WoW and Autofollow

[Yarddog]

I do my "three-boxing" actually with just two computers, so my support team is running in two windows on the second computer. Had no problem with it last night and there were times I would have had an unfocused window for more than 10-20 seconds, probably even for a minute or more, at least when traveling.

But I was only on those toons for less than an hour when the server was restarted and I switched to another server for a single box session with some RL friends.

I'll be watching to see if I have any disconnect problems tonight due to a window being unfocused and report any problems here.

[zoll]

Just thought of something... There might be a slight chance that I'm experiencing the disconnects due to a change of resolution.

Used to run @ 1280x960 whereas I'm now running in 1680x1050 (x2 windows that is).

Might just be my system that's screwing up at the higher resolution. Haven't had a chance to try again yet though.

[Gallo]

I suggest that everyone post something in the Bugs forum on Wow.com and also in the General Forum. I've seen several posts so far... the dual boxing community is larger than I thought.

[shockbeta]

Did some testing in the wee hours of the morning prior to going to work.. here's what I found.

First, if you follow someone up a winding staircase... you're almost gauranteed to make the follower fall. Secondly, When you first autofollow you actually start the run animation then tween to walk animation(looks horrid, I'd say as bad as the stutter run before this "fix").

Next deserved it's own paragraph... I managed to bug the autofollow. I followed my mage. Walked all the way upto her. Broke autofollow and low and behold I walked. I hit my walk/run toggle a few times... I still walked. I stopped moving forward and moved backwards.. still walked. I strafed, jumped just about every movement you could do. I still walked. I shifted to cat and I could run again. Weird crap I tell ya.

Another thing I detest with the new autofollow... If you follow someone and stop with them. In order to run anywhere, you need to first break autofollow, then press your movement key... So forward... forward now you are moving forward... Double tap to move is annoying.

And this is just me, The speed at which you walk upto someone from the distance you do is ungodly slow. I'd do that maybe if I was acting out bullet time or something. An average stride takes less then 1 second, the game makes it over 1 second. I think that alone makes you look like 1) you have a stick up your @$$ cause you think you're the sh!t. 2)Just idiotic.

BTW here's my post I put up in general forum.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...06001252&sid=1

If anyone feels like adding there two cents or can point us to a better post to add our complaints to do so. That way we can make it known how autofollow now blows. Most people who play one character won't even realize autofollow for a while. Only us multiboxers understand autofollow and know how it can effect gameplay to us, and to players in general. As I pointed out about following up stairs, and breaking autofollow with blink. I'm sure there are more things that make this go wrong. I'm sure whoever thought of this thought, hey this would be a cool feature to show. It's more realistic. But realism like this doesn't need to be in a game. I'm sure adding this autofollow code was way more important then adding/fixing any of the other countless things they could have.

[shockbeta]

Okay with a little more testing, the impact is minimal at most for multiboxing. The biggest thing to not do is do any kind of speedy range jumper. I.e. charging, blinking, any others. As was posted previously just need to change your style a little bit. Get in range. break autofollow. charge/blink in. drag back to your group. hit your autofollow key. Still annoying that they put it in. I'll detest it for enternity I swear. So much that I'm already trying to test a macro that will move forward and spam /f. The only problem I'm having right now is that sometimes it gets stuck in walking mode until you /f and break it again. Also trying to figure out how long to run it, and what to fire it. Think g15 can do a toggle macro that will work for it. Probably won't work out though... Need to bind forward to another key, then autofollow to a key then I can just spam those two keys in the macro. may work after all...

[Ceromus]

I have 5 computers in my house connected to the same wow server. When I follow character 1 character 1 and character 4 will start lagging something awful. When I follow character 5 no one disconnects but character 1 lags a bit. When I use just character 1 2 and 3 and follow character 1 nothing happens no one lags no one disconnects.

I can't figure out what the problem is but it didn't happen before this last patch. Its very disappointing.

[Bunny]

I have had a similar problem:
I had my five toons in UC and wanted to move them to SM. Every time i follow my main guy with the other four I whould get really high ping times from the server and ultimately get disconnected. I thought it was a problem of my server (EU patching was yesterday) so i created 5 little gnomes on another server (cute, aren' they?) and ran them to IF without a problem.
Kind of scares me to hear that someone has similar problems... let's see if it works tonight...
Bunny (Durotan EU)

[Steph]

I can confirm that I saw the following characters /walk up to the followed character.
BUT! This appears to happen only one time. Afterwards the characters move basically as they should.

I did not 'loose' any of them while riding about on epic mounts through shattrath or flying with my 60% gryhons.
I did not encounter any negative effects while doing the new 'kill 20 ogres' quests and was basically allways moving and then casting.

I tested this yesterday after midnight on my EU server, so after peak time. This may be a latency issue or a cosmetic change about the follow mechanics.

[Yarddog]

Last night with my two characters following my main I only experienced the walk problem some of the time and not as severely as a couple of days ago. But I was only able to get on for a few minutes of play so I can't say anything other than it was different, and not as bad, but still there in some form.

Perhaps this is just some bug that's being ironed out and not intended new behavior of the program. One can only hope, LOL.

[Yarddog]

I played some more last night. The "problem" was just as bad as ever. Again, not a show stopper, but extremely annoying. There were some times while moving around that my following characters got stuck on something because they were lagging behind a bit.

I was playing a rogue as my main and he was mostly stealthing around, so he never really got out ahead of the followers that much anyway.