Neurology of Multiboxing

[Maxion]

Good to see you again Xzin, what's the website for your company again?

[Bigfish]

I rarely take stock in these things. Usually its hard to get a hold of the actual study without paying some academic journal for it, which means the methodology and original conclusions are going to get filtered through whoever reported on it, usually amounting to little more than "multi-tasking good" or "multi-tasking bad".

[Aenar]

For me, this has two points of interest. First, the standard method most of us use to play collapses into one or two tasks (depending on the variety of characters played). For me its controlling the tank manually & spamming a limited amount of buttons for dps/heals (which over time are locked in memory as a routine). For multi-class groups, I would expect it being more complicated at first, but ends up the same way. So I don't see anything really being neglected by this method.

However, my second point of interest is... this explains WHY we may lock up or fail to recover when the crap hits the fan during a run. Especially when beginning multiboxing. When an instance pull goes wrong suddenly we're less competent then a PuG full of 12-year olds. Something that should be possible to live through (with effort) just completely wipes the group because our minds can't always think on the fly for all types of roles (tank / melee dps / caster dps / heals). For me, its usually tank grabs all the mobs while dps preps/launches AES but I don't take stock of healths which quickly neglects the healer's role. Or I heal like mad but the tank isn't producing enough agro then dps / healer go down.

So multiboxing can be multitasking, but it appears to me that once the rhythm is learned it becomes a single task. 22112211221122112211 etc

[Sam DeathWalker]

However, my second point of interest is... this explains WHY we may lock up or fail to recover when the crap hits the fan during a run. Especially when beginning multiboxing. When an instance pull goes wrong suddenly we're less competent then a PuG full of 12-year olds.

You're lucky you are not playing EQ1; a single add can wipe you super easy. EQ1 mobs are WAY WAY harder then WoW mobs of the same realitive (your level vs. theirs) level. In wow you really hardly have to buff to win against a ton of mobs, in EQ you have to have every buff up or you are toast. And in EQ splitting is all you do mostly when you pull cause if you don't yur dead, I'm not sure if I have ever split a camp in wow.