Off to Vegas

For "work"...uh...yeah, that's what we do there.

And on that note...I'm sure I'll be replicating some of the sillyness here after sharing one of the infamous 5ft beers with a buddy of mine. We've done it before...for lunch. How my wife puts up with me? I have no clue...

And on that note...how I'll be feeling at about 6PM...

Multi-Boxing and Dailies

So I thought I'd post this...and it will obviously be followed up with additional experiments, but my collective GPH (gold per hour) on 3 70s doing the QD Island quests is a total of around 250 or so, whereas with an individual, I hit a shade over 150. I attribute this largely to two horrible, miserable quests - Arm the Wards and Don't Stop Now - ones with not terribly great drop rates and when you have to pick up 3x the items to complete the quests, it doesn't get any better.

For tomorrow's dailies, I'm going to give a go at them doing all non-gathering quests, record that, then do any other dailies where it's not reliant on a drop rate, e.g. the Ogri'la dailies. Stay tuned...

My Setup

There's a lot more discussion on good setups over at http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Portal so if you want to get far more detailed than I care to...feel free to take a look. I like to call mine multi-boxing on a budget. A budget, if you happen to have 2 KVMs and 3 PCs handy ;)

General Setup

My basic setup consists of the following hardware and software:

• 2 Desktop PCs
• 1 Dell XPS M1730
• 2 IO Gear DVI KVMs (although only one is specifically required for WoW...the other is used for other purposes)
• 1 USB switcher (to switch my secondary keyboard)
• 3 copies of WoW
• Octopus

If you've looked at http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Portal you'll see that this is a significantly shorter, and in my opinion, far less complicated setup than others may use. One thing they talk about ad nauseum is latency if you're using software to broadcast keystrokes rather than hardware however I've not found this to be an issue at all. Furthermore, it seems a bit silly to compare local LAN latency to that of hitting the internet and the game servers...they're orders of magnitude apart so I wouldn't lose any sleep over it, particularly for the simple purpose of leveling characters.

As you can see...I have a lot of display space. This allows me the freedom to multi-box in several ways. I can run a single copy per machine (which I do)...or I can allocate space and run multiple copies on the same machine at lower resolution. Note that I didn't purchase these 3 monitors for the purpose of WoW...they're actually for work, but...it's not exactly bad to have the option :)

Also note...3 mice, 2 keyboards. I use a mouse to drive each character when they need individual attention such as quest turn-ins, looting items, whatever, but I generally only need one keyboard. Once Octopus is up and running everything should generally be fairly smooth sailing but I do use it to log in on each secondary computer so that I don't have to fiddle with trying to send credentials from the master keyboard...particularly when keys are omitted.

Octopus Setup

Octopus is pretty straightforward to set up.

On the clients...

1.) Go to the client tab and enter the name or IP of the machine on the General subtab.

2.) On the Windows subtab, enter WoW as the process name and check the "Auto add windows" checkbox

3.) Go to the games sub-tab and enter the location of WoW and give it a tag of WoW

On the server...

1.) Go to the client tab and on the Windows subtab, perform step 2 of the client setup. This will allow you to run multiple instances on the same machine if you need to.

2.) Establish your key filtering list...mine are as follows:

How Many Subscriptions Does Blizzard Have?

Take a look at their most recent quarterly filing...

http://investor.activision.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1104659-08-50976

There are a couple of numbers of interest to look at...the Operating Income and income attributed to the PC platform, respectively 79,170 and 31,906 (in thousands).

Divide both of these numbers by 12...and that's taking the most optimistic subscription cost and it breaks down to 6.59mln subscriptions if you use the operating number and 2.65mln subscriptions if you look at the PC number. I would be more inclined to use the latter since that's a more clear categorization of income.

Meeting it somewhat in the middle and picking 13.5 as the subscription cost, it drives it down to 5.8mln and ~2.4mln.

Contrast that to this little press release...

http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/080122.html

My Multi-Boxing Guild

If you're interested in keeping track on my progress...you can check in here, bearing in mind that the Armory isn't updated instantenously so level changes may not be shown.

http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Silver+Hand&n=Bank+of+Gnomerica&p=1

Big List of Dos and Don'ts

This will be a perma post (how do you "sticky" a post on blogspot?!) where I address some of the gotchas found with my experience, hopefully making it easier for others to follow.

• Make your groups consist of the same class - until you're very comfortable with MBing, I would strongly suggest your groups be comprised of members of the same class. This will help keep you focused for one, since everyone is doing the same thing, and can make it easier to recover from mistakes. The only caveat I would add for this is that it might be nice to have a rezzer just in case you "wipe". On my Netherwing quests, for example, I run a warr, priest and mage and pretty much the only one doing anything is the mage. The priest is targeting the mage and spams shield, PoM and Renew on him- easysauce.
  
• Consider removing the Tab key from your broadcast keys - If you pass the tab key along, it's possible your drones can target another enemy rather than the one you're targeting. If this happens, you can always revert back to your /assist macro, but it may be too late.
  
• Remove movement keys from your broadcast keys - Omit W,A,S,D and the arrow keys. This would fall under multi-boxing 101 as if you pass any of those along, you'll break follow.
  
• Be smart when you refer-a-friend - Don't have one account refer all others, chain the referral. This is nice because it can allow you to have all members of your group hearthed at a different location and they can chain summon each other. EDIT: While there are benefits to referring correctly, such as more than one account getting the mount, after spending more than 3s thinking about this, you can obviously still chain summon people. It would just go from RAF #1 -> Main -> RAF #2. The downside is that if your main is in the location that you want to be, you're more or less screwed whereas if you chain the referral, you're not.
  
• At early levels, if one of your characters dies, spirit rez - You can summon them instead of waiting on them to walk back. Very handy, particularly when you're in an area with a high density of mobs.
  
• Gather, Gather, Gather - Yes...this will take some more time, however if you set up 2 characters, one with skinning and mining, and another with herbalism, you can power level your others through their professions quite easily. Once you hit level 8 or make it into your first city, e.g. Goldshire or Dolanaar, grab skinning at the very least as there are several quests that have you in the area of skinnable animals or require you to skin them outright. DONT FORGET THE CRITTERS! A one shot and skin for easy scraps which can help level Leatherworking cheaply and easily.

First Things First

Before going too far into looking at the various hardware and software options out there, you'll want to do a bit of prep work so that you can better organize things and assess your leveling performance as you progress. I've taken some screen shots of the Excel workbook I use for tracking...nothing fancy, but I do have a couple of charts that I utilize for analysis - one that looks at the average time to level and one that tracks overall progression. I could break down the data a bit further, but for right now, this is what I'm interested in.

This first chart is one of the most important ones for me as it organizes the groups and tells me a few important things such as:

Group Status - A group is defined as ready if they've had all mods and settings copied down and /assist macros set up for each account.

Group Composition - Defines who's in the group, what class and level they are, etc....

Time to Level - All the columns to the right of the groups show how long it took to reach each level in terms of /played time.

The chart below is a basic keyboard mapping chart. This is mainly used when I sync settings among the accounts after a significant threshold. The sync occurs after the first 20 levels, then again after each 10. During that time, I simply add items manually to hot bars and such. This may be seen as an unnecessary step, but as part of my process, for better or worse, I have a script that pushes settings and addons from the master to all of the client machines so if it's not set on the master when that's run, all settings will be lost.

For some, the overall charting and analysis of leveling performance may be an unecessary step, however I'm someone that strongly prefers crunching numbers and while I know there may be some skewed data in there at times, being able to refer to previous performances to know how well or poorly I'm doing is a good motivator and honestly, interesting. For example, my initial guess was that leveling would be somewhat exponential in terms of time, however it appears to be largely linear (minus a few bumps for some excessive gathering and having to talk to a GM for 45 min to resolve a R-A-F issue).

The bottom line is - don't go into this unprepared - you will likely go insane if you're not reasonably ready and metrics are fun for everyone! ;)

Welcome

Thanks for stopping by! As you can tell by the clever URL and the description of the blog, this will be largely focused on my multi-boxing experiences, particularly using the Refer-A-Friend program. Over the next several days I'll post some basic information on my setup largely centered around mods that speed up the questing process, physical layout of devices and hardware/software to facilitate multi-boxing (on the cheap!).

All that aside, I'll start off with posting a picture of me atop a scenic mountain in Nagrand having just acquired (like...literally...10 minutes ago) my new Draenei mount. The silly thing here is that I was apparently going about it the hard way by grinding out Alliance faction in AV, which of course has the added bonus of honor, but at some point the reputation mechanics were changed for quests so that they granted cross-faction reputation...and stopped scaling down with level (I could've sworn they used to be worth much less the higher your level in relation to the quest). At any rate, my idiocy aside, someone pointed out that doing the starting quests in Darnassus for example would still get me partial rep, which was all I needed and I had done a fair amount of the Draenei quests with alts anyway.

So...here it is...my gnomeaphant...