Multiboxing prohibited in BG's and Arenas

[Malseph]

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/9r3mly/multiboxing_is_now_prohibited_in_bgs_and_arenas/?

Blizzard has taken a new stance on multiboxing. Havent seen any official announcement about it but it went into effect yesterday. Also not sure if thats against the rules or not to post a link to my post instead of the post. Just let me know and I will fix it if it is.

[MiRai]

Do you care to share how you were getting around the loss of /follow in battlegrounds?

[Malseph]

Do you care to share how you were getting around the loss of /follow in battlegrounds?

Will post videos on my channel within the week for any questions folks have. I just use ctm and iwt. It takes me time to get from one spot to another, but it was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted.

[Lyonheart]

Wouldn't they make an official announcement about this?

[Malseph]

Wouldn't they make an official announcement about this? Thats what I said but I never saw one come up and since they wanted originally to ban me for 18 months I figured I might make sure nobody else runs into this. They literally were going to ban me without warning but the GM saved my ass. They are being really hawkish towards multiboxers lately.

[Lyonheart]

Even though I was upset when they took /follow out of the BGs, I understand why. There are great arguments for and against it, but in the end I except that PvP+Multiboxing=lots of pissed off people. When i read all the hate posts, it seems its 90% about PvP. In rarer hate posts someone talks about it ruining PvE, but only when there is one guy controlling more than a group. I have not seen many against 5 boxing ( or less ) PvE content.

[Jabberie]

Thats what I said but I never saw one come up and since they wanted originally to ban me for 18 months I figured I might make sure nobody else runs into this. They literally were going to ban me without warning but the GM saved my ass. They are being really hawkish towards multiboxers lately.


What got you banned the first time?

[Malseph]

What got you banned the first time?
This did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ibERpbFwDE - I was mass reported by the guilds I was fighting at the time. They even had a pastebin up of the report. I got banned for allegedly causing the crashes in that video with my 12 accounts despite it being a battle of nearly 200 people on each side. Scapegoated for something that wasn't my responsibility as a paying customer, nor could of possibly even been my fault. Vowed to never return to WoW again. Skipped all of legion, sucked back in for BFA.

They wanted to outright ban me again just for being successful in BG's despite no rules against it. Its really depressing to see these attacks on multiboxing, something I have enjoyed for many many years.

Apparently your allowed to multibox unless you win too much. Then it becomes a problem.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I hate to be pedantic, but your sample size is really small and you make a lot of authoritative declarations. In my experience, that doesn't usually hold up well in the long run.

I should note this is not your typical GM that often makes mistakes, but a supervisor who spoke directly with the devs. So there is no mistake here.Time will tell. We've been through that before.

This is basically Blizzard saying multiboxers have an unfair advantageIt does nobody any good to put words in their mouth. We've also had GMs/mods/devs explicitly say that it's a faulty premise that multiboxers have an advantage in PVP, and also that we have no more advantage than a group of 5 people on voice comms together and are actually at a disadvantage against any coordinated team of 5 brains assuming similar gear levels and such. I guess the number of us who remember these conversations are shrinking.

That said, *if* they decided they were tired of spending dev resources chasing/fixing/nerfing all the ways people playing multiple accounts managed to PVP successfully that the devs didn't expect, I couldn't really fault them for just walling off certain areas from multibox play. Then again, I also wouldn't go out and commit seppuku because I lost 5 accounts, two of which have been active for nearly 14 years. Caveat emptor, etc.

[Malseph]

I hate to be pedantic, but your sample size is really small and you make a lot of authoritative declarations. In my experience, that doesn't usually hold up well in the long run.
Time will tell. We've been through that before.
It does nobody any good to put words in their mouth. We've also had GMs/mods/devs explicitly say that it's a faulty premise that multiboxers have an advantage in PVP, and also that we have no more advantage than a group of 5 people on voice comms together and are actually at a disadvantage against any coordinated team of 5 brains assuming similar gear levels and such. I guess the number of us who remember these conversations are shrinking.

That said, *if* they decided they were tired of spending dev resources chasing/fixing/nerfing all the ways people playing multiple accounts managed to PVP successfully that the devs didn't expect, I couldn't really fault them for just walling off certain areas from multibox play. Then again, I also wouldn't go out and commit seppuku because I lost 5 accounts, two of which have been active for nearly 14 years. Caveat emptor, etc.

I wasn't trying to making any declarations. Thats just from my personal experience. I'm hoping this is all sorted out soon.

A blue has responded in this thread https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20769698153?page=1#post-19 and it looks like hes now trying to turn it into a separate issue never before mentioned. Manual movement is exploitive maybe? Not sure what he is getting at.

Edit: Well, that didn't go well. A GM tried to disguise it as a separate issue from months ago that is unrelated and somehow this GM that repeatedly told me all multiboxers were not allowed in BG's and Arenas was wrong despite him being a supervisor and saying it multiple times, even instructing me to report any I see in BG's. Whatever, they wanna play games now and I am too tired to play.

[WOWBOX40]

It certainly seems to be the case, that they are telling you spesifically to not join pvp again. That sucks. They probably reached a climax amount of complaints towards you and now they wish for it to stop. Just be glad they didnt just ban all your accounts. They seem to still want you playing, just not in pvp. Time for a "timeout" apparently, untill things maybe gets better explained later on.

Personally i had a blast soloing AV etc back in days. But i stopped when they removed /follow, as i didnt dare to "circumvent" the removal by instead using iwt on stuff. Too afraid of getting a ban. Damn now i miss the good old days :)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Posted by Vrakthris
Yes, you have been spoken too directly, Malseph, a couple times if I understand it right. As I said, the written response provided was a little misleading, the directives given to you were intended to be primarily for you.


As I said in my initial response, we'd look at exploitative behavior which may be circumventing the previously removed of the /follow command, especially in connection to Zone/Area Disruption.

Posted by Vrakthris
I'm sorry, Malseph, I can't really be more specific than I have been. I'm sorry if you are misunderstanding what I've said, or what was conveyed to you back in July and now. Your activity, then and now, has proven extremely disruptive, impacting the zone and stability or the area and you were asked to stop.

Overall policy has not changed. That isn't to say the various elements of it aren't continually discussed, but when a policy shift happens we tend to see posts made by Community letting the playerbase know.


For example, the update to In-Game Advertisement in the Looking for Group tool.


I think it is time to lock this one up.
I'm beginning to see a pattern emerge.

[Noxdiebox]

I am amazed that it took so long for the gms on US to decide for a ban of multiboxing in battlegrounds after you did so many of them.

Some of our german multiboxers which have also played bgs got told to stop. One did not stick to it and even got punished with a six-month ban.
That was already at the beginning of legion I think.

Anyway... at least you can still do some open pvp :P

[Ellay]

I've found a little bit of success doing arenas with 3. It's horribly clunking but it brings back the good ol times. Did 8 matches and won 6 of them. Granted it's in low ratings bracket.
My random thought to all of this, would be terrible if its completely gone. It's bad enough follow doesn't work.

[Jabberie]

I've found a little bit of success doing arenas with 3. It's horribly clunking but it brings back the good ol times. Did 8 matches and won 6 of them. Granted it's in low ratings bracket.
My random thought to all of this, would be terrible if its completely gone. It's bad enough follow doesn't work.

Check out the official forum thread he had. It was a targeted action on him, not multiboxing in general.

[MadMilitia]

Reading it looks like yes, confirmed to be specifically him.

However arenas are another matter. They aren't BGs you share with randoms so I don't see how a votekick could be abused there. That they mentioned arena should be concerning. Maybe the instanced PVP flags all look the same? IDK.

[MiRai]

Reading it looks like yes, confirmed to be specifically him.

However arenas are another matter. They aren't BGs you share with randoms so I don't see how a votekick could be abused there. That they mentioned arena should be concerning. Maybe the instanced PVP flags all look the same? IDK.
OP could easily be win-trading in Arena.

[MadMilitia]

OP could easily be win-trading in Arena.

I guess that might be possible.

[Malseph]

Nah check all my toons. Haven't done any Arenas at all. Not sure why you would make such an assumption anyway, pretty strange.

It wasn't anything specifically targeted at me, according to the supervisor that contacted me. I don't know who Vrakthris is at Blizzard or who is higher up there. But he was talking about something completely separate it seems, or trying to cover up and disguise this one with something else. In the phone call I was told no multiboxing in BG's and Arenas for anyone, at all, and I even mentioned "There are plenty of other people multiboxing BG's" and the reply was that I should right click and report them. He also mentioned this in the in-game chat. I asked just to make sure and he said everyone.

Nothing Vrakthris talked about was ever mentioned by the supervisor in any form. Which is why the ticket screenshot literally says not to do BG's and Arenas. If it were for anything else, that wouldn't be the result. The result would of been probably a ban or a warning to stop some sort of behavior. So Blizz is being really fishy.

I suspected they were probably just saying that because there was no announcement and because I had been targeted before. This confirms my suspicion that it was directly targeted at me due to the amount of complaints and they were just lying because they knew I hadn't broken any rules and that it wouldn't be right to arbitrarily target me. You can do BG's, unless you win. That seems to be more accurate.

Its not a big deal. I prefer the open world, but I am pretty annoyed at how I am being treated lately by Blizzard after nearly 15 years without having broken any written rules.

[MiRai]

Nah check all my toons. Haven't done any Arenas at all. Not sure why you would make such an assumption anyway, pretty strange.
Yes, it was an assumption (it wasn't masked as anything else), but is it really all that strange to come to that assumption? Really? I mean... You wouldn't be the first mass-multiboxer to do such a thing.


It wasn't anything specifically targeted at me, according to the supervisor that contacted me. I don't know who Vrakthris is at Blizzard or who is higher up there. But he was talking about something completely separate it seems, or trying to cover up and disguise this one with something else. In the phone call I was told no multiboxing in BG's and Arenas for anyone, at all, and I even mentioned "There are plenty of other people multiboxing BG's" and the reply was that I should right click and report them. He also mentioned this in the in-game chat. I asked just to make sure and he said everyone.

Nothing Vrakthris talked about was ever mentioned by the supervisor in any form. Which is why the ticket screenshot literally says not to do BG's and Arenas. If it were for anything else, that wouldn't be the result. The result would of been probably a ban or a warning to stop some sort of behavior. So Blizz is being really fishy.

I suspected they were probably just saying that because there was no announcement and because I had been targeted before. This confirms my suspicion that it was directly targeted at me due to the amount of complaints and they were just lying because they knew I hadn't broken any rules and that it wouldn't be right to arbitrarily target me. You can do BG's, unless you win. That seems to be more accurate.

Its not a big deal. I prefer the open world, but I am pretty annoyed at how I am being treated lately by Blizzard after nearly 15 years without having broken any written rules.
It seems pretty clear cut - They're just tired of your shit and the problems you're apparently causing for others. Even in the reddit thread you created (and have since deleted) there's someone who was in a battleground with you showing a video that they were flagged as AFK (look at their debuffs) by you and your guild (https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/9r3mly/multiboxing_is_now_prohibited_in_bgs_and_arenas/e8e7zmm/), and for what reason? They weren't contributing? What they show in their video says otherwise. They obviously weren't AFK since they have almost the most damage done on the leaderboard for their faction, and you had to abuse the votekick system for that, which I doubt (look out, another assumption) is the first time that's happened.

You can try to claim innocence all you want, but Blizzard was about to hand you another suspension until someone, for whatever reason, stepped in to stop that. In addition, what Vrakthris stated in that Customer Support forum thread (https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20769698153?page=4#post-64) also doesn't help your case one bit, and if you were playing by the rules, nicely, Blizzard wouldn't tell you, specifically you, to stop doing battlegrounds and arena—it's as simple as that.

Stop abusing the system, stop disrupting others' gameplay, stop causing issues, and stop dragging the multiboxing playstyle through the mud... FFS.

[EaTCarbS]

Honestly op you should just play EVE

[thedreameater]

Yes, it was an assumption (it wasn't masked as anything else), but is it really all that strange to come to that assumption? Really? I mean... You wouldn't be the first mass-multiboxer to do such a thing.


It seems pretty clear cut - They're just tired of your shit and the problems you're apparently causing for others. Even in the reddit thread you created (and have since deleted) there's someone who was in a battleground with you showing a video that they were flagged as AFK (look at their debuffs) by you and your guild (https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/9r3mly/multiboxing_is_now_prohibited_in_bgs_and_arenas/e8e7zmm/), and for what reason? They weren't contributing? What they show in their video says otherwise. They obviously weren't AFK since they have almost the most damage done on the leaderboard for their faction, and you had to abuse the votekick system for that, which I doubt (look out, another assumption) is the first time that's happened.

You can try to claim innocence all you want, but Blizzard was about to hand you another suspension until someone, for whatever reason, stepped in to stop that. In addition, what Vrakthris stated in that Customer Support forum thread (https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20769698153?page=4#post-64) also doesn't help your case one bit, and if you were playing by the rules, nicely, Blizzard wouldn't tell you, specifically you, to stop doing battlegrounds and arena—it's as simple as that.

Stop abusing the system, stop disrupting others' gameplay, stop causing issues, and stop dragging the multiboxing playstyle through the mud... FFS.
I always liked MiRai, but after this post you just became my hero. No one can deny Malseph's skill but the dude is a piece of shit. Seeing he got banned is an early Christmas present to the multiboxing community.

[Rocknard]

Multiboxing is allowed in bg's it's just fucking brutal without using follow but you can multibox in bg's nowhere stated you cannot, that Reddit and forum post is my god so misleading, except when they say abusing the /follow that is all.