"Multiboxing" & WoW

Wow. That is the definition of sad and obsessed.

That is crazyness indeed. I am just thinking of exactly how much money that guy must be spending on hardware, subscription bills, electricity, etc.

I don't get it, why do this? Are these people selling virtual stuffs?

Quote from ifO

I don't get it, why do this? Are these people selling virtual stuffs?

They just play with multiple characters at the same time using lots of hardware and shit. Sick and sad people. Seriously. Try to tell me that there are such guys in all those 40k< active EVE players. :roll:

Quote from ifO

I don't get it, why do this? Are these people selling virtual stuffs?

Farming gold and selling it on teh internets for $$ most likely. Though some obsessives will run multiple boxes just for laffs. I used to have accounts running on 3 boxes at home when I used to play Diablo 2. Great for power leveling and muling stuff

Quote from Thrik

Wow. That is the definition of sad and obsessed.

5 Warlord characters.........

I had one Field Marshal character (same thing just alliance side) and I wanted to pull my hair out during that grind.

Must be fun to have such a setup. Completely destroys the purpose of multiplayer and no friends to play with you.

Quote from FrieChamp

I'm wondering what the people at Blizzard say when they see something like this. Probably just sigh and shake their head. I bet there is nothing that can surprise these people anymore (the sock poopers are still my favourite)

they rub their hands with glee at one person paying for so many accounts

the only thing i can really say here is, "why?"

Quote from Sentura

the only thing i can really say here is, "why?"

For the sake of epic virtual items.

Quote from Thrik

Wow. That is the definition of sad and obsessed.

I disagree completely. They are gamers that take gaming seriously.

Quote from Skjalg

I disagree completely. They are gamers that take gaming seriously.

Yeah, 'obsessed' is spending months gearing out a single character, 'efficient' is using that same amount of time to do the same with five characters.It takes a lot mor money than normal, though.

Am I misinterpreting this, or do they not play with all these characters simultaneously? I assumed that's why there're multiple monitors and so many separate machines (as supposed to just using partitions of a single machine, or even logins).

That is sad. That is obsessed.

I take gaming seriously, but I don't buy dozens of computers and copies of one game. That's going well over the line between 'serious' and 'excessive'.

The electricity bill alone must be epic.

Keeps Blizzard happy though.

I would mindn't a 3 monitor setup however, would be useful!

Nuts to Blizzard's happiness.

A 3-monitor set-up might be all well and good, but let's just remember what we're looking at here. Lots and of separate PCs, all running separate copies of WoW, used for playing with multiple characters at the same time.

I call that sad to the 1000th degree.

I am finding it hard too see why there is so much negative feeling towards this. Fair enough if its a setup that has been built to exploit the game and farm gold then granted its sucky as it is essentially cheating. However, if its simply a dedicated player, using their own personal cash earned from a real life job to modify the game experience into a radically different form, I believe we should applaud him for the imagination, insight and technical know how he displays in doing so.

The technical skill alone required to get 40 boxes running off the same connex, all hooked up to KV switches and networked is tough enough. Beyond this I imagine you would need to essentially script yourself from scratch (in WoWs scripting language) a set of macros that would issue long chained orders to your first character, then switch control to a 2nd PC, give this character orders, switch to third PC, issue orders etc. You would need to build a wide range of different group tactics from the ground up to be able to effectively control this number of characters. This alone is a great achievement.

Also at its essence isn't he simply modifying, at client side, an essentially single player game into a group/squad based experience? Or with the 40 box example, into what could be considered an RTS? Surely this guy is only doing what the rest of us devs try to do day in day out, that is to modify an existing game framework into something radically different, yet still recognisable as to where it has come from, and as such easily understood by those who look at it.

I could rant on for ages about why I like this but I guess at its core the whole issue of whether this is sad or cool comes down to personal opinion, I see the ingenuity and ambition evident in what is being done, but I can see that others may view it as obsession gone too far. I'd be very interested to know more about the folks that do this kind of extreme multi boxing and whether they think they are "1337" or if they are just extreme hobbyists with too much spare cash.

Don't get me wrong, the technical merits are very intriguing and I think he's done a good job. However, it's far more effort and money than I'd personally consider reasonable to put into a game, and the fact that WoW is generally considered a huge time sink anyway doesn't help my perception of this.

I'd be inclined to call a guy who bought 20 high-definition LCD televisions so he could turn a room of his house into a 360° viewing area a bit obsessed and sad, too.