Blizzard is making multiboxing harder (again)

Back in November, Blizzard made input broadcasting software an actionable offense, meaning that if you were using software that took your keystrokes and sent them to more than one World of Warcraft character at the same time — software that makes multiboxing much, much easier, to be clear — you could be banned for it. If you’ve ever seen a group of ten Druids ruthlessly farming all the nodes in a zone, or ten Shaman running around AV all Frost Shocking in unison, you’ve likely seen someone multi-boxing with input broadcasting software. Multiboxing itself wasn’t banned — if you want to run around using three keyboards and manually inputting three sets of commands, you can still do that, as hard as that is to imagine for me. But if you’ve used software that takes the keystrokes you’re making on Shaman #1 and automates the process of sending the exact same keystrokes to Shamans #2 through #10, you could get banned for that.

Now, with a further update, Blizzard has gone past input broadcasting via software and has made any software or hardware that mirrors commands or automates or streamlines the process of multiboxing in any way actionable. This means if you’ve got a hardware solution instead of simple software that lets you hit the keys once, you can be banned — for example, this device, which sends the keystrokes from one keyboard to five PC’s simultaneously, which multiboxers started talking about using as soon as the ban on input broadcasting software was instituted.

What does this mean? Well, it means that you can still multibox per se — they still haven’t banned that — but they have effectively banned any means to automate it. If you want to run ten Shaman through AV, or ten Druids through a zone mining nodes, or ten DKs through a raid, you have to be using ten physical keyboards and entering ten sets of commands manually, without any means of automating or streamlining the process. So they haven’t banned multiboxing, but they have made it much, much harder. Honestly, I’m not sure why they didn’t just ban it outright, but I suppose this allows for players who just run a couple of characters at once via separate PCs with separate keyboards to keep at it, or players who run multiple installations of WoW and tabbing between them. But if you’re mirroring your commands in any way, through software or a USB splitter, they’re going to ban you.

I feel like this is a move against the abuses that prompted the original policy update back in November, and I understand why they did — seeing a swarm of characters moving in perfect unison as they stripped an area clean of resources is pretty bad, not going to lie. But I do feel for players who just enjoyed running group content with their small army of characters, and I’m not sure what they can do to keep enjoying the game. It wasn’t a surprising change, but I get why for some players it’s a hard one.