Recently, Blizzard announced that they were going to be cracking down on players and organizations that were using mirroring software for multiboxing purposes.
In case you aren’t familiar with the term, multiboxing is a tactic used – most commonly by farmers, powerlevelers, and bots – to have multiple instances of a game open (World of Warcraft in this case) and active at the same time.
The usual tactic is to have several characters in a party with each other, set to follow so that they don’t get separated. From there, it’s business as usual, with five characters getting the loot instead of one.
Blizzard has taken issue with this, as it’s most commonly done by bots and exploiters, so they’ve made a change to their terms of service: Players using mirroring software for these accounts – software that makes inputting a command on one character execute it on all characters – are now eligible for punishment.
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“The use of input broadcasting software that mirrors keystrokes to multiple WoW game clients will soon be considered an actionable offense,” Blizzard stated in their official statement. “We believe this policy is in the best interests of the game and the community.”
This has raised questions – what about players that multibox without this mirroring software? It’s a common tactic among more legitimate farmers that aren’t using the software, simply having the characters follow for extra loot or leveling purposes.
The answer there is simple: Nothing. Multiboxxing in and of itself, Blizzard insists, is not a bannable offense, and players can have as many clients open as they want without facing any sort of action over it.
To make certain this was clear, Blizzard added the following text to their terms of service not long ago, making sure players understand that multiboxing is perfectly acceptable:
“Multiboxing, or playing multiple World of Warcraft accounts at once, is not a violation of our Terms of Use. Please note, however, that use of input broadcasting software may result in account penalties.”
That should certainly lay it to rest, but plenty are still annoyed to have the ability to use broadcasting software taken away. This was an exceptionally common way to level, especially in World of Warcraft: Classic, where mages especially would come in groups to AoE farm using the software.
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Still, the vast majority of accounts using this software are going to be bots, so banning it entirely is a preferable fix. It’s the latest step in a world of effort to get rid of botting and exploiters from the game, and far from the last one that Blizzard will need to take.