Is multiboxing alowed?

"

nikentic wrote:

Do you have any GGG source on this? Would, per se, macro buttons on a G19 be bannable if used for more than 1 task per button?

"

Mr_Bill wrote:

GGG hasn't said whether key repeaters are ok or not. They said multi boxing is alright though. Just ignore all the posters that try to foist their opinion of whether it is allowed or not and pretend they speak for GGG.

Of course everybody is allowed their personal opinion of whether it is a desirable thing for the game.

I have no objections to multi boxing and key repeaters to make it easier up until unattended bots start running by themselves.

The Terms of Service state it pretty obviously. Again, if you do everything manually, you're fine. If you use automation/scripting of any form to otherwise make something easier (hence the reasoning for scripting) then as the ToS stands right now it's against it. This may change in the future, who knows.

"

Utilising any form of automated software in relation to your access or use of the Website, Materials or Services is prohibited. Any contravention by you of these Terms of Use or any other terms or conditions notified to you by Grinding Gear Games or any behaviour which Grinding Gear Games deems in its sole discretion is not in keeping with the intended spirit of participation in POE, terminates the Licence Immediately.

I applaud Burmeister for testing & publicly taking his findings to the forums. We were talking about this in Global yesterday & there was much confusion on the topic.

I doubt they will ever come out and straight up say multiboxing is ok as from what I understand about it there's more than one way to do it and its possible a multiboxer could use a program that would clash with the ToS. Which if they did come out and say it was okay could possibly clash with the ToS causing all sorts of problems. Blizzard has never said multiboxing is okay specifically either because of this despite what people say. In every thread about I have ever read on the blizz forums about they simply link the ToS if they give a response at all. All I can say is multibox at your own risk there's no gauruntee it won't get you banned.

The two terms cause some confusion.

1. Multiboxing - running more then one client at a time.

2. Key Repeating - having a program send keystrokes to two or more clients.

My understanding is that multiboxing is ok while Key Repeating isn't addressed by GGG unless you want to go the internet lawyer thing and decipher the TOS. Unlike some I don't find revisiting my high school debating class techniques all that entertaining so I hope GGG will directly address the issues in the FAQ.

"

Burmeister99 wrote:

My latest test resulted in all toon dying after 5min in HC. So it is technical possible in POE but is it viable im not sure

I've had different results with my testing, but maybe I'm a little more creative with what I'm doing. :) Don't worry though, I've already PM'ed Chris about it.

If you want to level up to 6 characters at once, the problem with multiboxing using a tool like AHK or ISBoer is "intent". Simply passing keystrokes through all the clients creates a "relative input" effect that does not translate directly into the action you want. For example. there's no way to make 6 characters click on an object due to player collisions and minor location displacement effects in the game. You pretty much have to toggle between the clients and do it by hand.

If you do simple input pass through, you end up with an effect of "parallel" attacking, which means your 6 characters are shooting in parallel lines at (a) very narrow target(s). At best, maybe 2-3 hit them. In a group of 6, having 2 - 3 of the characters barely hitting the mobs in packs that are scaled to 6 people does result in quick deaths. The assumption here is that all the characters are the same level, so you need everyone to be doing something to be combat effective.

There is no simple way around this, so trying to level up a lot of characters at once is simply not viable. You end up spending more time trying to keep characters alive than playing. It was actually quite amusing the first time I tried this. A rhoa snuck up behind my group and started picking characters off while I was fighting other mobs. The seek and destroy AI of the game certainly helps with characters that are unable to do anything.

Anyways, so now you have to ask yourself, how can you make it more viable. The first answer would be to figure out the best level cap ratio. The goal here would be to have a slightly more powerful character that can "carry" the other characters and essentially power farm them. In a sense, you aren't exactly "power farming" because GGG already made it so everyone in the group gets the same EXP as long as the levels are not too far off (which is how you fix the issue).

The downside here is similar to before: keeping characters alive and in range while using your more powerful character to kill mobs. It's a lot easier said than done with how the mob AI works. It's a lot to manage too and the pace you are leveling is going to be so slow that, you might as well just level in a party with people 6 times as it'd be a lot faster.

You could take the exp penalty and just use stronger characters that specialize in AoE to level the characters, but once again you get into issues of combat effectiveness. Is it actually worth it? When OBT hits and there's going to be a lot of people to party with, I highly doubt it.

That pretty much eliminates the purpose for multiboxing to level characters in any way possible in my opinion. It's just not viable to try and solo it out when there are far better alternatives to doing it "legit".

Now for my "creative" part.

If you look at the quest progression in the game, it's pretty typical for an ARPG, albeit broken for rushing. The level cap to enter the next difficulties was a start, but not the solution to stop people from rushing through the game.

Consider the current quest progression barriers for Act 1: Hillock -> Mud Flats -> Brutus -> Merveil. Any new character you make and want to multibox with will have to solo Hillock no matter what. This is about 1 minute worth of work on most classes, plus or minus depending if it's a shadow (faster) or a templar (slower).

The mudflats quest is a matter of minutes as well. Finding the glyphs is easy and all you have to do is touch the wall.

Now comes the interesting part. Let's say you have your 5 multiboxed characters (being vague on classes, so you can think about it yourself) and 1 main character (higher level / powerful). Is it possible to kill Brutus for the 5 multiboxed characters 100% safely with no risk of death? Yes! After your main character kills him, your other characters just have to go to town to get the reward. One of these rewards is a lot more valuable than others ;).

From there, your main character can just port to cavern and drop a TP and all your characters can go in and go back to town for the support gem. In maybe 15 - 20m+ of work, you can have 5 x the quest rewards of normal hillock, mudflats, brutus, and merveil. Trying to do the same by hand for 5 characters solo or in a group would be a lot longer and not even compare.

Once the characters are in Act 2, there is another quest you will want to do for the skill gem quest rewards. While there is no 100% safe way to do this, other than clearing every mob in the area except the boss, it's quite easy to manage. Once again, being vague with classes and quests, the value of this quest reward gem is a lot more than the Brutus one.

To summarize, in about 30 - 45m of work, give or take depending on map RNG and your move speed, you can take a powerful high level character and get 5 x the quest rewards of key quests that would net you anywhere between 20 - 40 alchs. All this is possible WITHOUT having to use 3rd party tools. Using 3rd party tools cuts down the time a little, but not much, as you can just waste TP scrolls instead.

What I realized was, there's no real need to get a super strong high level character to do this effectively. It's possible with a relatively low level character with the right gear.


The chest would typically be the level 1 unique, but I couldn't find one. The amulet is your choice, but you won't have a good unique one until 20+ anyways. For the build, it's your typical OP mara build: http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgEAGS4n7VBQVElYY18_cql82YzPrKq53cQVxPbG2NSP51LvDvIv9kg=

What you end up with is a 500+ DPS boss farming character that can one-two shot pretty much every rare or unique boss without any issues. Merveil takes 6 hits total, 3 per phase. Brutus takes about 4 - 5. Just phase run -> infernal blow / elemental hit / normal attack and you pretty much gib them without breaking a sweat. You have extra survivability from the mara passives, so you can't die in Act 1. Keep in mind, this is being done in a full group of 6!

This build was made specifically for farming gems from Brutus and Merveil. It has no real AoE, so don't expect to be able to use it to power farm up characters; there's other builds better for that.

Besides farming quest reward gems, there's also something else you can take advantage of in a group of 6. You create an artificial "monster power" scenario where, you aren't getting more exp, but you are getting more item quantity/rarity? bonuses from the full group.

This means, if you find the right area(s) to farm, you can park characters in a safe location, run and gib the boss and grab the loot, the repeat over and over. The purpose of this is not for exp, but simply the drops. In testing, I found that on average, using 80 wisdom scrolls to ID rares and magics resulted in a 100% profit. That means, for every 80 wisdom scroll I bought, I earned an extra 80 wisdom scrolls.

There's a pretty heavy time investment, as you have to id everything, go back and forth to town to vendor, but that's where the Portal gem helps a lot. You conserve your TP scrolls, so you reduce costs a lot. If you run out of ID scrolls, you could just farm the transmutations by selling the uniuds, but that ends up taking a lot more time.

That was long, but multiboxing to build wealth is indeed viable. Multiboxing to level, on the other hand, is not, in my opinion. There's no real need for AHK or ISBoxer for doing the things I just described though. The only thing those tools can do for you is help make a few things more convenient, some of which are outside the scope of the game anyways.

One thing I did was use AHK to manage the game client windows so I could press a button and have that client come to the foreground. That saves on having to Alt + Tab and search for the client you want. It sounds simple, but in terms of min/max'ing this stuff, it's quite useful.

Anyways, that's my contribution to the topic on multiboxing. If you look at their history, they will change the things they need to in order to make it not easily advantageous without outright disallowing it. If there's one thing anyone can see in MMORPGs, as soon as you get into the "you can't do this", you just encourage people to do so. By changing the game instead, they save themselves a lot of work and effort and can continue to focus on making a better game.

@drew_benton: Excellent post and you deserve recognition, as does the original poster, for your research and work.

I've long said that the problem of automation and multi-playing isn't a problem with the players - it's a problem with the game. GGG seems to have done a great job in this respect and continues to refine its approach.

Put another way, if something in a game is so predictable, repetitive, and.. stupid.. that it can be automated, it will be, and in the end there's nothing the game company can do other than change the game. Banning doesn't work because you can't, in most cases, prove it. The same holds true for multi-playing (or multi-boxing or multi-botting).

Drew. Much of what you described is multiple loading. At least in terms of bringing them to merciless. Or, how it used to be done (and still is once you reach lvl 35).

What is a shame is aloot of people talking negatively about it without real knowledge about it.

The amount of effort time, preparation and money to be able to do something as stupid as multiboxing and people saying it ruins the economy is ridiculous.In no game ever have you seen thouhsands of multiboxers.It just dosent happen.Multiboxing brings aloot of headaches aloot of them and this is coming from someone who used to multibox.Its extremely rewarding and ive done it in aloot of games even where they said it was imposssible.I just hate the amount of well "hate" that it brings from people who dont totally understand it and what it brings.People just always think ohh you get 6x loot its not entirely like that and to be succesfull you also have to spend 6x loot.Not only that in a game like this one.Multiboxing a having a specific synergy if you loose one character it fucked you.

Wether or not its allowed in this game i dont know.People saying blizzard never said directly they allow it, well they have various times.Sometimes even "blue" would say its allowed with a tint of hate in their posts.

In the end if youve never spent your sweet time doing it and extensively you would understand that people that hate on it are extremely biased and look at it as "zomg this guy get 6x loot its so unfair" as if the guy was using the same amount of effort as a person playing 1 character.

Theres aloot to go into to it.And in the end in a game like poe will it be worth it god knows.

But for us multiboxers its always the reward of doing it.Its not for the loot.Its not for the epics.Its for doing something near impossible and saying fuck it im going to do it.
And in a game like this unless your playing default.You have more to loose then to win.

"

dazed1992 wrote:

What is a shame is aloot of people talking negatively about it without real knowledge about it.

Sorry, talking to the wrong person here for one. Before I retired, my housemate was a sysop at an ISP, we had tons of bandwidth and more hardware than we needed for any practical purpose. My housemate multiboxed in a couple of games, I even got into it a bit, and frankly it wrecks havoc. A handful of multiboxers can ruin the gaming experience for hundreds of other players. That's just plain truth, gaming history, and there's no challenge to it for anyone of mediocre or better talent. Frankly its not even worth bragging about.

Now in the case of Path of Exiles, it may be that GGG has designed the game such that it will never be a serious problem, but to say that it has never caused problems elsewhere is absurd. I don't need to be specific, check the forums of any online multiplayer game where multiboxing is possible and you can see for yourself.

Really good post drew_benton

And yea is not that easy hehe. But all I need to know is if its allowed or not to use ISbot and autohotkey.

I saw a post some time ago where someone made WASD commands using autohotkey and that was allowed and I basically think that would be a prober way to make multiboxing viable because mouse keymapping is simply not good enough for POE

But ill await GGG stance on this issue

"

Omnivore61 wrote:

"

dazed1992 wrote:

What is a shame is aloot of people talking negatively about it without real knowledge about it.

Sorry, talking to the wrong person here for one. Before I retired, my housemate was a sysop at an ISP, we had tons of bandwidth and more hardware than we needed for any practical purpose. My housemate multiboxed in a couple of games, I even got into it a bit, and frankly it wrecks havoc. A handful of multiboxers can ruin the gaming experience for hundreds of other players. That's just plain truth, gaming history, and there's no challenge to it for anyone of mediocre or better talent. Frankly its not even worth bragging about.

Now in the case of Path of Exiles, it may be that GGG has designed the game such that it will never be a serious problem, but to say that it has never caused problems elsewhere is absurd. I don't need to be specific, check the forums of any online multiplayer game where multiboxing is possible and you can see for yourself.

And you just plain wrong. There is no difference between a party of 4 and 1 guy conttrolling 4 charecters. unless you saying joining up in POE ruins the economy?

"

dazed1992 wrote:

What is a shame is aloot of people talking negatively about it without real knowledge about it.

The amount of effort time, preparation and money to be able to do something as stupid as multiboxing and people saying it ruins the economy is ridiculous.In no game ever have you seen thouhsands of multiboxers.It just dosent happen.Multiboxing brings aloot of headaches aloot of them and this is coming from someone who used to multibox.Its extremely rewarding and ive done it in aloot of games even where they said it was imposssible.I just hate the amount of well "hate" that it brings from people who dont totally understand it and what it brings.People just always think ohh you get 6x loot its not entirely like that and to be succesfull you also have to spend 6x loot.Not only that in a game like this one.Multiboxing a having a specific synergy if you loose one character it fucked you.

Wether or not its allowed in this game i dont know.People saying blizzard never said directly they allow it, well they have various times.Sometimes even "blue" would say its allowed with a tint of hate in their posts.

In the end if youve never spent your sweet time doing it and extensively you would understand that people that hate on it are extremely biased and look at it as "zomg this guy get 6x loot its so unfair" as if the guy was using the same amount of effort as a person playing 1 character.

Theres aloot to go into to it.And in the end in a game like poe will it be worth it god knows.

But for us multiboxers its always the reward of doing it.Its not for the loot.Its not for the epics.Its for doing something near impossible and saying fuck it im going to do it.
And in a game like this unless your playing default.You have more to loose then to win.

Couldn't have said it better myself. And you right I also get mad and sad when people accuse of us botting. We got nothing to do with the botting community and many of us is actually trying to fight them. Multiboxing got nothign todo with automation or botting if I had 10 hands that would be called multiboxing!