Be Prepared. Or not.
It seems a WoW player who calls himself Prepared has got a setup whereby he boxes 36 toons at once in World of Warcraft. Via Alice. 
He says he does it because he wants to invade Ironforge or Stormwind when he hits the level cap. If you don't know WoW, these are two of the main cities there. So he's PvP focused. And he means business:
It costs me exactly $5711 in subscription costs per year with 36 accounts on the 6 month pay schedule. Not bad considering I'm looking at it like it's a hobby and there are more expensive hobbies out there than World of Warcraft. :)
Later he says,
When Wrath of the Lich King is released, I plan to be at the store when it opens and will purchase 36 copies of it. With tax, it should be about $1500 for all of them.
And I thought I was kind of obsessed with MMO's. He's right of course, there are hobbies that are much more expensive. Collecting Ming vases and Rembrandts, for example.
I've also got some mages and priests that I'm currently working on that are level 23. Once they are at level 31.9, I will stop working on them, get 16 of them to level 60 with the recruit-a-friend bonus levels and work on the shaman again.
It sounds to me like he's used the recruit-a-friend promotion to recruit himself, 24 times or so.
That's dedication. Or obsession. Or maybe both. I don't think we'll ever see this on EQ2, I doubt that many copies of EQ2 can run on one machine at the same time, it's so much more demanding of resources. Besides, 24 would be a natural limit, to field your own raid force.
Labels: multiboxing, pvp, world of warcraft
posted by Toldain | 8:47 AM
3 Comments:
Working definition of obsession, there. He's not running 36 copies of WoW on one computer, btw. He's slaved several computers together so he can perform the same action simultaneously on many of them.
I used to see multiboxing people in EQ2 all the time, but none recently. You could always tell who they were, though. A tank, a cleric, and four wizards, all standing on top of each other.
Using the smallest window size and the lowest graphics quality, you could probably get away needing just two computers to multibox an entire group in EQ2.
That said, I can't see where the fun is in doing so. Sounds like something you would do if it were a job, or something.
This guy must be a gold farmer. 36 box as a hobby? That's a lot of nice computer hardware! Even say if he ran 10 computers (low estimate). If you look closely 5 of them are matching laptops. I see 7 computers total in that picture.
They would have to be mutli-core.. expensive wireless trackballs, 19' flat panel monitors in the background, which seem to match, a bandwidth bill. While this could possibly be archived with a broadband connection I doubt he has that running the set up.
Between my roommates and myself we have, 6 computers that are running EQ2 simultaneously and we do occasionally hit some lag spikes on Time Warner Business class.
I am going to call B.S. on 36 boxing as a hobby, it's professional.
I can see how it might be interesting to try to pull off something like that. But at the end, after he finishes raiding Stormhold and Iron-whatever, I don't foresee a great level of satisfaction - at least if I were in his shoes.
When you've accomplished all you can with that crazy scheme, in the end you're just a dude with 36 computers in your room and too much time on your hands. He'll be a novelty at best.
Boxing 36 characters is impressive to be sure, but I don't think it's quite as impressive in reality as it is at first glance:
- He's got it all hooked together so he can use one keyboard, so he's not mad scientist boy with levers and buttons all around him.
- He doesn't need to be seeing through the eyes of every character, as long as he can issue commands to every character through the keyboard. He can monitor the entire raid's HP/MP/ailment status through the MT's UI. So he only really needs to look at one of those monitors while actively playing.
- Mob AI is obscenely predictable. He has all day to plan every detail of the combat beforehand, then execute the symphony he's written.
- He doesn't need to worry about raidmates going AFK or not listening to instructions.
Yeah, he's only one guy, and if he makes a mistake and loses his train of thought, the raid wipes. But so what? He can try again.
Again, I'm not saying it's not impressive. I just think a lot of his success depends upon preparation and dedication more than raw multitasking skill in the heat of the moment.
I personally find it much more satisfying to accomplish, with 1 character, feats which by most players' standards would absolutely require a full group. It's also a little bit cheaper than 36-boxing ;)
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