Forcast: Potential Future Multiboxing Issues

Gold farming is not a "real" problem for Blizzard. They only claim it on the surface due to the moral issue Gold Farms present. You have to think about what drives the game forward. Mostly it's the top end raiding guilds. I've bought probably around 30k gold myself, and I'm in a top raiding guild with Illidan on farm for a couple of months. If they'd want to ban me, they would have done it a long time ago. Shouldn't be very hard to track my 5000 g economy spikes.

Probably close to half the people in my guild have purchased large amounts of gold just to keep raiding effectively. Pushing through new content is costly, not only on repair costs, but flasks, gear, potions, mana oils etc etc. Before the pot-nerf, I probably used elixirs/flasks for at least 100g pr day, on top of 50-100g repair cost. So close to 1000g spent every week, and that's not including new enchants for gear upgrades and stuff like that. Now I don't use much since everything is on farm, but come Sunwell I'm probably gonna purchase some more.

If anyone wants to read a VERY interesting book about the future of technology, pick up The Singularity Is Near - by Ray Kurzweil.

It is an amazing book that talks about the up and coming innovations in technology, and how it is going to change society. Imagine having tiny robots floating in your bloodstream that allow you to get 100 times more oxygen to your brain and muscles. Imagine tiny robots that will fight disease from inside of your body. Imagine computers that not only "think", but that can intelligently design other computer programs.

It's an amazing book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near is a synopsis of some of the chapters.

blizzard has made 1 hour delay for mail sending gold and AH gold delivery, they dont care about gold farmers eh?

blizzard really monitors gold leaks and probably ban gold sellers here and there

Yes! 100x cell oxidation! Sign me up :)

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Originally Posted by Gallo

If anyone wants to read a VERY interesting book about the future of technology, pick up The Singularity Is Near - by Ray Kurzweil.

It is an amazing book that talks about the up and coming innovations in technology, and how it is going to change society. Imagine having tiny robots floating in your bloodstream that allow you to get 100 times more oxygen to your brain and muscles. Imagine tiny robots that will fight disease from inside of your body. Imagine computers that not only "think", but that can intelligently design other computer programs.

It's an amazing book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near is a synopsis of some of the chapters.

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All I'm going to say to this is, pick up a Sir Issac Asimov book. Any of his books really. He has accurately described the future over and over again. The cool thing is how he did. Every nerd/scientist I know has read the Foundation Trilogy and want to bring about what he describes. Fiction becomes Reality faster sometimes than new fiction can be made lol. Look at what Star Trek did for society. The inventor of the cell phone got his idea from Star Trek. And who did G Rod get star trek from? Sir Issac Asimov.

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Originally Posted by stompershock

you give them to much credit, unless you are talking from personal experience

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Being someone who obviously knows a bit about server side detection, what would you say it is doing the server side detection? A human or a pattern matching Algorithim? Blizzard are very effective at eliminating farmers, and I'd wager this is mostly down to the server side software at their disposal which is continually monitoring pretty much everything that can or could be automated, as well as generating huge reports on gold/item transfers, etc.

As far as small-time botters go, you are quite unlikely to get caught if you are sensible and have well written bots. Glider is probably the most well known for 'end user' botters, It allows grinding although rather stupidly, it doesn't deal with zoning, mailing, or even quests, thus meaning that to effectively bot with it you have to zone into an instance and set it running, or risk it in the open. Innerspace is the "real mans" platform, and what I'd wager most of the commercial botting farms are using. Its a development platform, Its functionality extends to how good you are at programming, and with ISXWarden you are fairly well screened from all client-side detection.

All in all, we will see an increase in farmers using 5-man groups to farm, however I really doubt that they will be anything like the current ones you see, instead they will be cold, calculating, well written programs that are capable of dealing with most eventualities being checked over by one skilled programmer everytime an "anomolie" happens.

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Originally Posted by Xzin

You dump the screen, do basic image analysis to give the computer the data.

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There was a proof of concept fishing bot that did this to scan for the lure, repositioned and snooped the audio channel in a crude way and right clicked the loot.

Goldfarmers already do raids to gear paid characters, I don't see why they need to multibox. If you need to outfit your characters in blacktemple gear its likely you might have one or two characters there just for duplicate loot.

But frankly most high end guilds already do this in selling raid slots for gear or tuning up a character to sell on ebay.

Goldfarmers are not doing Black Temple. I highy doubt they even do karazhan. And afaik none of the top guilds on my server are selling spots in BT raids.

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Originally Posted by kayb

Gold farming is not a "real" problem for Blizzard.

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I think the potential threat for multi-boxers isn't gold sellers or instance-farming. Blizzard already is working on limiting the impact of gold farming/selling, and daily quests have probably put a nice dent in their business. And instances are... instanced.

I think the potential threat is if gold farmers decide to multi-box outdoors. On many servers there is already plenty of competition for locations where players can farm stuff like motes for primals. If there is an occasional multi-boxer monopolizing a spot now and then it's probably no big deal. If certain choice spots are being farmed 24/7 by teams of gold farmers, Blizzard will step in at some point. If it becomes a wide enough problem, they will take whatever steps they need to stop it, which could include banning the use of software keystroke broadcasters, and being aggressive in pursuing multi-boxers.

Mind you, I'm not saying this is even likely at this time. But if there were to be a threat to legit multi-boxing, I would think that it would be from wide-scale 'hogging' of farming spots by gold farmers, and the disruption it would cause to other players.

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Originally Posted by Fursphere

It would be extremely easy to stop multi-boxing, from Blizzard's side.

Turn off /follow

Neither software nor hardware methods would matter at that point. It would simply be too difficult for 99% of people to want to mess with.

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Don't give anyone any ideas :)