Multi-Boxing

[Dren]

I had almost forgot about an experience I had a few weeks ago while hitting the BG's hard one night.  I was on another BG binge of mine to grab as much honor as I could to get my next S1 piece.  I kept noticing a tight group of gnome mages that all looked alike and all did the same things. 

I didn't really take notice until I saw them in the 3rd BG I was in.  It was at least three mages, but it could have been more.  It was hard to tell since they were always synced up together and overlapping.  They would all sit and drink together, get on mount together, move together, etc.  Obviously, this was one person controlling multiple characters at the same time.

Anyway, they could really bust up people with essentially 3-4 mages all hitting the same target at once or all doing the same AE damage to everyone around.  I then thought of the potential for grabbing honor and marks damned fast with this technique, but to what end?  I'd think farming materials, etc. would be more profitable if you are going to the trouble of having 3-4 accounts logged in at one time.

Anyone else have any run-ins with people multi-botting WoW?  I really hadn't seen it to this extreme in any MMO I've been in.  I've read about it, but never seen it personally.

[Evildrider]

I had almost forgot about an experience I had a few weeks ago while hitting the BG's hard one night.  I was on another BG binge of mine to grab as much honor as I could to get my next S1 piece.  I kept noticing a tight group of gnome mages that all looked alike and all did the same things. 

I didn't really take notice until I saw them in the 3rd BG I was in.  It was at least three mages, but it could have been more.  It was hard to tell since they were always synced up together and overlapping.  They would all sit and drink together, get on mount together, move together, etc.  Obviously, this was one person controlling multiple characters at the same time.

Anyway, they could really bust up people with essentially 3-4 mages all hitting the same target at once or all doing the same AE damage to everyone around.  I then thought of the potential for grabbing honor and marks damned fast with this technique, but to what end?  I'd think farming materials, etc. would be more profitable if you are going to the trouble of having 3-4 accounts logged in at one time.

Anyone else have any run-ins with people multi-botting WoW?  I really hadn't seen it to this extreme in any MMO I've been in.  I've read about it, but never seen it personally.

I used to see 20-man groups doing the same thing in SWG. 

[Nebu]

Team Wizzy in DAoC = 8 wizards played by one person.  Yeah, sadly this happens in many MMO's.

[Chimpy]

There was some guy who had waaaay too much money/needed to get laid REAL badly who had set up a huge rack of custom built machines all controlled by a single KVM switch, bought 40 copies of WoW, and then proceeded via fun macroing to do MC with 40 toons controlled from the one keyboard.

Just the UI/macro setup alone needed for such an endeavor puts the required nerditude to heights I could never imagine to achieve in my worst nightmares.

[SurfD]

if you think 3 or 4 mages are nasty, you should see 5 Elemental Shaman in action.  Fuckin Sick.

[Teleku]

5 Moonkin moon beam spam

 

[Chimpy]

if you think 3 or 4 mages are nasty, you should see 5 Elemental Shaman in action.  Fuckin Sick.

You play on the Reckoning battlegroup, don't you?

That guy and his heroism/lightning overload rapage of people gets bloody annoying.

[Merusk]

On Venture Co. a few of us have run into a similar group. 5 blood elf warlocks all controlled by the same person.  (I think all their names were "Rider"  Shadow Rider, Blood Rider, etc.)

I've seen one or two other similar groups around over time.  Yes, it's sick.

[Teleku]

Dear god, 5 Warlocks controlled by one player.  He could just run around tab targeting people and throw one instant Dot x 5 at people all around him and pretty much assure their death. 

I mean, trying to kill 1 warlock already is like trying to solo Grul.  5 working in perfect unison would be scary to behold.

[Jayce]

You'd think that this wouldn't work for most classes, because they often have an Achilles' heel. Of course, warlocks are not in that boat   

But really, what happens if you cc a few of them?  5 dispel/purges or whatever don't do you a lot of good.  Do they all trinket or something?

[Azaroth]

I've seen this done before, and it's generally with mages. Plenty of classes it'd be pretty crazy with, though.

I know it's not illegal to multibox in general, but one wonders after watching people create synchdump and autotarget scripts on IPY (essentially turning their entire team into bots controlled by one person) whether multiboxing would eventually become illegal if people started running multiboxed 5v5 teams. Taking targets out instantly and decisively one by one would probably be pretty unstoppable.

[Zetor]

Actually elemental shaman are the best class for 5-boxing, simply because they can heal [5 chainheals at the same time nullify AOE], do heavy synchronized burst dps [EM+CL is nasty enough from ONE shaman], and have stacking utility [5 grounding totems every 15 seconds = good luck getting your spells through; 5 healing stream totems = permanent renew on all 5 shamans, etcetera]. Oh btw, Totem of Wrath stacks too, so 5 of that equals +15% spell crit.

We also have a 5-boxer on our server, he plays Tetria/e/i/o/u the elemental shaman/s and ganks people in the wild (it's the same idea as being ganked by a 5-man group, only with less lube), etc.

There are videos of a 4-boxer doing arenas with 4 elemental shaman + a healer [priest, paladin, restoration shaman] played by someone else. As silly as it sounds the first time, he hit ~2000 rating with this makeup... and the counters to this team are not that trivial either.

Anyway, it's their $70 a month... I guess.

Edit: unfucked tags. Also, I've seen a 5-boxer on another server in our battlegroup 5boxing a team of 4 warlocks + 1 priest (Osirisa, ... Osirise) in AV. He's not at the 2000s yet, though.


-- Z.

[Teleku]

I've seen this done before, and it's generally with mages. Plenty of classes it'd be pretty crazy with, though.

I know it's not illegal to multibox in general, but one wonders after watching people create synchdump and autotarget scripts on IPY (essentially turning their entire team into bots controlled by one person) whether multiboxing would eventually become illegal if people started running multiboxed 5v5 teams. Taking targets out instantly and decisively one by one would probably be pretty unstoppable.

Actually, I doubt that would be the case.  While having perfect sync with 5 guys can cause havoc in a general BG, in Arena's, teams are already working closely with each other.  It's already common for a single target to be called out for everybody to take down, and this is taken into account with Arena strategies.  Thus, the person trying to multi box would be at the disadvantage, because he doesn't have 5 separate people working closely with each other, giving the full array of advantages multiple types of classes give.  Not to mention how important movement/twitch and working LOS is in Arena's.

We played a team several times in 3v3 Arena that consisted of 3 PoM Pyroblast mages.  While that sudden blast of damage was insane, we beat them every time.  Gimmick shit like stacking classes just doesn't work in Arenas.  Due to high a level of skill, and to much gear made specifically to midigate burst DPS.

In a general BG though, you could easily rape face.

[Koyasha]

Personally I can't figure out how to do that - the instant synchronization, that is.  I can twobox and sometimes threebox, and in EQ I could play up to 5 at a time due to the slower pace of the game, but I've never been able to send input to more than one client at once unless I have my hands on two separate keyboards simultaneously, in which case the most I can do is send it to two clients.

So I've always wondered how people can have 3+ characters do something exactly at the same time with basically zero delay.  What I would love is to be able to run several clients on one computer and have my keyboard input go to ALL of them instead of just the one in focus, but I haven't figured out how to do that.

[Trippy]

Key broadcasting software:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Multiboxing_Software_Requirements

[Koyasha]

Wow, nice.  I figured it had to be something like that, but when I looked before I didn't really have a good idea of what to search for.  This could prove interesting.

[Zephyr]

Team Wizzy in DAoC = 8 wizards played by one person.  Yeah, sadly this happens in many MMO's.

Before the nerf, there was a guy doing the same thing with smite clerics on MLF.

[Tale]

There was some guy who had waaaay too much money/needed to get laid REAL badly who had set up a huge rack of custom built machines all controlled by a single KVM switch, bought 40 copies of WoW, and then proceeded via fun macroing to do MC with 40 toons controlled from the one keyboard.

Just the UI/macro setup alone needed for such an endeavor puts the required nerditude to heights I could never imagine to achieve in my worst nightmares.

46-boxing WoW
http://kotaku.com/gaming/wow/2-people-47-pcs-46-wow-accounts-no-life-275830.php
http://www.gameslah.com/evolution/iboxing.htm

[SurfD]

Here is a very informative link to a multiboxing writeup from a dude named Xzin (had a 5 box 4 Mage + 1 Priest setup that he took to Warlord rank back when pvp ranks still existed).  Gives a step by step breakdown of everything he used (keyboards, switchers, seperate bank of programmable keys, some broadcasting / syncing software and the like). 

Far as i remember from reading the post, there is almost 0 automation (ie, classic unattended bot type assistance) involved.  He does all the work through keybinding / ingame macro setup.

http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=410

[Zetor]

Here is the link to the 4-boxing elemental shaman arena video. (horrible resolution, but you can see what's happening usually) Here is a vid of the #1 5v5 team beating a high-ranked 5-shaman team.

The funny thing is, typical tactics that you'd expect to work against a 4-boxing team just fail against 4 elemental shaman. Staggered tremor totems mean almost complete fear immunity, 4 grounding totems mean that getting curse of tongues to stick will take a LONG time, and staying in LOS [unless you're a hunter at max range] means you will get blown up. Sure, stacking nature resist would mean an easy win, but who stacks nature resist in arena?! :p
Yeah, it's possible to heal through the onslaught, but they can target-switch to any other target at any time, and completely blow it up before the healers have time to react (this is what happens in Aelli's video most of the time). It's like a 4-dps arena team with perfectly synchronized burst (which is all but impossible to achieve).


-- Z.

[Simond]

Obligatory Sam 'da Man' Deathwalker reference.
NWS/NMS.  

[Azaroth]

Here is the link to the 4-boxing elemental shaman arena video. (horrible resolution, but you can see what's happening usually) Here is a vid of the #1 5v5 team beating a high-ranked 5-shaman team.

The funny thing is, typical tactics that you'd expect to work against a 4-boxing team just fail against 4 elemental shaman. Staggered tremor totems mean almost complete fear immunity, 4 grounding totems mean that getting curse of tongues to stick will take a LONG time, and staying in LOS [unless you're a hunter at max range] means you will get blown up. Sure, stacking nature resist would mean an easy win, but who stacks nature resist in arena?! :p
Yeah, it's possible to heal through the onslaught, but they can target-switch to any other target at any time, and completely blow it up before the healers have time to react (this is what happens in Aelli's video most of the time). It's like a 4-dps arena team with perfectly synchronized burst (which is all but impossible to achieve).


-- Z.

This was my general point. There's a huge difference in outhealing a DPS team in 2v2/3v3 and 5v5. Perfectly synchronized DPS is a huge benefit, and in a lot of cases it's going to be 100% impossible to heal through.

[Phred]

Here is the link to the 4-boxing elemental shaman arena video. (horrible resolution, but you can see what's happening usually) Here is a vid of the #1 5v5 team beating a high-ranked 5-shaman team.

The funny thing is, typical tactics that you'd expect to work against a 4-boxing team just fail against 4 elemental shaman. Staggered tremor totems mean almost complete fear immunity, 4 grounding totems mean that getting curse of tongues to stick will take a LONG time, and staying in LOS [unless you're a hunter at max range] means you will get blown up. Sure, stacking nature resist would mean an easy win, but who stacks nature resist in arena?! :p
Yeah, it's possible to heal through the onslaught, but they can target-switch to any other target at any time, and completely blow it up before the healers have time to react (this is what happens in Aelli's video most of the time). It's like a 4-dps arena team with perfectly synchronized burst (which is all but impossible to achieve).

-- Z.

This was my general point. There's a huge difference in outhealing a DPS team in 2v2/3v3 and 5v5. Perfectly synchronized DPS is a huge benefit, and in a lot of cases it's going to be 100% impossible to heal through.

Speaking of which, a friend of mine was complaining that teams seemed to be using some sort of mod that let everyone nuke the same target almost instantly. Does anyone know if this exists? It sounded kind of fishy to me, as the same affect could be achieved with an assist macro and vent but he was quite adamant that it was an illegal mod. I couldn't Google up anything that sounded like it either.

[Chimpy]

Here is the link to the 4-boxing elemental shaman arena video. (horrible resolution, but you can see what's happening usually) Here is a vid of the #1 5v5 team beating a high-ranked 5-shaman team.

The funny thing is, typical tactics that you'd expect to work against a 4-boxing team just fail against 4 elemental shaman. Staggered tremor totems mean almost complete fear immunity, 4 grounding totems mean that getting curse of tongues to stick will take a LONG time, and staying in LOS [unless you're a hunter at max range] means you will get blown up. Sure, stacking nature resist would mean an easy win, but who stacks nature resist in arena?! :p
Yeah, it's possible to heal through the onslaught, but they can target-switch to any other target at any time, and completely blow it up before the healers have time to react (this is what happens in Aelli's video most of the time). It's like a 4-dps arena team with perfectly synchronized burst (which is all but impossible to achieve).

-- Z.

This was my general point. There's a huge difference in outhealing a DPS team in 2v2/3v3 and 5v5. Perfectly synchronized DPS is a huge benefit, and in a lot of cases it's going to be 100% impossible to heal through.

Speaking of which, a friend of mine was complaining that teams seemed to be using some sort of mod that let everyone nuke the same target almost instantly. Does anyone know if this exists? It sounded kind of fishy to me, as the same affect could be achieved with an assist macro and vent but he was quite adamant that it was an illegal mod. I couldn't Google up anything that sounded like it either.

Shit, you use something like Proximo which puts up a unit frame for all of the enemy targets if you mouse over them before combat, then you can just click and go bazoom.

If the pre-combat portion of the match takes more than 20 secs, good teams will have a main target, then a switch tgt already laid out and they will call it out, pop their heroism/bloodlust and other DMG cooldowns on the switch and rape tgt 2. The first target is a decoy to get the healers locked on one target and have pain supression/Blessing of Protection burned on a target that is not the first to die.