My opinion is that the biggest problem we're facing right now is botting and associated gold selling (although the gold selling may be specific to classic). And I'd argue that streaming is the 2nd problem - anytime you're intentionally (or unintentionally) concentrating hundreds of people into one area it causes too much disruption to others, but that's another argument for another day.

While I don't think that most multiboxers are botting, it does seem like almost all botters are also multiboxing (at least in classic). Personally the latest round of bans or instance caps don't seem to have actually caught any of the botters on my server. The same people are still in the same dungeons 24x7.

In addition to the folks who are just purely running teams of bots 24x7, there seems to be a lot of more casual botting going on - cases where the person is generally fully in control most of the time, but does use some automation some of the time. I think its just too easy to cross the line now, and the risk of being caught seems so low. I've had to argue with people in my own guild about the definition of botting. (e.g. I click this button and it runs a small script recorded on my programable keyboard that makes everyone mine/herb, then remount and follow again, or I use this button to "turn on" my dps cycle which is then executed automatically until I hit the button again to "turn off" my dps cycle, not to mention all the fishing bots.)

Not that any of this is new, but it seems to be getting worse recently. In classic right now the barrier to entry is so low - with no game to purchase up front, you just need $15 to get started. Retail isn't much different - its just $20 to upgrade a starter account to BfA right now isn't it? So it seems like botters are regularly using throw away accounts - if Blizz is only going to do ban waves every couple of months I guess they figure they'll get their money's worth and then just rinse and repeat once they get caught.

At a technical level, the hardware requirements have certainly gone way down - any semi-recent PC and video card is good enough if you don't really care about performance - its not like someone who sets their account to farm all night cares what level of FPS their getting.

I haven't ever looked at the market place for WoW bots, but as a network penetration tester I can tell you market for any sort of technical hack has only gotten cheaper and more widespread, less technical/more user friendly. You don't have to have any technical knowledge at all and you can buy just about whatever sort of hack or DDOS you want cheaply and easily now. It seems like years ago the people botting were either mostly programming it themselves or maybe trying to purchase something from some really fishy warez sites where your odds of getting scammed were quite high. Now there's professional looking websites that brag about their customer service. My guess is that the people making the money botting aren't even the people doing the actual botting in game - its the people selling the bots and the gold.

Personally it seems like even some of the legitimate systems and tools we have available to us as multiboxers are too much. The 4x2 farming thing just seems like bad game design. I get that Blizz wanted to allow multiple people to tap a node to reduce the frustration of getting beat to the node. But getting 8 herbs at a time feels even more broken. Blizz seems to be doing only minimal work to fix all the stand-still farming spots - that's equally bad design whether they're getting farmed solo, by bots or legitimate multiboxers (not even counting the AFK-multiboxers who I think fall somewhere between legitimate and a bot). I kinda wish Blizz would break even some simple stuff like having all toons take the same flight point and sharing quest turn in (I know that's allowed in the Blizz API - I'm suggesting they change the API).

I guess I share some sentiment with the original poster that public opinion seems to have changed and I could even understand if Blizz did some sort of knee jerk reaction and did something game changing like breaking /follow.