Multiboxing, Its Solutions, and Why it won't be as much of an issue in AoC
Buckle up me mateys, this is going to be a long and detailed post. There are 3 segments to this post: a little info on multiboxing, why it wont be as much of an issue in AoC as in WoW, and finally, possible solutions to Multiboxing. I've boldened and italicized these headings, so feel free to skip around. However, if you have the time, I suggest reading the whole thing through.
After the recent AMA with Steven, a large portion of the community has been discussing about multiboxing.
A large amount of the people posting about Multiboxing, have come from WoW where they have had bad experiences with Multiboxing. (Basically, from Asmongold’s recent stream, where he watched the AMA live.)
Before I jump into possible solutions and discuss why multiboxing won’t be as much of an issue in AoC as in WoW, I will first give you a little context.
So, what exactly is multiboxing? Multiboxing refers to playing as multiple separate characters concurrently in an MMORPG.
Most game developers allow multiboxing in their games. To date, Age of Conan, Aion, Anarchy Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, EVE Online, Lord of the Rings Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lineage, Lineage II, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft all allow multiboxing. So, it’s something that has existed in MMOs for a long time.
Now, I’ll talk about multiboxing with regards to WoW specifically.
In World of Warcraft, Blizzard allows players to multibox on the SAME hardware. This means that players can play with multiple accounts on the same PC or on different PCs. They are ALSO allowed to use SOFTWARE (macros and scripts), that allow them to master-control multiple accounts. What this means is that say for e.g., one person is playing 3 druids across 3 accounts. When you press an ability on a single druid, there is software available, that is allowed by Blizzard, that will replicate this command onto multiple other characters. So essentially, by pressing a single ability on one of the druids, you can make the other 2 druids cast the same spell as well.
What this results in is a group of x amount of characters (from 2 to 40 to sometimes around a 100), of the same class, moving in a group, gathering important resources that spawn in a certain area, and not letting anyone else get any of it.
The main example of this is the Zinanthid herb in Nazjatar, a neutral zone in WoW. Tons of multiboxers farm this herb, which is used in crafting several combat-boosting potions and other things. Even though it is a neutral zone, players from the opposing faction cannot contest these multiboxing groups as they will get one-shot (Because of the master-control thing I mentioned above. Getting hit by 7 to 40 copies of a high dmg ability, will one-shot anyone of a comparable level).
Not only does this sometimes ruin the game’s economy by flooding it with resources, it RUINS player experience by creating game lag and crashing the server. (This happened with the Emerald Dream server, in WoW, a couple of years back. At that time, there were MULTIPLE multiboxers running around with over a 100 characters each.)
Now that I’ve given you a decent bit of context on multiboxing, let us move on to why multiboxing won’t be as much of an issue in AoC, as in WoW.
1) Steven has said that macros and scripts will NOT be allowed. This is the MAIN reason that multiboxers exist in WoW. Because they can master-control multiple characters of the same class. Not allowing this has the potential to, on its own, remove the ENTIRETY of the multiboxers population, assuming that the game is perfect at tracking macros/scripts. Now this is obviously unlikely, so we will most likely still have to deal with multiboxers.
2) Steven has also said that multiboxing is ONLY allowed if the player that is playing on multiple accounts is playing it on MULTIPLE PCs i.e. one account per PC. This is different from WoW. In WoW, you are allowed to play with multiple accounts on the SAME PC. So, this further restricts multiboxers, forcing them to spend extremely high amounts of money on PCs if they wish to run multiple accounts at the same time.
3) Another MAIN reason that a large amount of these multiboxers won’t exist in AoC is because Ashes does not have something similar to a WoW token. The WoW token is an item that gives you subscription time in exchange for a large amount of in-game gold. This is the main reason why multiboxers with multiple accounts are able to sustain themselves. They are able to farm gold efficiently and pay for subscription time with in-game gold. This results in them not having to pay subscription fees for their accounts, reducing their costs significantly.
4) Multiboxers won’t be able to ruin player experience in AoC, unlike in WoW, as Steven has said that default player appearances and other features will be used to help with rendering and reduce server lag, when a certain no. of player clients come in radius of each other. These features don’t exist for open world PvP in WoW, and is the main reason for the server lag and fps drops caused by multiboxers.
5) Because distance matters in this game, unlike in WoW, this also limits multiboxers to an extent. According to the wiki, we will have one time resources (resources that can be collected only once and respawn randomly on the map after a cd), moving resources (like herd of sheep, that move constantly on the map) and finally, resource clusters (large mines with a particular type of ore in it). Multiboxers won’t benefit from the first two due to the huge distance between spawn locations. What they will benefit from however, are the large vein resources. However, there is an easy fix for this that I will mention in the solutions below.
So these are the main reasons why AoC will not suffer from AS MANY multiboxers as in WoW.
Now let us talk about possible ways to deal with the HANDFUL of multiboxers that DO manage to escape detection. How do we combat these people?
I came up with two solutions after reading through a few rage-filled blizzard forums.
1) Limit the no. of IDENTICAL classes per IP address. If a family were to be playing an MMO together, it is extremely unlikely that all of them will pick the same exact class. Only multiboxers do so, because they want to be able to master-control them.
2) There is an easy fix to prevent multiboxers from farming large-vein resources. Simply make large vein resource locations into PvP zones, so that players don’t gain corruption from killing other players that come to contest the resource. Because multiboxers are controlling multiple characters at once, they will not be efficient at large scale PvP. Since combat in AoC is skill dependent, this will result in an organized group of around 20 to 30 players, being able to take out 40-man multiboxers fairly easily. This will make it extremely difficult for them to consistently farm resources. If you wish to make large-vein resources less contested, you could also give players personal mines for these resources that give them a certain fixed amount of ores, on a regular basis.
I also came across 2 other solutions that players suggested:
3) Herbs, Minerals, as well as other collectibles should be made so that they can only be looted once per node by a player, per Intrepid account and per IP Address.
4) Another suggestion was to make the resource nodes, that were available to be collected in a particular region, being different for each character. So if there are x no. of nodes in a particular region, that is available for collection, it will appear in different locations for every character.
Not sure how effective 3) and 4) are at stopping multiboxing, but I put them up just in case.
So to conclude, I don’t think multiboxing will be a significant issue in AoC. Those that do manage to get through will be few and far between and won't have much of an impact on the playerbase.
