Multiboxing Anarchy Online

Why multi-box this game? I'm not even going to bother an attempt in answering that question since we have our own personal reasons. I love and will always love AO because I prefer Sci-Fi over Fantasy. There are other reasons to multibox this game, or at least give it a try. The original game is free and there is no limit (that I have seen) on the number of free accounts you can make. So if you're interested in trying the game for an unspecified duration to try before you buy into it you're more then welcome. There are other subscription options as well and those will be discussed later.

Anarchy Online is a very PvE heavy type of game and multiboxing works well for this end.

Player vs Player in AO has always been an more of an after thought and is more of a chaotic free-for-all then many other games. You can definitly use multiboxing in PvP and since there is a lack of fear mechanics currently in-game it would be harder disorient a group. There are serious imbalances between some classes and the imbalance changes depending on level ranges.

The biggest down side to Multiboxing in AO is the lack of macro commands and how they can be executed. For example /follow doesn't take a parameter so you have to have your /follow target already selected. There is a way around this as I will discuss later.

Originally I attempted multiboxing a group of engineers but this group lacks some balance and as with many games pet pathing can be wierd and cause additional headaches. I will discuss the different classes and their multiboxing synergy later.


Hardware limitations:

• On the down side, AO (currently) is a game based on DX7 and wasn't coded to make much use of your video cards GPU. This means it taxes your CPU to hell and running multiple instances even minimized can easily cap your modern CPU to 100% and when overloaded, cause the game clients to crash.
• On the up side, the games memory requirements can be scaled way back.
• Got a sweet video card? Great, it won't help you until they roll out the new engine based on DX9c. I imagine then, if that day comes, multiboxing AO will become far more friendly.