response from Blizzard either...

I'm really disappointed, 45 EUR for the game and then you can't play it!

Best thing, even their contact form is throwing errors. And nothing is mentioned on the main site, everybody has to figure it out themselves.

I'm going to start calling them starting from Monday until I can create the account, otherwise they can give my money back and take their game back until they get their crap together.

Good game, terrible service...

If anyone from Blizzard reads this: Try to turn this negative publicity into something positive...