Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

People who multi-box do so for the challenge and for the freedoms it offers. You don"t really need to do anything more then WoW did. A moddable interface and the non-banning of software like synergy/keyclone is good enough.

Making "Simple fights for multi-boxers!" defeats the whole purpose of multi-boxing. Essentially, multi-boxers are little/no different then just a group of normal people in terms of impact/needs.

It"s a non-issue. Seriously. Multi-boxers have never been frowned upon. Those that thought they were hot shit because they had more then one PC were, but that"s because they"re douche bags, not because they can handle more then one account at once.

I don"t see any reason for people to dislike multi-boxers in the new world of instanced content.

However, I fully understand the annoyance/anger early in EQ, before low server pop lead to everyone having a Shaman/Cleric bot, where a single "person" was taking up content that could be advancing ~6 people.

Leveling/AA spots is srs business.

Grave said:

Also, I realize WoW never intended for levels to mean anything specifically. That"s fine. However, as a personal preference, I think it"s a little silly that so many quests even in WotLK involvekilling bears, wolves, and so on.

Click to expand...

I don"t understand why so many people in this thread hate killing animals for quests. How do you expect players and npcs get leather? As long as you have a choice to do these quests or not why does it matter?

Right now I"m finishing up the quests in WoTLK for the achieve and easy money and i"m in Grizzly Hills In almost full t7.5 killing bears and wolves for their hides, and i honestly don"t mind it, I"m choosing to do this because it"s easy money. What would you prefer these quests be? I mean i can understand if most of the bears don"t drop hides but for most of the part they do. No matter what level you are if you are a leather crafter you will always need leather, it"s the same thing for skinning, how do you expect to get leather without killing animals?

Maybe i missed the reason behind the argument, but i don"t understand why it"s so many people hate doing these types of quests.

It"s just boring, Toxxulian. It doesn"t feel very heroic to kill bears and wolves.

I think leatherworking / collecting hides is completely fine and a great tradeskill, but I don"t see why the animals can"t be relegated to gathering like other trades have.

Like I mentioned earlier in the thread, you could have a Hunting skill that was all about tracking animals and getting hides/meat from them. Rarer hides could come from rarer critters.

No reason to make half the quests in the game about killing animals though.

Flight said:

This exemplifies just how anti-boxing this forum and community has always been; the worst possible place to have a discussion about it. Its not many months since people who box were catalogued with lepers and rapists on here.

Click to expand...

It"s not that I"m anti-multibox. Far from it; how people play... I couldn"t care less about it.

It"s just that you need to realize that multiboxing is NOT a significant amount of the playerbase. At all. The only games where it is prevalent are those where you need multiple players to do anything at all (EQ), or where the structure of the game rewards holding multiple accounts in parallel (EVE training system).

As soon as you remove those constraints, the number of multiboxers fall to a meaningless proportion of the population. Suggesting "you have to design your game for multiboxers because they will multibox" is a fallacy - multiboxers multibox because the game encourages multiboxing in the first place.

Now, of course, those games that do reward such a thing in practice are never "correctly" designed to recognise this. That"s perfectly true. And they don"t because designing your game for multiboxing is something that no self-respecting designer wants to.

If you want to design your game so that the same player controls multiple characters, then you would design your game so that it"s the normal mode of operation - and done from a single account. Your basic unit isn"t the character - it"s a party. Just like almost all single-player RPGs out there.

You do realise that pushing the "let"s design around multi-account/multi-box" philosophy is skirting close to a big no-no around these boards? Namely, rewarding the "I pay more than you do, I"m better in-game" philosophy that"s a big anathema around these parts?

Yeah. From a gamer point of view. We must not under any circumstances give the impression that getting gamers to pay more for better rewards in game is a good idea. Devs and accountants try to nickle and dime gamers plenty of ways already.
How long would it before multi-boxing would be required for end game raiding? Don"t think they wouldn"t do it. It might sound crazy. But don"t think for moment, that isn"t someones great idea to bring in more revenue.

Ukerric said:

Suggesting "you have to design your game for multiboxers because they will multibox" is a fallacy - multiboxers multibox because the game encourages multiboxing in the first place.

Click to expand...

I didn"t say anything of the sort, mate. Nobody else has, either.

Ukerric said:

You do realise that pushing the "let"s design around multi-account/multi-box" philosophy is skirting close to a big no-no around these boards? Namely, rewarding the "I pay more than you do, I"m better in-game" philosophy that"s a big anathema around these parts?

Click to expand...

For a start, again, I didn"t say this either. I just said multi-boxing has never been considered by game designers, before. I suggested it would be a good idea for designers to decide early whether their game would facilitate it and to make design decisions based upon that, with both boxers and non-boxers in mind.

Your response I"ve quoted suggests boxing could cause concerns to non-boxers. Indeed it does - boxing promote strong responses. You, for example, start by saying you don"t care about boxing, yet half way through your post lists fears about the possible outcome of catering to boxing.



Lets do away now with the idea that paying more via boxing = better rewards. I 6 Box EQ, 5 box WoW and LotR ( though let me triple underline its, as Zehn says, for the challenge and I much prefer to play one character in a party or raid) and I know unequivocally I can never achieve 6 boxing what 6 separate people playing individual characters can achieve.

I stand by the opinion that a lot more people have multiple accounts/box in most MMOs than some people here think. Just because folks don"t in your small cadre of playing friends doesn"t mean it isn"t happening.


As for considering boxing in game design, I"m not advocating designing the whole game around boxing - I"m talking about a small number of minor features :

i) have mobs which drop quest items drop one item for each person in a party, if and when they drop it;

ii) have some small repeatable instances reached by talking to an npc that are easily reached;

iii) make some instances and bosses straightforward tank and spank.


These things aren"t in any way game breaking, but just doing these three things, with boxers in mind, would achieve what I am suggesting.

Designers should waste no time on developing a damn thing with multi-boxing in mind. The ones who are going to do it will do it anyway.

Dumbing the game down for multiboxers is asinine. Also: lollercaust at the 40% number. Really?

I"m trying to treat this thread as an arena to discuss with 38S how to achieve the best they can with their MMO. In many ways, this isn"t the best community to do that. There are some issues that cause some of us l33t, "I"ve played every MMO since Meridian/UO", we were doing world first, never mind server first, in "01, SoE suck kiddies - of which I freely admit to being one - to not want to take them seriously or into consideration. Boxing is one such issue.

However, if you want to do this the best it can be done, with the best chance of success, even disregarding the fact that you are investing $50-100mill, you have to look at what has gone before, what is happening now and what may happen.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Also: lollercaust at the 40% number. Really?

Click to expand...

Yes, really. Now what I said and what you"ve probably read are two different things.

You think I said four out of every ten characters being played in WoW are being boxed.



What I actually said was (without mentioning WoW or any individual MMO) that it wouldn"t surprise me if the number of cases of people who are responsible for multiple accounts or of boxed accounts came to 40% of the subscriber base. People who are boxing now, have boxed or who have access to more than one account, whether they box or not, whether one of those accounts is theirs, their wives, a roommate, or someone else.


I didn"t really expect to have to contrive legal definitions of what I was saying, without having lollerskates and insinuations that I"d said there were Sam Deathwalkers marauding across every server like great hordes of majestic Wildebeast sweeping across the plains, thrown at me.



Really, although I stand by my belief in what I said, the number is not important. In summary, for the hard of reading, I"ll repeat again I"m making two points :

1. A significant number of people have access to more than one account;

2. Multi-boxing has never been considered by game designers, before. I suggested it would be a good idea for designers to decide early whether their game would facilitate it and to make design decisions based upon that, with both boxers and non-boxers in mind.

I have multi-boxed at various times during my years of playing WoW, many times having a separate account for it (instead of just using my wife"s). Hell I even had 2 accounts in EQ for years for multi-boxing.

And no, they should not spend even a minute of Dev time to make multiboxing easier. Hell, the whole point of multi-boxing is that the game is easier for you because you have more characters at your disposal. That"s a choice a player makes for whatever reason (so they don"t have to group, so they can level characters up faster...etc.)

There really is no need to inconvenience anyone else AT ALL for the sake of multi-boxing.

Flight said:

What I actually said was (without mentioning WoW or any individual MMO) that it wouldn"t surprise me if the number of cases of people who are responsible for multiple accounts or of boxed accounts came to 40% of the subscriber base. People who are boxing now, have boxed or who have access to more than one account, whether they box or not, whether one of those accounts is theirs, their wives, a roommate, or someone else.

Click to expand...

So now "boxing" means anyone who pays for two accounts? Hell, why stop at having access to more than one account, why stop at those accounts being active at the same time! I have all the boxes from the old EQ expansions, EQ2, FFXI, WoW, AoC, and GW. That"s what boxing means right? Not two computer case boxes. I am a fucking multi multi boxer man. Look at all my boxes. Shit this phenomenon is probably like 87% of the MMO playerbase, why are we being ignored!?!?!

You really haven"t given a reason yet why resources should be wasted on it, when it has been perfectly possible to do in every game that doesn"t give a shit one way or the other thus far. Hopefully they know this is one of those player insights to ignore.

Fammaden said:

So now "boxing" means anyone who pays for two accounts? Hell, why stop at having access to more than one account, why stop at those accounts being active at the same time! I have all the boxes from the old EQ expansions, EQ2, FFXI, WoW, AoC, and GW. That"s what boxing means right? Not two computer case boxes. I am a fucking multi multi boxer man. Look at all my boxes. Shit this phenomenon is probably like 87% of the MMO playerbase, why are we being ignored!?!?!

You really haven"t given a reason yet why resources should be wasted on it, when it has been perfectly possible to do in every game that doesn"t give a shit one way or the other thus far. Hopefully they know this is one of those player insights to ignore.

Click to expand...

What I said was :

Flight said:

i) multiple accounts and boxing make up a large part of the customer base; I would be surprised if its less than 40%.

Click to expand...

Multiple accountsANDboxing.


Lets look at that. In a group of eight people six people are only responsible for one account. The other two people have their own account and their partners account registered with their details. That is 40% in the hands of multiple account holders. No Sam Deathwalkers, no lollerskates, just two in eight people having two accounts under their details = 40%.

The majority of people in that situation I know have used that other char to either adventure or PL, even if its not in prime time or when most of their guild are about.


This isn"t even considering the people who run more than one account for the sole purpose of boxing, nevermind the people who run three, four, five or six accounts. I box 6 EQ accounts, but I have 8.


Forty percent of accounts being accessible by people who have access to more than one account is far from unrealistic, even in WoW. Its pretty much a certainty in EQ, DaoC, Eve etc



That is forty % of a games subscription coming from people who have access to being able to play more than one account.

You still haven"t answered why you think a game needs to make it easier (at the possible inconvenience of others) for the group of people that already have it the easiest (in terms of what a single person can accomplish).

Flight said:

Lets look at that. In a group of eight people six people are only responsible for one account. The other two people have their own account and their partners account registered with their details. That is 40% in the hands of multiple account holders. No Sam Deathwalkers, no lollerskates, just two in eight people having two accounts under their details = 40%.

The majority of people in that situation I know have used that other char to either adventure or PL, even if its not in prime time or when most of their guild are about.

Click to expand...

So the people in the second paragraph are boxing. The people in the first one aren"t, but own multiple accounts and you are using them to pad your way to this 40% number...why? What design decisions should be made with group two in mind that have anything at all to do with group one? Really, if you are going to include multiple account owners, doesn"t 40% seem almost impossibly LOW!?

And then how do the three plus boxers even have enough in common with those first two groups to be mentioned at the same design meeting? There is quite a jump from putting your wife"s laptop beside your monitor and putting her on autofollow for xp/buffs/heals...to boxing 3, 4, 5,8toons?!

Of course the main question still...what the hell really needs to be changed in the MMO paradigm to accommodate you? I don"t have a problem with you boxing, but I don"t get what in the game needs to change. Zehn already covered that very succinctly though.

I don"t think a game should be designed with multiboxer in mind, however, you can learn/remember to get some features when you consider it from a multiboxing point of view. For example, a working /follow. This looks stupid, but out of the last big mmos, AoC had a very buggy /follow, and WAR... I can"t remember to be honest, but I"m pretty sure you couldn"t follow in WAR.

This is a feature that is very useful to multiboxer obviously, and while it shouldn"t be considered as a feature FOR multiboxer, it"s an interesting feature. Others would be shared quest drops(again WAR and AoC had mixed results with this), exp gains while grouped, class soloability, macro system...

Considering your game from a multiboxing perspective might make you question wether certain aspects of a game are good enough or not, because if a multiboxer can"t do it easily, it means a real player might not be able to do it easily either, or might miss the feature. The lack of follow was painful in AoC(not so much in war, due to flightpaths), the lack of macro was annoying in WAR.

Nothing needs to be made for boxers though, people box to work around the need to find partners in mmo for particular parts of the gameplay that they find tedious otherwise(leveling or farming dungeons), but most boxers also appreciate playing a single char to its fullest in what they like(raiding or pvp). I know a lot of people boxing, me included, but I know almost no one who boxes when raiding or pvping(there"s a 5box shaman team on my server, but that"s about it). Designing your game with boxers in mind has no point really, but you can design your game so people don"t feel the need to box(good lfg tool, being able to lvl solo with every class, decent lvling content).

Pyros said:

Designing your game with boxers in mind has no point really, but you can design your game so people don"t feel the need to box(good lfg tool, being able to lvl solo with every class, decent lvling content).

Click to expand...

Dingdingding! We have a winner.

Games need to work on the reasons why most people resort to boxing, not just make it easier to do so.

People "resort" to multi-boxing because it"s an added challenge. Isn"t much more to it. It"s not about groups being hard to form or being anti-social. It"s just, fun. It"s like having your alts and eating them too. You get to enjoy more then one aspect of the game at a time.

It"s about getting more out of your gaming experience.

And that"s for the "hardcore" multi-boxers who do it regularly. The vast -vast- majority of multi-boxing that occurs is someone powerleveling alts or friends/couples dragging another character through an instance to get gear and etc...etc...

There is no issue here. I"m all for talking about gameplay mechanics for the sake of talking about gameplay mechanics, but this entire conversation reeks of "we have nothing better to talk about so let"s make shit up."

I mean for gods sake, look at what you guys are talking about. /follow. SERIOUSLY? Fucking /follow? I haven"t used fucking /follow in ages for multi-boxing. Phasing in WOTLK has ruined the shit out of follow because it breaks everytime you move between phases anyways.

You know who that would piss off most if it was removed? Not multi-boxers.It"d annoy the shit out of people who need to afk to take a dump or wash dishes or jerk one out.

Removing /target and /assist would just annoy the shit out of raid leaders who have a hard enough time getting their drooling retards to manage a simple damage rotation let alone hit the proper mob.

Making the game more duo/trio friendly to encourage friends/couples/small groups to form is one thing and something I can get fully behind and would make for an interesting brainstorm, but if you -seriously- think multi-boxing is a problem that needs to even be discussed...I dunno.

If you want to make the game more fun, interactive, challening and fast paced, do it because you want to make a good game. Not because you want to stick it to the multi-boxers. I mean honestly, 99% of the time you can"t even tell the difference between a multi-boxer and a group of mediocre players unless they go with a cute naming scheme.

Fuck.

A few features that help multiboxers are fine, but they have been discussed to death, and most of them are very welcome from non-multiboxers:

- A very very smooth ability to alt-tab
- A useful and fairly strong macro language ala wow post 2.0 (otherwise I will just use innerspace or a DX wrapper and write a script through that)
- A working follow
- Quest mobs that drop quest items for everyone in the party

What I do not want to see implemented is 10 second + spells that make it possible for a drooling mongoloid to box 5 or 6 classes. Make dual boxing possible but don"t cater to it by slowing the game down.

The ability to transfer items between character banks should be a standard feature in any game. I don"t like having to switch characters to check who has what, and I don"t like having to mail shit back and forth. At least EQ had the 2 shared bank slots.

And for the love of god, please make cross-server chat rooms. There"s no reason to limit communications in this day and age. I already alienate the rest of my friends when I"m on my guild vent.