I’m kinda with Palooka on this. Multi-boxing for solo grinding? Awesome, more power to you. But doing BGs with it is just retarded. It’s not sporting, and is clearly only allowed by Blizzard because some idiots will pay for 25 accounts just to feel like God. Obviously no sanctioned competition allows it.
When it gives you a potential advantage in one way along with a bunch of serious disadvantages, yes, that *does *mean it’s fair. It’s just as fair when one person multiboxing five characters ganks you as when five separate players in a coordinated group do it. (Which is to say: it’s going to happen either way, and it’s not terribly sportsmanlike, depending on the context.)
Multiboxing does not allow you to be “a top player.” It allows you to be a group of one. The only benefits you gain are from having a large number of characters that take actions simultaneously. Someone who does a shitty job of setting up what coordinated actions those characters have won’t suddenly become a good player. One person badly multiboxing five characters is going to be as powerful–or less–than five people badly playing five separate characters together.
I appreciate that you’ve probably had some bad experiences with multiboxers, but that doesn’t make it cheating. There is no automation. It’s not a magic “I win” button for any reason other than the number of characters involved, which can be duplicated *and improved upon *by a group of the same number of people playing as coordinated individuals.
ETA: Arena tournaments, IIRC, don’t let you use anything that isn’t part of the default UI. That even includes any addons, which are absolutely legal and sporting. Any restrictions on multiboxing in tournament play are only going to be a result of the same rules–*not *because it’s “cheating.”
If you multi-box, do you HAVE to have separate registered WoW games even if you’re doing single-computer? I’ve never tried, so I don’t know if it’s possible to open more than one instance of WoW if you only have the one registered copy.
It goes beyond that. In a tournament, you create a new character and equip it from a stock of top-level PvP gear. However you want to build, spec, and gear your toon is up to you, but it’s entirely consistent. The gear winds up mattering only a little. Everyone is on an equal footing, and it’s the quality of the players and their teamwork that wins or loses the day.
So tournament is not applicable as an example of fair versus unfair, except as an extreme example of “hyper-fair” that has nothing to do with day-to-day play in… well, not “the real world”, since this is WoW after all, but normal realms.
Yes. You have to be able to log into multiple accounts, since you can’t log twice into a single account simultaneously.
Registration is tied to accounts, not to installations. Anybody can open as many instances of the game as their computer can handle. You can only be logged in to one instance at a time per account, however. You can’t log into your own single account five times.
Yup, distinct accounts. And obviously, all up to the same game level, or else you can only play at the expansion pack content level of the lowest-expansion account. And if Cat does some weird phasing junk, that may not work.
Nearly all the multiboxing in WoW is done not with software, but with multiple computers and a KVM switch setup so that one keyboard is controlling the actions of multiple toons.
I snipped a lot, so hopefully I didn’t miss some subtlety here, but I do not think this claim is correct. When compared to 5 individual players playing in coordination, a 5-man multi-box does have automation. One button press does the job of 5 individual button presses.
IME, multi-boxing is rather rare, and not really worth getting too upset about. But it has ruined more than one BG while leveling (they almost always give up at max level, as the main benefit is reducing leveling time), and is rather clearly not “fair” if one defines “fair” to mean “every player on the field has access to the same abilities”. No amount of coordination can match the automation of one button press firing 5 arcane blasts simultaneously.
I really do think that the obvious answer is the right one - Blizzard allows it not because they deem it fair, but because it brings in enough money to outweigh the relatively small number of complaints.
Indeed. Reinforcing the point that this is exactly the same as having multiple people playing the accounts and hitting the buttons you tell them to.
I don’t think you understand what is meant by “automation” in the context of what is allowed in WoW. Automation means taking an action without a person initiating it–for example, a program that let you program in preferred series of abilities to use, and then evaluated the conditions and executed the best possible action, so that you could DPS by just mashing one button over and over, would be automation.
The guiding rule in WoW seems to be that the addon can’t do your thinking for you. You are the one who has to decide how to act and when. And if your action is to hit the “1” key on ten characters at the same time, well, you’re the one who decided what to put on that “1” for each character.
Wanna have the focusing power of a multiboxer? Get a bunch of friends together. Designate one person as the leader. Put them on follow. Make a bunch of assist macros so that your attacks go to their target. Voila, now you can swap like a multiboxer–and you can even decide which abilities to use on your own, if you want.
I think Blizzard is more concerned about balance than you think. (And that multiboxed accounts make up a tiny drop in the bucket of their income, given that there are, what, 12 *million *accounts?) Otherwise, we’d be able to buy our way to top-tier PvE and PvP gear.
Thanks for posting that. Followed the instructions, and got my cooking skill from 0 to 349 without much hassle. Although annoyingly, for some reason one of the quest givers is turning his nose up at my cranberry sauce.
Been working my way through the dungeons on heroic, and farming the elemental bosses for gear. Finally got the DPS cloak off windy boy, and a couple of rings today. Picked up the Tyrannical Beheader a few days ago. Got my average item level up to 238 now. I’m probably equipped to start raiding, although with Cata just around the corner it’s not going to happen. At least I’ll be well geared for the start, although it look like I’ll be replacing a lot of things pretty quickly.
Managed a best of about 9,500 DPS against a level 80 training dummy over two minutes, by popping trinkets, avenging wrath and vengence. Think my best against an actual boss is about 7,000 DPS.
Here’s my Retribution Paladin, basically a lump of metal with a dwarf inside somewhere.
Forget Shot From Guns nonsense, stuff is up.
3:15 PST and Dawnbringer server is live!
Servers are up!! …kinda. 
I was able to log into only one toon without getting insta-booted on two different servers. And then that toon (who I’d left marooned in Dal) tried to port to IF. Booted mid-port. ><
At least I gave the gnome mage a nice tip for their trouble. 
Huh, now my launcher is downloading some 106MB thing…
Death by addon error. Don’t forget to update!
Got back in finally, and I gotta say. Stormwind is made of awesome. All the textures got upgraded and I’m having a lot of fun rubbernecking at the changes.
King Chin took the chance to remodel his castle too – guess he had to make sure he outdid the AH facelifts. 
(about time too that the AH’ers broke into their cash and upgraded their surroundings)
This may be a case of ‘it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!’ but suddenly I have every place in Kalimdor explored except Durotar. I only had about 5 zones explored yesterday. Hell, I dunno, but I’m taking advantage of it!
Also, Achievements list says if you don’t have Explorer yet, you’ll have to explore the Cata zones to get it. So they just tacked on some more zones, not screwing with the old ones.
The new Orgrimmar is freaking awesome. Azshara is now fun and relevant, too. All I’ve done for 2 hours now is take flights around Kalimdor and EK.
Well, not sure about this one, but I managed to get into Org and stay alive long enough for the game to discover Valley of Strength but it didn’t recognize I had discovered Org aaaaaand I can’t afford to die again.
Edit: There’s current a topic over in the support forums that is making me crack up: “[Bug] Draenei too fat to fit through stockade”