Now that I've got a moment, I wanted to add my two cents to this thread. With that being said, it took me forever to dig up some of this stuff and write this bad boy out, and because of that it's now way past my bed time and I'm tired as hell -- I hope it all makes some sense.

Over the past few years that I've been around, there have been plenty of times where forum activity has dropped off or become stagnant, and to me that's normal, because there isn't always something exciting happening at every given moment of every given day.

However, I'd like to look at the history of multiboxing in World of Warcraft (through my own eyes). I'm going to use this game as an example for obvious reasons that it is the most widely played MMORPG of all time (solo or multiboxed) and this site's traffic heavily revolves around it (this is a personal opinion and not some statistical website data).

Vanilla - Very few individuals multiboxed because of one or more of the following:
  • The style of gameplay was still fairly unknown at the time
  • Multiboxing software was mostly in-house homebrew stuff
  • Multiboxing hardware was more popular than software, but was very expensive
  • The fact that computers weren't as powerful at the time and multiboxing an entire party of five characters most likely required multiple machines (something that most people didn't have)


I believe this was the era when Xzin began multiboxing.

The Burning Crusade - Multiboxing becomes more popular for various reasons. One of the main reasons was probably because multiboxers like Ellay (founder of this site) became well-known by dominating 5v5 arena, and others like Suvega and Vyndree (most of you probably don't even know who those people are!) were 2 x 5-boxing Karazhan. CMs (blue posters) on Blizzard's site were publicly responding to multiboxing in a large amount of hater threads saying that it was legal and giving people the green light to keep doing what they were doing. This site was also created during that era and there was finally a centralized hub where people could share ideas and information.

Besides Karazhan, I'm not sure if there were any other raids that were being multiboxed.

Wrath of the Lich King - The popularity of multiboxing continues to rise as software becomes more versatile and hardware becomes more powerful making it easier for individuals to break into this playstyle. In addition, Wrath of the Lich King (in my opinion) was a giant step down in difficulty compared to everything before it. Instances (non-raid) were mind-blowingly easy because everything was an AoE-fest and the need for CC could be ignored completely. Not only that, but the knowledge of comma-based timing macros was now widespread and most people were able to just create a single macro or two which was extremely efficient (too efficient by Blizzard's standards) that did practically all the work for them.

In this expansion, people were more successful than ever before (and the most successful to date) when it came to multiboxing raids. Also, Dual-boxing forum member Nejcha was possibly the first multiboxer to be part of a 10-man raid which downed non-heroic Lich King.

Cataclysm - Multiboxing takes a big hit shortly after the release of this expansion because it was a giant kick in the nuts (or the female genitalia for you female multiboxers -- I heard it still hurts if you get kicked down there) for the people who abused the lazy mechanics that WotLK had to offer. Comma-based macros were removed from the game and CC was once again necessary in many 5-man instances -- The overall difficulty of Cataclysm (from a multiboxing standpoint) was leaps and bounds ahead of what we had become familiar with in WotLK. Not to mention, leveling via questing was terribly painful because you were railroaded along quest lines with little freedom to avoid collection quests and other similar quests that multiboxers love to hate.

A handful of multiboxers attempted to raid in this expansion, and while there was limited progression, there was nothing major like in WotLK.

Mists of Pandaria - Multiboxing is back on the rise after people realize that 5-man instance mechanics are much more forgiving than the previous expansion, that is, until follow got removed from battlegrounds which caused a chunk of the multiboxing playerbase to swear off the game entirely. However, questing is easier than before thanks to Blizzard finally implementing the sharing of quest drops from mobs among party members and PvE leveling in MoP overall feels better than it did in Cataclysm. While some see the end game 'gating' and 'endless dailies' as a hurdle, others are loving it because they finally have a ton of things to do. And here we are today...

Looking over that brief history recap of multiboxing in WoW, it pretty much follows WoW's subscription history where it peaked in Wrath, took a big hit in Cataclysm, and is back on the rise in Mists of Pandaria.

These days though, most multiboxers are comfortable where they are and they do whatever it is that they do -- They keep to themselves because, by design, that's why most people are multiboxing in the first place; but the people that helped put multiboxing in the spotlight have moved on in one way or another (for the most part) because six or seven years is a long time to stick with a video game if you've got other things going on in life. The problem is, very few people have attempted to step up and fill their shoes by putting out relevant content either in written or video form. Most new multiboxers are just looking for a quick answer, and after they get it, they turn around and leave.

I'm sure there are a plethora of veteran multiboxers who clear instances (both normal and heroic) every single day, but rarely does anyone ever share it anymore. Why that is? I'm not sure. Last month in the ISBoxer IRC channel, beeq said that he wasn't sure that he was going to make any 5x Mage videos this expansion because he didn't think people would want to see the same thing again (Mages blowing things up in PvE). I told him he was crazy and that he should do it again for MoP because, while some people may have seen them last expansion, the new multiboxers have no idea and it's just entertaining to watch.

Anyway, I'm in the ISBoxer IRC channel practically 24x7 and people come in there everyday either for help or just to chat it up (although some days can be much quieter than others); and I'll tell you firsthand, multiboxing is far from dead and there's quite a demand for more videos (especially for ISBoxer because it handles more than just WoW). Personally, I do my best to put out videos (albeit a little slow), but I'm only a one man crew and if I had more time to make these things happen I would definitely make more (hopefully this will change within the next few months ).

I guess what I'm saying is that someone or something inspired you (you, the person reading this post) to begin multiboxing, and while the community is quietly chugging along behind the scenes these days, a little motivational content is always nice whether it's just to show off or be helpful to the new guys.

TL;DR - Overall, there's not really anything new and exciting going on in the multiboxing portion of the MMO world, but it's obvious that there are still many multiboxers because they all come out of the woodwork when there's either a shift to another MMO (e.g. when RIFT or SW:TOR were released), when a large content patch is about to be released (e.g. an expansion), or something drastically changes in the world of multiboxing (e.g. follow being removed from random battlegrounds in World of Warcraft). However, when people get comfortable in their multiboxing ways they usually stay there either because it's 'good enough' and there's no real reason to improve or they're just not inspired to change and become better at it. There seems to be little motivation from the community these days to write any guides or make videos possibly because of the extra time and effort it takes to either write out the guide or learn how to capture and edit footage so that it doesn't look like a 2nd grader created it; and because of that, there's less happening on the site, but from what I see, the same people visit it on almost a daily basis even if they're not posting anything.