Interview subjects needed for article on multiboxing

[Falkor]

In the interest of forum cleanliness can you please confirm when you no longer require any more interview candidates and drop us a link to the article for future reference

[Mukade]

Please talk Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw into pugging against a mutiboxer in arena or BGs :evil:

(In fact just seeing what he'd have to say about WoW would be a laugh)

[jinglehopper]

In the interest of forum cleanliness can you please confirm when you no longer require any more interview candidates and drop us a link to the article for future reference

I'm still collecting interviews if you want to respond Falkor. Always want to hear a luck dragon's opinions.

Article is due out in a month but I should come back with a link when it is up.


Greg

[jinglehopper]

Greg, please contact Sam Deathwalker and feature him!

Who is this Deathwalker you speak of and why should I feature him?

Greg

[badashh]

Greg, please contact Sam Deathwalker and feature him!

Who is this Deathwalker you speak of and why should I feature him?

Greg

He is the person whose e-peen would probably grow the most by having an article written about him. He has 26 or so accounts and has got to level 30 ish in about 6 months or so, another boxer Prepared has 30 or so that is past 70 in about the same amount of time. He wants to be the "best" but refuses to listen to most of the advice we give him. I'm sure he'll give you his resume about boxing EQ, you just have to ask. But as far as WOW boxing goes he has little to nothing to offer.

[Kaynin]

Greg, please contact Sam Deathwalker and feature him!

Who is this Deathwalker you speak of and why should I feature him?

Greg

He is the person whose e-peen would probably grow the most by having an article written about him. He has 26 or so accounts and has got to level 30 ish in about 6 months or so, another boxer Prepared has 30 or so that is past 70 in about the same amount of time. He wants to be the "best" but refuses to listen to most of the advice we give him. I'm sure he'll give you his resume about boxing EQ, you just have to ask. But as far as WOW boxing goes he has little to nothing to offer.

It's still amusing to have him around though. But he's quite unique indeed.

[Farleito]

If I may share some thoughts...

To help narrow down your candidate(s), you may want to clarify what you mean by pre-WoW multi-boxing. I think you will wind up getting a lot of responses from people who multi-boxed because they saw somebody else doing it, tried it and fell in love with it. I'm not saying that those people did not become very good or efficient at it...I'm only suggesting that they were presented with the idea rather than forming it for themselves. I don't want to flood this thread with arguments saying "Well...I came up with multi-boxing on my own...", because I know there are lots of you that probably did. There's just more people that didn't (myself included).

I think it boils down to personality traits. Individualists. A person that strives to be self-sufficient. Someone who subconsciencly seeks out the "best of both worlds". Cross that with the type of person that you would see playing several hands of black-jack at a casino, or multiple games of on-line poker. It's not necessarily to increase personal wealth or gain, but more of a compulsion to keep themselves entertained at all times.

I don't fit this personality trait. I starting multi-boxing after seeing other people succeed at doing it. I did it to gain an advantage over a single player. I would certainly agree that I would not make a good interview subject but I did a college research project similar to this topic.

[Osiris]

I was playing WOW pre Xpacs on Magtheridon on the Alliance side. Our guild was preparing to do BWL, we were in the hallway when everyone started shouting about "OMG the Zins." I looked up and saw this Arcane Explosion running down the tunnel like a traveling nuclear explosion...and Xzin WIPED MY GUILD. That's all the motivation I needed to sign up.

As for personal factors of multi-boxing, I have a decent job, so I consider the money spent like any other hobby. $60 a month in fees was the equivalent of a tank of gas not too long ago. I am in the IT field, so I already had multiple computers set aside for work.

Also, since I do work a lot, I can never tell really when I'm going to want to play. So I play at odd hours. Before I 5-boxed, I wanted to get a toon keyed for Kara, and I was LFG for Auchindoun and part of pick up groups for over 6 hours...and at the time I was in a pretty big guild...and I had a hard time finding help.

The biggest reason I wanted to do it though was to PvP. Going into the BG's have been my favorite. With one toon, you can't always influence the outcome of a BG. But with 5 you almost always can make a huge difference.

Props to Ellay and Xzin.

[Trammel]

Multiboxing wasn't really done in the UO hayday at all.

There were several reasons for this.

The first is that movement was primarily (entirely if you wanted any control) used by right clicking and holding your mouse in the direction you wished to run. This would require mouse emulation, which even today within this community isn't commonly done. The idea of playing with multiple mice on multiple computers just isn't feasible. The next is that all of the targeting in this game was also done by mouse clicking (and you guessed it, the way you got up a useful health bar was by clicking and dragging it off the character). There were no such commands as /assist or /follow. Furthermore, in the games prime there were essentially no "safe" non-pvp areas (and when you were killed you lost ALL of the items/money/ect. you were carrying). This kind of risk:reward ratio simply didn't allow for such activities.

The closest thing to multiboxing that really went on was using software/mouse scripting programs to "macro" skills on multiple characters simultaneously, though even this was rare and only really became popular much later.

So to the absolute best of my knowledge, multiboxing as it exists now wasn't even remotely possible during the days when UO was king.

It was really the advent of everquest, with it's PVE rulesets and scriptabilty/commands that allowed for the earliest multiboxing.

There was a group of I believe professional programmers at the time that had some rather interesting bots (or so the story goes) in a game called Asheron's Call. How they did it (before bots were publicly available) and what kind of set-ups they used (ie: ran multiple instances/clones/bots or what have you or really how or what they did at all) on the same computer they used wasn't really ever known. You could try asking around the AC-DT community or possibly on some of the other shards to hear of anything interesting happening in that regard or if somebody could point you in the right direction. The allegiance was called The Borgs or The Borg or something of that nature. There also came to be some "multibotting" in this game but still not really in the sense you would imagine.

Basically, the communities were very small and there was very limited networking that existed at that time so I'm pretty sure that anybody who was successful at anything of the sort would have been very well known very quickly.

[Khatovar]

There was a group of I believe professional programmers at the time that had some rather interesting bots (or so the story goes) in a game called Asheron's Call. How they did it (before bots were publicly available) and what kind of set-ups they used (ie: ran multiple instances/clones/bots or what have you or really how or what they did at all) on the same computer they used wasn't really ever known. You could try asking around the AC-DT community or possibly on some of the other shards to hear of anything interesting happening in that regard or if somebody could point you in the right direction. The allegiance was called The Borgs or The Borg or something of that nature. There also came to be some "multibotting" in this game but still not really in the sense you would imagine.
.

From what I recall from my years in AC on LC, there weren't really boxers. There were people who ran with bots. From what I recall, people just created their bot, set it to do X, Y or Z and hung out in one small area within range of their bot. Almost every town had a buff bot and a portal bot. Every monarchy had a buff bot. Marketplace and sub {or HUB for you Frostfell peoples } had several. Combat bots were generally vuln bots but I suppose they did other stuff too. I never went further than buff bots. But they responded to various chat commands like "You tell Guildbot, Mage" "Guildbot tells you, Thank you for using my buffs! I have 159 tapers and 12 scarabs left. Buffing you with Mage buffs now, please wait!"

Perhaps someone else knows more though. That's just what I recall, but AC was my first game, and my knowledge beyond "push the button, make it die" did't extend very far back in the day.