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Multiboxing = Cheating?
As Recruit-A-Friend Team 1 stood in the Blasted Lands at level 58 - directly in front of the Dark Portal - anticipating their journey into Outland and their last two levels of Recruit-A-Friend triple experience goodness (really I was tweaking some settings in X-Perl), another level 58 player trotted past on his mount.
Then he stopped.
And he turned around and came back to size up my team.
And he said “doubling up huh”.
And then he called me a “cheating fuck” and hopped on through the big green portal.
I immediately submitted a ticket to a GM about this and continued on into Outland.
A few minutes later I felt better of it and abandoned the ticket before it got a response. I figured it would go like this:
- I speak with a GM who assures me that multiboxing is not cheating. I’ve already done plenty of research into that topic as the last thing I want is to not be able to play WoW because I cheated.
- Multiboxing hater gets a 24 hour ban for swearing at me.
- Multiboxing hater is forced to play Call of Duty 4 on his Playstation tomorrow night.
- Multiboxing hater comes back from his 24 hour ban and is even meaner and more hateful to someone else than he was to me, taking out his post-ban aggression on some poor innocent soul(s).
Instead, I just let him go about his business questing in Hellfire Peninsula. 30 minutes later I see him in Thrallmar - still level 58 - as I’m logging out my two level 60 characters.
One thing I’ve learned in life is that bad people punish themselves. The more you try and punish them, the more they’re just going to take it out on their next victim. Just try and stay out of their way and grin at them whenever you can. It confuses and infuriates them far more than any silly punishment.
Yes, you are a cheating fuck. Recruit a friend is killing WoW for ordinary players, you may not see it, but real players do.
If you wouldn’t mind, could you please explain to me how my playing two characters is ruining WoW for anyone?
In my mind, multiboxing is pretty gay. It is NOT cheating though. By playing 2 toons at once, you’re not playing the game as it was intended, and with the recruit a friend, you’re getting an unfair advantage over players who aren’t willing to pay for 2 accounts. With that said, the only reason I believe Blizzard tolerates multi-boxers is because they DO pay for multiple accounts. If you could multi-box on one account, I assure you that it would be banned. You said it yourself, a level 58 came up to you and harassed you about multi-boxing, you gained 2 levels and he gained 0. While it could be that he’s noob, and you’re not, you kill mobs twice as fast, and esentially get double experience (1x on each character). If I want to level my warrior and my shaman, I have to play the shaman through to 70, and the warrior seperately through to 70. You do that in half the time.
So to reiterate, you’re NOT technically a cheater for multiboxing, but I still think you’re real gay. And its unfortunate to me that Blizzard is turning WoW into a cash grab by allowing you to multibox.
Cry about it you nub. If I want to level a warrior to go along with a healer in order to offer various means of help to my guild, then I can. if you dont have the computing power to run two instances of wow on one computer; or have the funds to pay for two accounts, that is your problem not mine. Get over it and play wow the best you can. I will continue to do the same.
you can 2 WOW.exe on one computer?
tell me more
Lots of silly arguments against multiboxing here…
First, if you think multiboxing is cheating because people can level more characters quicker - get a life. Quick levelling will be the motivation for roughly 0% of the multiboxing population. The reason is that you can already level characters with minimal effort by only playing when rested and cycling between several characters on one account. You buy a second account because you want to be able to play two or more characters simultaneously - not simply to make alts.
When you involve recruit a friend, sure, then you’ll level extremly fast - until level 60 when the xp bonus stops. That is pretty much equivalent to…. rolling a deathknight and starting at level 55? Blizzard is deemphasizing the early parts of the game - it’s that simple. It’s pretty clear that this is required as they add more new content and it will take longer and longer for new players to catch up to current content.
But seriously… how does another person’s levelling speed ruin the game for another person? It’s not like people play the same amount of time anyway. Back when I was raiding I also made quite a few alts normally and left pretty much everyone I ever grouped with far behind because I played a lot and knew hoe to level fast. The example of levelling twice as fast in this article is nothing unusual, even without recruit a friend. It can be as simple as knowing which quests are worth doing and which just slow your levelling down.
Anyway, my brother and me dual and triple box these days, we used to 40 man raid a lot a few years ago, but it got old - too much drama, too many idiots and the like. By multiboxing we can finally see what real players can do in WoW. We breeze through every heroic and downed the prince in Kara mostly in blues with our 5 characters. Sure, we’re restricted to 5 and 10 man content, but frankly the higher content bored the hell out of me anyway - too much downtime when learning new raids, the corpseruns are too long, wiping because of other people’s mistakes and not being able to do anything about it sucks etc.
Multiboxing is simply fun! Saying that this isn’t how WoW “should be played” is downright idiotic. Multiboxing makes WoW more like oldschool adventure games where you have full control and don’t have to deal with problems in other people’s real lives. For many of us, that’s a good thing.
There are also many practical issues where being able to multibox is good. Healer disconnects on you and you’re unable to find a replacement? Log on your own and complete the instance anyway. Can’t find key class X to get an instance run started? Multibox ftw! etc
How “real players” can see that recruit a friend is destroying WoW is beyond me. The people who opt into that program will generally be people who are either:
1. Experienced players who have already played the early instances to death and simply wouldn’t have any fun doing so over and over yet again as would happen with normal speed levelling.(They’re either making alts to join their current raid, or like my brother and me - exploring the game from another angle)
2. New players who specifically want to join their friends who are playing in new content as quickly as possible.
None of this should impact “real players” at all, as these people already have commited to who they will be playing with in the endgame.
However, I will say this - the levelling speed you get with recruit a friend makes WoW a lot more fun - it should be the default for everyone(or at least for secondary characters). The speed is almost perfect in the sense that if you do every instance once, including the instance quests - you don’t have to waste time doing other quests to level. Removing the grinding aspect from levelling in WoW is a huge plus.
Oh and Nick, yeah, you can start two copies of WoW and you use an application like autohotkey, for example, to distribute keystrokes to both windows. Once you have that set up, you just need two or more wow accounts so you can have several characters logged in at once. Just google multiboxing, there are several great sites dedicated to helping out people who are new to it.
Ztrobes, you are right about us more experience players, there does come a time where the game looses its appeal and you dont feel like renewing the account because of the same humdrum people who do exactly the same things over and over which make the game predictable.
But to try leaving the game is a little harder, and especally to say goodbye to the friends you have made in the 2.5 years of playing, the multiple lvl 70s you work hard on, or the dedication to the guild you help create.
So the next logical step is to try something new and for me that was multiboxing, even though I am a serious noob, it is great to see your 5 characters all work as a team, even if they do tend to walk in differnt directions somtimes, the full wipes because the macros dont work half the time the way you want them, loosing one character behind because you didnt pay attention of his location or the ganking of a horde that goes terribly wrong and you then become the victim.
Multi-boxing has brought new life to a game that has become stale and even with the new expansion for lvl 80s, you can only do the same thing over and over again for so long.
the bad side is the people that dont have a open mind to this way of playing and the insults are just words on a keyboard, and that wont stop me and I hope future multi-boxers from exploring the new challanges tha come with 5 toons.
I dont really care one way or the other, if you wanna multibox 5 classes more power to you. My complaint is if your mulitboxing 5 shamans for the power they pack and rippin g up the battlegrounds where im trying to play then I have a problem. Im trying to have fun and succeed with my one toon and 5 shamans make it hard as hell. I wont give up but its real annoying. Personally I dont want 5 of the same class but if you do, help yourself. Like I said I could care less as the only place it affects me is the bg.