I'm going to use this thread to get some of my thoughts out, I may or may not then compress this information into a blog post.

Like many of you I've been multiboxing in wow for years, but the recent unfriendly changes (plus my own hatred of dailies) has kept me away from it for the last couple of months. I miss the challenge of working out MB systems and methods, though, so I thought it might be a good time to try a different game. I recently had an interesting time delving back into Tera, so I thought I'd like to try an f2p game, to see if it is easier to keep from burning out on multiboxing a game if you don't have the pressure of subscriptions making you feel like you HAVE to play.

In order to six box, btw, you need to get customer support to issue you six keys, this took me a total of three emails last summer (I personally already had my original key from four years ago, and then I got 1-1-3, obviously only the last person actually read my customer service note about how many keys I wanted). This process might take a while to work through.

I chose to download the non-HD version of Lotro, and I'm running six boxes (plus my usual smorgasbord of other programs and tabs) easily with five of the boxes set to Low graphics and my master box set to high. Each box takes up about 1 gig of memory and 11% of my cpu, except for the "high" box which chews 19/20% of CPU.

I've spent about 8 or 9 hours playing and tweaking this setup, http://www.alluxi.com/multibucks/isboxer/Luxlunae-Lotro-4-14-2-13.xml, which looks like this http://i.imgur.com/f8Er9VJ.jpg

Obviously the leftward screen is my main screen, with quest tracker feeds running down the left hand side and the six cast bar feeds underneath the chat box on the master box.

My impressions of the game itself are what I remember, that it is charming and the story is interesting and the world is filled with neat characters. Multiboxing however, is about 3x more painful than in wow. Quality of life is just lower. Anyone who likes is welcome to start with the setup that I shared above, it works off of assisting and following the leader of the fellowship. There does not appear to be any way to automatically transfer leadership, and hence master, when swapping boxes. In my setup, I used "=" as the "assist and interact with target" key, but unlike in wow this isn't a smooth process. For some reason it often takes many clicks to get all six boxes with the quest dialog open. You often get an error when trying to interact, with "that object is busy", and you have to toggle repeater on to select, accept, and turn in quests once you do have the box open. One quality of life thing that I did add was a second repeater toggle key, titled "repeater click" on this config, which is a normal repeater toggle except that it is a press/release so that it can be bound to one mouse button, giving you the option of holding down that key, clicking with the normal button, and then releasing that key. I find I've liked it enough as a concept I'll be using that whenever I return to wow.

That said, the place that I got bogged down on my original run through the game was questing in the late 20s, and for now I don't think I need a full group of six to quest better, and I don't feel like the frustration of a full group of six is giving me what I want in terms of an experience. I'm going to start over with a group of three (a "small fellowship") and see if that suits me better.