Was multiboxing a thing in Retail Vanilla?

[Splash]

Out of curiosity, was it a thing or not?

If it was, did Blizzard allowed it or not?

[snawfu]

Yeah it was a thing and Blizz had nothing against it since you're paying for a second account

[Undertanker]

It was a thing, though the rule was you can't automate your key presses to control 2 different clients at once.

Was very rare but I came across it a few times.

Was rare due to the no account sharing rule so it meant you were having to pay 2x as much for subscription to pull it off. If account sharing was detected due to sudden changes in location detected in regards to IP, you would be flagged and heavily monitored.

[Hernia]

i can't imagine it being common due to how shitty our internet connections and pcs were back then

[Docholy]

Out of curiosity, was it a thing or not?

If it was, did Blizzard allowed it or not?

It was a thing and all things Hydra said were spot on. Its wasn't common but it was around. For some reason I always saw Shamans doing it.

[Drain]

I wouldn't say it was common enough to be "a thing" but it did exist. Despite being against the terms of use in several ways, they, as far as I saw, never punished anyone doing it. We were quoting their own rules to them in a futile attempt to get them to enforce it. They were however happy to take that sub per account. But it was never that common due to the costs. It mainly plagues private servers, which can box without cost. We were quite fortunate that Nost strictly prohibited this, and banned many players that refused to stop doing it.

The main benefit of boxing was cheating the arena. You could solo 3s or 5s using a boxed group. With the right stack, it's actually difficult for the enemy team to fight back. Shaman was probably the most popular choice, because with 3-5x 100% crit Chain Lightnings, they could instantly drop several players, following up with instant cast high burst shocks to finish off anyone that survives with low HP. They had Chain Heal on top of it to heal their group. This is on top of Bloodlust and entire stacks of totems.

Other players would simply box to cheat questing, using a high level puppet to do the work for a low level scrub. Again, Blizzard did not care at all if you did this. The main strategy is to tag groups with your scrub, then tab over to the main and mop up. With the mobs tagged outside the party on your scrub, he gets 100% XP, even if the high level guy does all the actual work. You could also abuse your high level to run out low level enemy players, which can technically be done without boxing, just by logging over, but with boxing, the guy is already online standing next to you. A Hunter/Warlock is the most abusive, since you can just /follow outside the group, with the pet on Aggressive, and it'll literally kill everything for you. Hunter also brings Aspect of the Pack, which is useful to travel prior to getting a mount. But in later years, the mount was reduced to 30(BC), then 20(WR), so this lost most of its benefit.

[Mastodon2090]

Back in the WoTLK days I saw a guy in AV boxing 5 shamans. They were all named something similar like bod, tod, rod, nod, ect. He was lava burst chain lightning raping ppl.

[Norjak]

It was a thing, though the rule was you can't automate your key presses to control 2 different clients at once.

That rule was in place on Nost...I don't think Blizz honestly gives/gave a shit as long as each toon was another account making them $15 bucks/month.
I knew a guy who did it in BC but I never encountered it on retail Vanilla..

Its wasn't common but it was around. For some reason I always saw Shamans doing it.

Not real familiar with Shamans in Vanilla, but later on they were a popular choice for multiboxers, you could pretty much 1-shot anyone in BG's by focusing a lightning spell (forgot the name.) All those different totems were pretty crazy...I remember a Horde multiboxer who used to take his 5 or 10 Shamans to hold the IBT/IBGY chokepoint almost by himself.

[Castro]

Back in the WoTLK days I saw a guy in AV boxing 5 shamans. They were all named something similar like bod, tod, rod, nod, ect. He was lava burst chain lightning raping ppl.

Saw one back in vanilla doing one pali to pull large group and then mana bomb it with 4 mages

GM said it's legal as long as you don't sell account or gold.

[Askental]

There was 1 person doing this on the server I was on too. He tried various things but would also main as shaman. He tried arenas by himself in TBC but of course you can't really go really high like that...