Multiboxing and bot-farming? When will SE draw the line?

[Altena]

I can't see how it's possible to play 2 characters at the same time in this game without some form of bot..

FFXI or 1.0? Yeah sure.. Because combat was 10x slower, and half of the combat relied a bit on auto-attacks.. In 2.0 however, when you are required to hit a button every rough 2.5 secs, I truly can't see how that's possible even with 2 keyboards in front of you.. So that's 2 characters... Anything more then that? No way, that's obviously a hack of some sort..

Basically automated third party scripts or programs are against ToS and can be/should be reported. Pretty safe to blanket everyone that uses 3 or more accounts at the same time unless they are doing excessively trivial tasks.

[LordSideKicks]

Get this. Some ppl do it to Plvl Characters and sell the Characters to earn money. Using 3rd party program or use build in macro. I believe is against TOS to sell accounts and it is hard to catch but you can see them doing it in game.

Multi boxing is good or bad?

[Ravno]

That's not relevant. A RTM who powerlevel using multiboxing will have each account under a different name and can be ban for account sharing without anything to do with boxing. A legit boxer will have all his games registered under the same SE account.

[PerrythePlatypus]

Muliboxing =/= boting
Two different things. Boting should be extremely strictly enforced as not aloud. Alas SquareE's server security is pathetic, and they don't seem to care to make much effort to get rid of them.
One of the reasons I'm out of here.

[LordSideKicks]

That's not relevant. A RTM who powerlevel using multiboxing will have each account under a different name and can be ban for account sharing without anything to do with boxing. A legit boxer will have all his games registered under the same SE account.

Thanks for the info. Let's see if SE ban them.

[Pinworms]

If they are using a 3rd party program it is against ToS. Pretty cut and dry. If they do it without then they are fine.

[Ravno]

If you are using your mouse driver, mumble, direct X or any 3thd party program it s against TOS ?
It's not clear, a third party program is against ToS if it's a cheat or give an advantage to the player.
Not sure about software boxing since you gain no advantage to an hardware boxer.

It's a gray area (at least as long as you do pure 1 keypress = 1 action) and SE will never tell witch 3thd party are allowed or not they have others things to do than giving certifications.
If SE judge it's a cheat, software boxer will be ban so that's definitivly a risk and i advise to stick to hardware boxing. But the risk is low, i don't see why SE will think it's a cheat since all others MMO allow boxing (software or hardware).
And by the way, there is a report of one software boxer who was mistakenly ban because SE thinked he was a bot and he get his ban lifted after telling SE he was a software boxer and witch software he was using.

[SirSchmoopyofAwesometon]

A program that controls the other toon?

What happen to just having keyclone?

I still rock keyclone. I don't multibox anymore, but it worked just fine for WoW..

[sQQuare]

only game (to my knowledge) ever having a ban against multiboxing was very early everquest (the ultimate multibox game haha) but after awhile they removed it because it made no sense.

How would you ban ppl, on what grounds, what proof would be considered enough, and lastly no company could afford the amount of GMs required to track multiboxers since they follow the same patterns normal player does.

The difference on botting is that you can track it by searching for repetitious patterns etc, and lastly multiboxing make use of core fundamental functions that have been around in IT since the 60s, it would come down to "haz pc must be multiboxer" ie most of us who plays.

And lastly, and this is where Blizzard got alot of heat, tracking program like warden(wow) would have to be allowed to act the same way as keyloggers and trojans in order to really see if you are using a program that allows you to run several clients at the same time. Warden is "only" allowed to track its own memory space, which is still considered "blizzard" property.

So while a multiboxer might annoy the odd player in an mmo much like a fly annoys an elephant the resources required to hunt down ppl who multibox are atm being used by NA to hunt terrorrists, so untill that problem is solved or multiboxing becomes no1 prio of the NSA, dont bother