Blizzard is changing their policies to make it harder to run multiple accounts at once

If you play World of Warcraft long enough you’ll probably find yourself heading to gather a herb, and out of nowhere a flock of Druids will swoop in and strip it bare. Or maybe you’ll be headed across the map in Alterac Valley when all of a sudden ten Flame Shocks hit you, followed almost right after by ten Lava Bursts. In both of those situations, someone was running multiple accounts of WoW to get themselves an advantage in gathering or combat. They’d use a combination of macros, add-ons, and usually a piece of software that would copy any keystroke made in one instance of WoW across to every other active one.

With the upcoming launch of Shadowlands, now Blizzard is making a change to their policies to stop players from using mirroring software.

It never felt great seeing a player running five or ten characters who was able to just run roughshod over the content they were in. Herb and Mining nodes are able to be picked by multiple people, despawning after a short period, which was a great change that stopped a couple of regular players from having to fight about who got there first. But it turns out that there’s an upper limit to how many people can get resources from any one of them, which meant that the flocks of Druids you could see flying around Nazjatar were stripping the ecosystem bare despite that, all while cornering the market on the Auction House.

Making this change is a pretty clever way of stopping the worst abusers in this system, while still letting players who only ran two or three accounts without the aid of mirroring software still have their fun. I have a friend who likes to do World Quests and old raids with a team of three characters through using the /follow command and multi-passenger mounts like the Grand Ice Mammoth. I’m glad that he’ll still be able to play the way he likes — while I don’t have to worry about the ten Shaman that could be lurking around every corner in battlegrounds.