Answer to question : Is Multiboxing WoW legal and safe?
Note: This question keeps getting asked over and over in many spaces and to keep from typing an answer over and over I figured best to just create a thread for an answer to those questions. Please note that these are my thoughts after reading countless other folks posts in the various mediums. I will do my best to read any replies to this thread and will update this top initial summary post with any guidance that seems reasonable.
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Question: Is Multiboxing WoW legal and safe?
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Short Answer: Yes it is legal, depending on how you do it, though safety is up to debate;
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Long Answer: Multiboxing in theory is allowed but any Input Broadcasting (mirroring), automation, or streamlining is bannable:
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/24258
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...ay-2021/956613
Many non-boxing players seem to be rabbidly doing witch hunts against boxers and the term "streamlining" is so vague that no one really knows what is truly safe...
Some folk are still doing Multiboxing with as many precautions as they are comfortable with. Seems like open world farming and/or interacting with other players is where most people get into trouble. Some folk are still using hardware or 3rd party software though many are not.
Personally the following recommendations in degrees of increased risk are:
- -Safest would be to not multibox in the current climate... I and others choose to continue to box at our own risk;
- -Do not box with any accounts you are uncomfortable losing (I took my main account out of my 5box team);
- -Only have your characters together inside instances (unless you are using a meeting stone or summoning via Warlocks or what not);
- -The most conservative & arguably safest approach would be to not use any 3rd party tools and just alt-tab or move your mouse manually to each window to click (or maybe use multiple PCs each with their own keyboard/keypad/keystick);
- -Possibly slightly less safe but likely still reasonable (at least to me) would be to use the built in windows "ease of use" "mouse over focus" settings.
- -Slightly higher risk would be to use a tool like WOB (http://WowOpenBox.org) to help place your WoW windows and then close it before logging into WoW (likely safter though to just do that manually);
Some folk are using tools specifically designed to not support Input Broadcasting (like JMB or WOB) and when the new guidance came out the developers of these tools recommended at least not using Round Robin (RR) and other features like that which could be considered Streamlining. Maybe they changed their mind about that since then but the bottom line is what Blizzard considers streamlining and frankly no one knows. It is a fair statement that not using any 3rd Party apps to streamline should be less risky than using them.
Using any software (like ISboxer) or Hardware (like a Synchronous KM switch) that supports Input Broadcasting (mirroring), even if you are not actually using the mirroring features, is in my opinion just asking to get banned as at best you are in the undefendable position of "yes it supports that but I wasn't doing that"...
If you do go the Hardware Boxing route I would use separate keysticks for each PC which should eliminate any mirroring as discussed here:
https://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/...cement-options
In the end it comes down to what risk levels you are comfortable with...
If you want to use Window's "ease of use" "mouse over focus" feature the following are some ways to turn that feature on/off:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=1349954576
