Is multiboxing alowed?

So much sillyness going on here. My final comments on the matter:

- I don't care if you multibox. None of the competitive players are doing it since the booster nerf, because it simply isn't productive. GGG did a great job with that. The only people who are doing it are noobs, and they are making less progress than people who are playing legit. That should tell you something.

- Key repeaters involve automation, it's really simple, and from a technical stand point it's not debatable.

- Saying that people don't understand multiboxing because they haven't done it is stupid. You don't have to commit rape or murder to know it's wrong.

- People keep saying that a party of 6 gets 6 times the loot. It doesn't work like that.

tl;dr: Its your own time you're wasting, idc.

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Sickness wrote:

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Magnicon2 wrote:

How exactly is it a form of exploitation? Its doing something that groups of people are already doing, but your doing it less effectively. How is that in any way shape or form an exploit?

But you don't have a group to divide the rewards with, so it can be alot more efficient.

I don't multibox but even I can see some obvious flaws with this. One example would be that playing in an actual group will clear the entire level much faster than one person. While you may get all the loot multiboxing, it is going to take a hell of a lot longer to clear a map. By the time you go back and forth clearing a map by yourself, a good group could have done it 4 or 5 times. Multiboxers are at a higher risk because the monsters are harder and they are alone. They get much less experience per time spent. In the long run, they may get slightly more loot per time spent but they are playing the game in a much harder fashion. I don't see that as too much of a problem.

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Elynole wrote:

The language is English, and there is not a word in the English language that I know of that's officially represented without a majority acceptance of a meaning to the word itself. They may have sub-meanings, they may have different meanings...but they have meanings nonetheless. In context with this argument, the word "automation" would be categorized in computational linguistics and should be treated as such - therefore a meaning is defined and is relevant to the argument. As such, there can be right and wrong usages. Just like anyone else misusing a word.

Majority acceptance? Exactly how do you think that's determined? Have you ever voted in a semantics election? :) Language is constantly changing; today's minority usage is tomorrow's majority usage and vice versa, and in order to appreciate how that takes place you have to recognize ALL the usages all the time.

Of course words have meanings. Lots of meanings ;) And specifically, different meanings in different speech communities. Lexicographers recognize this when they attribute a sense of a word to a group such as a profession, but generally the way they do this is imprecise and non-empirical. In real life there are millions of groups of people ranging in size from families to nations that develop distinctive usages, and any dictionary that seriously took that on would be... millions of times the size of Wikipedia ;)

Frequently, each speech community will insist that its usage is "right" and the others are "wrong". But from the point of view of an adequate description of the language, you have to recognize all of them. For a great example of that in gaming, check out the endless debates on the Diablo III forums over the use of the word "toon" for "character". Some people really, really hate that. But there's no objective or scientific reason to think it's any less "correct" than "character", or "hero" or "avatar" or any of the other terms that get used. It's mostly about the attitude one group of gamers has towards another group of gamers.

Having said that... if it really is the case that TehHammer belongs to a speech community of one, and NOBODY else uses the term the way he does... I will concede that he is as close to "incorrect" as you can meaningfully get ;) I don't know whether that's the case, and I don't think there's any quick or easy way to find out EMPIRICALLY, that is, by observing behavior rather than asking people what they think they do, since people are notoriously unreliable at self-reporting when it comes to language. (If you tell me that all your friends agree with you, I will point out that all your friends most likely belong to the same speech community as you :p This is one of the reasons why everybody THINKS they're in the majority, in language as well as politics.)

My larger point was really that it is not useful to confuse a discussion about what "automation" does and does not include with a discussion about whether multiboxing is detrimental to games, and no amount of claimed expertise on any side (including mine) will change that.

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sharkh20 wrote:

In the long run, they may get slightly more loot per time spent but they are playing the game in a much harder fashion.

Or they may get much more loot per time spent and they are only playing the game in a slig´htly harder fashion.

Chris was crystal clear in his last interview in Kripp's stream: if you have 8 hands and can move various characters at the same time you are fine, ANY form of automation is not allowed (via third party programs or whatever form).

The rest is semantics.

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knac84 wrote:

Chris was crystal clear in his last interview in Kripp's stream: if you have 8 hands and can move various characters at the same time you are fine, ANY form of automation is not allowed (via third party programs or whatever form).

The rest is semantics.

Have you ever thought how much automation is involved in a single key press on a single computer? At the hardware level, at the software level (BIOS, OS, drivers, etc.). ANY form of automation is not allowed? That's bad news for all of us.

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TehHammer wrote:

ANY form of automation is not allowed? That's bad news for all of us.

Not for me, I enter everything in ASCII binary using eight toggle switches and a pushbutton, just can't let go of my IMSAI8080 front panel. Admittedly I could use some help with UTF16/32.

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Omnivore61 wrote:

Not for me, I enter everything in ASCII binary using eight toggle switches and a pushbutton, just can't let go of my IMSAI8080 front panel. Admittedly I could use some help with UTF16/32.

I could be wrong, but I feel like you get it. ;)

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MonstaMunch wrote:

- Key repeaters involve automation, it's really simple, and from a technical stand point it's not debatable.

Yes, it's not debatable, the question is, what form of automation is OK, because until you start sending out electronic ones and zeros you'll be using automation to play this game.

Now, if typing on a keyboard and one computer responding isn't automation, than what's the difference between six computers responding? Because I pushed one key and six computers responded? What if they're virtual machines on the ONE computer? Is it OK then? I mean it's really on the SAME computer then, it's just ONE computer responding.

The whole argument is asinine, the problem isn't automation, it's the intent. Multiboxing is bad because... it's cheating. It doesn't matter HOW you cheat, it's the CHEATING that's bad. Spoons don't make people fat. Drunk cars don't kill people. And automation doesn't make you a cheater.

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TehHammer wrote:

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knac84 wrote:

Chris was crystal clear in his last interview in Kripp's stream: if you have 8 hands and can move various characters at the same time you are fine, ANY form of automation is not allowed (via third party programs or whatever form).

The rest is semantics.

Have you ever thought how much automation is involved in a single key press on a single computer? At the hardware level, at the software level (BIOS, OS, drivers, etc.). ANY form of automation is not allowed? That's bad news for all of us.

Play the semantics card all you want, you know exactly what he meant even if you were butthurt about it. What is this, a sophism lesson? not interested in endless semantic arguments.

It's pretty simple: you have to give any order to each of your ingame characters individually 'manually' with your hands via keystrokes/mouse clicks. Bye.