Zarsalesem & Reese

madgan | May 31, 2008

Have you ever heard of the MMORPG gaming phenomenon known as Multi-Boxing? Probably, but if not, I’ll explain it anyway. Multi-boxing is a not-so-commonly utilized technique whereby a given player with large amounts of disposable income, or at least a willingness to give up eating for a few months, can buy multiple accounts for any given MMORPG, endeavoring to use his advantage in numbers to boost what is technically a solo-experience.

By possessing multiple accounts this player can then run with a dedicated heal-bot for his warrior, or perhaps a shaman for the windfury totem as his rogue whirlwinds through the opposition, either way it’s definitely a benefit, but only to those capable of effectively controlling and monitoring both characters at once.

Many players find themselves able to run two accounts at the same time, at least skill wise, but most prefer to run with only one, as to avoid spending overly large sums of cash on a game, or perhaps because they find it detracts from the fun of the game.

Either way, for quite some time I’ve been running two account, sometimes in tandem, other times to check the auction house and earn cash (in-game that is) while leveling up a new alt or doing battlegrounds. However, I couldn’t help but become acutely interested at the tales of players running not two, nor even three, but five accounts at once.

Imagine an entire team of characters at your fingertips! the possibilities are endless, and so I set out to research this subject myself, and now being in the possession of five accounts, I’ll post how I managed to make it work, and how you might as well.

Notice how all are gnomes, this allowed for ease of teaming right from the start, another thing is that I decided to make them all warlocks, a ranged caster class being supremely easier to configure as opposed to melee, and by making them the same class, macro creation and control was again far easier than if I played with a mixture of mages, warlocks, and priests - Although I will try this at some point.

Through some configuration I was able to, as you can obviously see in this picture, connect all five WoW clients into the same keystrokes, having the other four clients mimic the button presses of my primary character, being Zarsalesem in this case. Although I am using one recently upgraded and juiced up PC for this process, other Multi-boxers have utilized multiple PC’s to run everywhere from 5 to 25 characters at once, however I don’t think I’m ready for that step just yet.

Here you get a view from one of the other WoW clients, my minion characters utilize Targeting and Assist macro’s to cast all their spells, making certain that they follow my lead as opposed to randomly assaulting nearby wild-life as they did in my first test. Also you’ll note that all four minion characters are on follow, this is done so that I can use the mouse keys run function to move without triggering the minion clients to do so as well, using WASD would result in all the characters running off in random directions, not very condusive to my purposes.

Finally, the combat strategy. The slight difficulties of five-boxing were that I had to lead all four other minion clients around on a /follow leash, and since spell-casting requires you to face the target, I was sometimes in situations where the other clients were unable to target a monster, got stuck on various rocks, tree’s, etc. and various other such difficulties.

All things considered, the five-boxing was certainly a fun experience, making a level grind I’ve been through all too many times once more an intriguing challenge. Perhaps I’ll update this specific subject at some time soon, either way, this should show you in a fairly simple manner just how it all works.

I’ll list of the requirements one last time, Five WoW accounts (Or however many you plan to run,) a copy of either Keyclone, Synergy, Autohotkey, or any keystroke copying program that suits your needs, and finally a computer, or computers, that can run all the clients smoothly, lag is a very bad thing when running five characters at once.

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