RIP DAOC Multiboxing 2002-2010

The game that Team Wizzy popularized and demonized Multi-boxing in, where he used it to great effect, especially in RVR, has officially taken an anti-multiboxer stance.

According to Todd Grupp, Senior Manager of Customer Service for Mythic Entertainment on the Camelot Herald:

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This behavior has always been a violation of DAoC’s Rules of Conduct. Specifically, this breaks rules 13, 14, and 16, which I’ve included below. I’ve been playing DAoC since launch, and I’ve been a part of CS here for six and a half years. We’ve been aware of multi-box teams since their inception and have received player feedback regarding the issue since that time. Where the change in our stance as a studio has come into play:

• Clustering has increased the contact rate of players in the game world.
• We now have technology to determine whether a set of characters that appear to be played by one person is being controlled by multi-box means.

CS does not warn, suspend or terminate an account for the use of a 3rd party program or hardware without being able to detect it on our side, no matter how sure we are of what we visually verify. When asked by players what exactly a violation of these rules would be, our CSR’s are instructed to advise the following:

• “One keystroke should only perform one action, on one character, on one account. Anything which is used to circumvent this would be a violation.”

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It's certainly the game where I got started dual-boxing. I find it pretty disheartening that as more MMORPGs are released and accept (if not embrace) the multi-boxing concept, Mythic has chosen to specifically deny it and ban for it.

They have such a minuscule player base these days, they probably figure they would lose more customers by allowing boxing than losing the customers who are boxers, and with the small revenue stream they have every penny counts now to them.

I used to box DOAC, which was especially fun in RVR.

But, then Mythic came along with Trials of Atlantis expansion, tailored the game for high power guilds and raids, shafted the casual player base, and killed the game. There was a mass exodus with that expansion, and the game has been dying a slow death ever since.

It's a real shame because they got the whole battleground and world PVP thing right with RVR. Nothing I've seen from any other MMORPG even comes close.

RvR was fantastic back in the day. I started dual-boxing in EQ, but that was just with a pocket cleric. I didn't really start actively playing multiple toons until DAoC.

I got started multiboxing in DAOC.

HotkeyNet started there too.

It's a shame, really. They could allow it outside of PVP if that's where they're complaining but, as is their wont, they tend to paint with broad brushes instead of targeted responses. No wonder the game is fading. Too bad, too. It was my first MMO and I still remember some of those times fondly.

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“One keystroke should only perform one action, on one character, on one account. Anything which is used to circumvent this would be a violation.”

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A round robin system would play with this rule. Funny that the CS rep is too fucking stupid to understand how easy it is to abide by this rule and still multibox.

Round robin key

Keypress 1 Toon 1 attacks
Keypress 2 Toon 2 attacks
etc....

all pressing the same button.

What a tool.

There were two types of complaints. The main one was that multiboxers (including Chinese commercial farmers) werre monopolizing certain encounters and preventing other players from doing them.

The other complaint was that multiboxers had an unfair advantage in RvR due especially to simultaneous casting.

The first problem could have been fixed by (1) making loot available in other ways or making it bind-on-contact and (2) giving mobs abilities that are difficult for multiboxers to handle.

Ironically, Mythic made both types of changes, but they didn't give them a chance to succeed. The second type of changes were only published on the test server today and nobody's even tested them yet.

The RvR problem could have been fixed by code changes.

The vast majority of DAOC multiboxers were using HotkeyNet which means Mythic could have mostly solved the problem by disabling HotkeyNet. I wrote to two different Mythic employees offering to help. They didn't take me up on it.

I could have put a switch in HotkeyNet for them that they could call from the client to disable HotkeyNet in selected encounters or RvR or wherever they wanted.

That sucks :( DAoC was good in it's time.

Fur beat me to it, but yeah

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“One keystroke should only perform one action, on one character, on one account. Anything which is used to circumvent this would be a violation.”

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roundrobin = win again. no problem boxing and DAOC is again available =)

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Originally Posted by Mokoi

Fur beat me to it, but yeah



roundrobin = win again. no problem boxing and DAOC is again available =)

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Unfortunately that written "rule" doesn't really summarize what Mythic is enforcing.

Mythic has that "rule" mixed together in some muddled way with other rules that prohibit software that does "macroing" or "scripting."

Even if their written rules were clear, which they are not, it might not matter because they are using a new program to catch offenders. I think that program is probably the real rule. Whatever that program looks for exactly, however it happens to be written, that's the real rule.

Edit: By the way, they aren't calling that new rule a "rule." They are pretending that they haven't changed their rules, and that they are only enforcing the same rules that have existed for years. They are claiming that the new rule, quoted above, is only an explanation that CSRs have been instructed to give.

If this all sounds confusing and absurd, it is. Compared to Blizzard's customer service department, Mythic's is a bunch of clowns. It's really unbelievable.

I haven't played in a couple years, but I'd be surprised if a good portion of this problem isn't the animist class.

In my opinion, it was always a broken class which could deal damage from a safe location. Something which fit Mythic's own definition of an exploit prior to the introduction of the animist.

Stackable mushrooms that do 8-15% damage to a character. Then stack animists. Even if the mushrooms are getting killed, they can be replaced fast enough in number large enough to kill an character in seconds. There was also the problem that (when I left the game) mushrooms finished their cast even if a player left line of sight. So you could peek around a corner and jump back but if there were 20 mushrooms there, you were dead. The whole time the animist is some place unreachable.

There was also the matter of end game content being trivialized by the animist class.

I can see where there could be a problem with multiboxers considering the total population playing still.

I'd love to see another game in the spirit of DAoC. WAR need not apply (hey, let's flip some unattended objectives for realm points!)

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Originally Posted by Freddie

Edit: By the way, they aren't calling that new rule a "rule." They are pretending that they haven't changed their rules, and that they are only enforcing the same rules that have existed for years. They are claiming that the new rule, quoted above, is only an explanation that CSRs have been instructed to give.

If this all sounds confusing and absurd, it is. Compared to Blizzard's customer service department, Mythic's is a bunch of clowns. It's really unbelievable.

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That's pretty standard behavior by Mythic, Verant, Blizzard and The Party. It is standard procedure to claim that the new way of doing this is the way it should be, even if they have denied for years that it was a problem.

I remember many a night pulling Jay out of towers or camping keeps with my animists ( Proud member of Brotherhood of Steel) then jay rolled banshees and and i had to side with him BAH!!!!. then vanilla iceee came along etc. But animist boxing was never that big it was enchanters and that ultra sexy PBAOE and banshee's with their cone aoe that made life sexy.

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Originally Posted by HTeam

I haven't played in a couple years, but I'd be surprised if a good portion of this problem isn't the animist class.

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Prepare to be surprised.

Probably not too long after you stopped playing (and right about the time I went on about a 2 year break), Mythic placed numerical limits on the number of total pets that each Animist could cast, and a numerical limit on the number of total animist pets allowed in a single area. At the time, I believe that they claimed that it was for better server stability and performance, but when they echoed that change to the Theurgist class it made a strong case for the move to be a method of balancing high-end encounters by limiting the number of non-player attackers that a small group of people could generate.

No, mainly the issue has to deal with Mythic's path forward as population has dwindled. They started to "cluster" servers to provide shared RvR areas, since the RvR game suffers the most with smaller numbers. This was fine for the PvE side of the game, since most of the good stuff wasn't instanced, but it was at least duplicated across each server in the cluster (Dragon is down/camped on Server1? No problem, we can just port to Server2's Mainland area and check that Dragon spawn). But, apparently, the ability to PvE more efficiently and get to the real bread and butter of their game, RvR, put somebody's panties in a bunch at Mythic, and they pushed to eliminate the duplicate zones... again in the name of "server optimization". So every area became shared on a cluster. Still, populations were split between several clusters, so most of the population values were still not to the extreme where you could still expect to find a decent farmable mob uncamped if you were looking to make some in-game currency or get some items for your characters.

Fast forward to last year, and Mythic had to keep combining more and more servers together until there were just 3 clusters, and even on those clusters, 2 out of the 3 had < 100 or so players on at a time. So they came up with the grand idea to create a new cluster, force everybody to transfer from their current servers/clusters to that new one, so that all of the population would be together, and everybody could theoretically use any of their characters created. But now for the entire playing population in a particular realm, each decent encounter only has a single instance. And they've gotten to the point where they can be killed by a single person or pair of people running multiple accounts. So the population finds itself in a situation where it becomes nigh impossible to kill certain MOBs and obtain their drops without buying them from the multi-boxers that camp the spawns... most of those groups being from professional outfits that sell the in-game currency for real-life currency in the first place.

Rather than instance these encounters, as many people consistently have asked for, or provide anti-multi-boxer measures in the encounters, or just ban the activities of the anti-social outfits, Mythic has gone down this route. And every person that has ever had a single issue with a multi-box group is applauding them for doing the "right thing", even though it really is not the most optimal solution, and Mythic won't be clear on what is and isn't allowed, because of whatever reason.

Round-robin keypresses, key-press delays, alternate tools all seem like they may provide the answer. However since nobody can really be sure what Mythic CS does to detect what they describe as illegal in-game conduct, it's hard to be sure what will or won't be tolerated.

Me? I haven't actively multi-boxed in DAOC for a few months. Even then, I mainly did PvE with multiple Ice Wizards, but found that the end result wasn't of much use for what I wanted to accomplish. I played around with a pair Necromancers in the Molvik Battleground with a Minstrel for speed, and a trio of Necromancers out in New Frontiers. But nothing very serious like the Team Wizzie, Team Animist, Team SM, etc. that are in the game, and nothing as advanced as the 5-boxing I did when I tried out LOTRO. And while I think that its a stupid decision, I can't say for sure whether it will positively or negatively impact the game for me in the near future.

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Originally Posted by JamieW

Rather than instance these encounters, as many people consistently have asked for, or provide anti-multi-boxer measures in the encounters, or just ban the activities of the anti-social outfits, Mythic has gone down this route.

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They ironic thing is, they are providing anti-multboxer measures in the encounters! One of the developers has been doing a ton of work on that, and the first results of his work are in yesterday's Pendragon patch. They didn't even give it a chance to get tested or go live.

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Originally Posted by Freddie

They ironic thing is, they are providing anti-multboxer measures in the encounters! One of the developers has been doing a ton of work on that, and the first results of his work are in yesterday's Pendragon patch. They didn't even give it a chance to get tested or go live.

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Perhaps, but from my reading of the patch notes, they aren't targetting just multi-box players that use clone-setups (ie., 4 PBAE casters stacked on each other).

The patch notes say: " New mechanics have been put into place to target inattentive players." I haven't seen the changes in place on Pendragon, but I the wording of it makes me think that non-played bots, etc. may also be targeted with these changes.

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Originally Posted by JamieW

Perhaps, but from my reading of the patch notes, they aren't targetting just multi-box players that use clone-setups (ie., 4 PBAE casters stacked on each other).

The patch notes say: " New mechanics have been put into place to target inattentive players." I haven't seen the changes in place on Pendragon, but I the wording of it makes me think that non-played bots, etc. may also be targeted with these changes.

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Your reading makes sense but my comment wasn't based on the patch notes. Additional info was given to me privately. Many changes were made specifically to stop multiboxers.

Edit: I'm not saying those are the only changes they made. I don't know what else they did. But they made a number of changes designed to stop multiboxing at those encounters.

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Originally Posted by HTeam

I haven't played in a couple years, but I'd be surprised if a good portion of this problem isn't the animist class.

In my opinion, it was always a broken class which could deal damage from a safe location. Something which fit Mythic's own definition of an exploit prior to the introduction of the animist.

Stackable mushrooms that do 8-15% damage to a character. Then stack animists. Even if the mushrooms are getting killed, they can be replaced fast enough in number large enough to kill an character in seconds. There was also the problem that (when I left the game) mushrooms finished their cast even if a player left line of sight. So you could peek around a corner and jump back but if there were 20 mushrooms there, you were dead. The whole time the animist is some place unreachable.

There was also the matter of end game content being trivialized by the animist class.

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Nah, that's long ago been nerfed into oblivion. In fact, the major neutering of the animist class happened well before Catacombs, even.

To wit:

• Nerfed number of shrooms per animist.
• Nerfed number of total shrooms/pets per 100-yard radius.
• Nerfed shroom health by 85% so that one wizard AoE (or hell, even a THANE aoe) could kill them all.
• Nerfed to-hit on shrooms.
• Nerfed shroom aggro so that aggregate aggro went to the animist instead of the shrooms. (This effectively killed animists soloing encounters where the mobs would last long enough to kill the animist, e.g.: dragons.)
• Nerfed shroom LoS so they became nigh useless on keep walls and around doors.
• Nerfed creeping spec CC turrets to be heavily affected by diminishing returns, basically killing the spec.
• Nerfed turret damage for off-spec shrooms, basically killing using creeping DD shroom stacks as damage while PBAOE'ing with your verdant tank shroom or bombing with arb.
• Nerfed verdant's main shroom PBAOE to-hit, damage and the survivability of the main shroom due to nerfs to verdant's "buff" shrooms.

Basically, the only viable animists left after all the blunt-stroke nerfs to a mechanic that was obviously not well thought-out, were arboreals. And those suffered severe issues with their "bombs" having stupid fucking problems like not being able to path into a keep or (LOL) not being able to catch sprinting players or someone running by you at an oblique angle using speed 5+.

It just got so damn silly that you ended up with a class that had roughly 85% of its original capability completely gutted, despite the fact that you could ALWAYS just AoE mezz a gang of shrooms and then forget about them as your entire raid just walked blithely by the sleeping, full-duration-mezzed pets.

I mean, I see why they did it, but the roller-coaster ride from "Hey, what's this new class all about?" through "Wow, this class is FUN!" to "OMG, my class...what have they done to meeeee??!?!" was depressing to live through as an animist.

These bludgeon-style nerfs to the last interesting class I played was what finally made me quit DAoC for good.

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Originally Posted by JamieW

Round-robin keypresses, key-press delays, alternate tools all seem like they may provide the answer.

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Not if they simply decide to outlaw multiboxing, which is what they seem to have done. They may not have covered every possible action with their "1 button/1 action/1 character" statement, but it looks as if they're saying that they'll take action against anyone who tries to play multiple accounts at once.

Sounds like a response to the shrinking population of a game that is on its last legs. They've probably got no reason to want to spend any more time or money on it, just milk it until it finally keels over.