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Gamer Plays Over 30 Warcraft Characters
If your significant other complains that you play too much World of Warcraft, just show them this article about a user named "Prepared." He plays an amazing 36 World of Warcraft accounts on 11 different computers at the same time. He is his own raid group. "It costs me exactly $5711 in subscription costs per year with 36 accounts on the 6 month pay schedule," he writes. "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."
He's the biggest nerd in the world
*DrugCheese rants*
that he managed to get all that hardware into his parent's basement.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
It always amazes me how much time/effort/money people will put into their hobbies. However, I'm curious why he stopped at 36. A WoW raid can be up to 40 and in the still current expansion, it's 25 (generally). If you're going to run 36 and pay _thousands_ of dollars for it, why not tack on 4 more and have a full raid? Technical limitation? Ran out of funds?
Then again, maybe he actually wanted 4 slots open to "show off"? If I was crazy enough to do something like this, I know I wouldn't want to keep it all to myself, friends/enemies would have to partake!
What's worse... he has both a job and a wife.
If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose.
I hope he does not have comcast cable or the download cap may hit hard 11 systems = a lot of bandwidth.
What is this "wife" thingy you're referring to? A cool interface addon maybe! I'll go google it!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
ACORN paid him $1 apiece to register his characters to vote.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Clearly he has a job but I read the blurb and didn't see mention of a wife.
He plays with himself! I play WoW, but I thought one of the basics of the game was player interaction. I personally enjoy talking to other players and getting to know my guildies. The social interaction combined with play is what keeps me around. It would be funny to whisper a random character of his every ten seconds, see if he keeps up. Nahh, he probably runs around /dnd.
Note his NT4 MCSE books underneath the console. Is this Billy Gates' gaming rig?
But keeping 11 systems update can does he have a WSUS sever to keep the windows update bandwidth down.
Part of me wants to say "Wow, what an impressive accomplishment!" Another part of me wants to get him some serious psychiatric help.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You're only off on the cost by a factor of 12 or so. It's $5711 a year.
/. links to Yahoo as source.
Yahoo links to Joystiq
Joystiq links to gamepolitics.com
gamepolitics.com links to gizmodo
gizmodo links to crunchgear.com
crunchgear.com links to ripten.com
ripten.com links to the actual forum post: http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=14611&pageNo=1
The picture of all the kit gives an idea of how crazy this is. Reminds me of teh masterer from this: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TuiDJvBSsHg purepwnage
That's still 475.92$ USD/month only in WoW account fees. That's more than my rent (and I got a 5 rooms apartment),
Actually the title should read 30 WOW characters, not Warcraft characters.
Warcraft don't mean WOW.
If you are going to take a game like WoW to it's extreme, then do it in style!
I can see the attraction - PUGs (pick up groups) can be very annoying as it takes just one muppet to ruin the quest/dungeon/raid for everybody else.
That said, I doubt I would go past the more standard 5 that multi-boxers (http://www.wowwiki.com/Multiboxing) seem to go for as a standard group is 5 and that makes a bit more sense...
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Female elves don't count as wives.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
these guys were relying on elemental shaman's wrath of air totem, which gave 3% crit chance. crit chance gives the chance to do double damage. prior to patch 3.0.2, all totems' buffs for a group stacked. 5 wrath of air totem was dropped, it would increase the crit chance by an additional 15%, for all group members for example. therefore all the shamans he plays in that group had very high crit rates, and when they all shot at something they all did massive double damage.
patch 3.0.2 made it so that buffs do not stack. so if 30 shamans drop wrath of air totems each, the group wide bonus will be only 3%. this will reduce their power approx to half in terms of firepower.
he is called a multiboxer, and this activity was called multiboxing. now they wont be able to do it like before anymore.
Read radical news here
What is this "wife" thingy you're referring to? A cool interface addon maybe! I'll go google it!
It was an alright add on, but after 2.0 was released, it broke and had all these nagging error messages and no ones bothered to maintain it since.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Looking at the mess of keyboards and mice, could he use Synergy http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ or does it not work with WoW? -armus
He didn't say that there are worse hobbies, he said there are more expensive hobbies. There's a difference.
Of course no - everyone knows that female elves are used as nubile slave girls.
The forum that this originated from is a well known if not THE best source of multiboxing information, http://www.dual-boxing.com
The forums are located here: http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php
There is a beginner guide to multiboxing here: http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Board&boardID=11
Compared to the drivel that is the common Warcraft General Forums, this one is very elegant, polite and helpful. It has a plethora of free and useful information to help new boxers get started as well as the depth needed for people who have moved on to as many as 5 or 10 accounts (and sometimes quite a few more). There are custom addons and programs that people have written and shared with the community as well. If you are thinking about multiboxing, take a look and learn more about it - it probably isn't what you might think - or this being the Slashdot crowd, maybe it is.
I wonder if that air conditioner unit high on the side wall is enough to cool that room?
Sadly, according to this link on the same site, he may need help in pill form too.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Doesn't he realize he can virtualize his 36 accounts and 11 computers into a single WoWoW account.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
No no, he said "more expensive" hobbies. Not "worse."
I might play WoW myself but even I can admit that this is pretty bad when it comes to a "hobby."
There is no knowledge that is not power.
And it costs me $13.99/month.
rooooar
A co-worker is trying to convince me to play WOW. I keep telling him "No." He's like oh, it looks awesome! It's fun! "I'm sure you're right. That's exactly why I'm not trying it." Damn, it's like working alongside the pusher man, goddamn the pusher man.
I'm not thinking he's wrong about the game, I'm sure he's right. And I need a gaming jones just like I need to get hooked on crack.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
`nuff said.
But you know Blizzard is going to have to take some action against multi-boxing now. Five-boxers were bad enough, with 32 you can dominate any BG. With 15 shaman in a typical battleground, he can literally kill 2-4 players instantly.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
After checking it out, I must agree that it went on a downward spiral - the first year of releases was mostly fun (the internals were especially good!), then it all went to hell, as it's lua scripts started to over-check the db files for visual flaws, making the whole process sluggish. The 0.2.0 version (which was released two years after the first one) started showing all these nag-screens about your fishing/cooking/first-aid skills not being used at all (who the hell has time for that?). The interface got really cluttered around 0.4.2, and also the developers decided on a god-awful bright yellow design for it - you just couldn't look at it anymore without losing your eyeballs. I held myself tough for the 0.5.3 "Middle release", but after that, i just couldn't go on. I admit, i miss the entertainment features of this addon, but i simply will not tolerate all this trouble. I tried deinstalling it, but - for some unfathomed reason - it decided to take half of the other addons with it. My whole Gatherer database was split in half because of that stupid addon!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
I don't get it, does that make you a nerd or a geek?
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Seems real to me. Here is his guild.
http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Aegwynn&n=We+Are+Prepared&p=1
A whole lot of level 61 shaman, just as indicated in the story.
Actually, that depends where you live. Around here, it's 3.5, 4.5, 5.5, counting the kitchen / living room / bedroom as full and bathrooms as .5. If you have two bathrooms then you have a full number, but that's usually for higher numbers (6-7-8) of total rooms.
Here, a very nice 4.5 rooms apartment cost around 430$ (US equivalent at the current rate)
The photo is clearly shopped - each of the shaman is in fact the same, wearing only different gear.
It's always the second in a list of 3.
(Except for the top left quadrant of the top left screen of the center group of 4 monitors. This is clearly a shop with the last name duplicated a bunch of times.)
You can zoom in on any of the vista desktops and see obvious use of the blur tool where the desktop meets the edge of the monitor. Some of the Vista desktops have some horribly obvious blocks of noise added to try to differentiate them.
No one can manage that many characters at once - 2 is doable, but you'd be severely disadvantaged. This person is NOT leading raids into dungeons / alliance territory.
Even if he had 100 hands, and 200 eyes, he wouldn't get far using a pack of all shaman. (Yes, shaman are overpowered, I hate them too. But they're not THAT overpowered.)
The simple explanation for the accounts is GOLD FARMING. The photo in question is photoshopped, and unrelated. (Note the Everquest II box, various old programmer/admin reference books, and hardware that can't run WoW at those settings, let alone 4 instances.)
If you knew more about how this kind of thing works you wouldn't be so quick to call fake. The blur on the screen edges is an effect you see with your own eyes when looking at an LCD screen from an angle. Those machines are perfectly capable of running WoW for what he is doing. Framerate is not a problem when multiboxing because you don't care about framerate on screens you rarely look at. The old books don't really mean anything either, I have old books laying around - stop the presses I must be a time traveller! Also, there is a reason why things are set up in an identical fashion between all the accounts.
Based on the your opinion that "2 is doable, but you'd be severely disadvantaged", I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest you either don't play WoW or haven't run into any multiboxers yet. There's a guy on my server who controls 26 toons at once. There are several people who are 5-boxing. Blizzard seems to content to accept the money and look the other way, but it really does violate the spirit of the Terms of Use if not the letter since these guys are all using 3rd party software to control the keystrokes sent to the game.
I married a female elf, you insensitive clod!
Last week my wife and I watched Conan the Barbarian and had a discussion/argument about whether Conan's sword would be elven or dwarven. My money's on dwarven. Sure, elves can make great bows and pretty armor, but if you want a dependable two-handed sword to cleave a man's skull in half, you've gotta go with dwarven steel.
In hindsight, the whole discussion sounded like fodder for Penny Arcade.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Pics or it didn't happen.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
No, you're thinking of Discord Action Bars.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
In case you don't read the subject lines of the comments (which I don't either a lot of the time,) I'll start by restating it: The geekiest part of it is...that people around here give this kind of discourse enough thought to mark the above Insightful. (And it was) but, pots... meet kettles. I suppose my having noticed means that I'm not excluded.
Speak for yourself.
Here is his set up. check out picks 2-5.
http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=498
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
What's worse... he has both a job and a wife.
And no kids, right???
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
"Working as intended."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Would he have to mark out days? I'm thinkin' that he's running into the "47 hour straight exhaustion cap".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I thought this over way back. I retired from video games after MK3, just before the height of the advent of MMOs. The effort/reward ratios were changing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Meh. Proper dwarves use axes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, but it does explain where Half-Elves come from.
Actually, as far as I can tell, he has too many for a raid. All the 40 man raids I remember offhand are level 60 raids from before the expansion.
However, you have to also keep in mind that:
1. The loot you get in MC or AQ40 is less than what you get for random FedEx quests in the Hellfire Peninsula at level 58 after the expansion pack. So there's no need whatsoever to actually make them at level 60 with a 40 man group.
2. If you're going to do them just for nostalgia or curiosity sake, you can just leave it for when you're level 70 and well equipped. IIRC a well equipped 5-man level-70 group can down Onyxia, and a 7 man group can do MC. I haven't tried it after the latest patch, but that used to be the case at least.
So, really, I can't think of any situations where he'd actually need 40 characters nowadays. He can do just about anything imaginable with 25.
So, well, my question would be from the exact opposite direction: why a whole 36? Why not stop at 25?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I thought this over way back. I retired from video games after MK3, just before the height of the advent of MMOs. The effort/reward ratios were changing.
single player is still fun, I'm enjoying the hell out of GTA4. I've tried multiplayer there and, while fun, I obviously still suck at it. That's the kind of multiplayer I'll do, the kind I can sit down for a few months and pick up and nothing's different. MMO's are too much like work.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You need not maintain it because it has a 'self-fixing feature'. Bad enough it has the nag dialog ('does this column make my table look big' is my fav) but no matter how often it tries to fix itself, it is never happy. Plus the costs just keep on comming in. Trust me, the initial cost of the trial key and the license was just like a freebase. Lure them in and before they know what's happening, whammo, you got them. No penis enlargement spam could suck money out of these suckers as fast as woman-ware.
But they are taking keyboard input from a human and replicating through to multiple accounts rather than computer generating the inputs to the game aka glider. As long as there's a human controlling the main keyboard and they don't start automating things I personally don't see this as a big deal. Pretty neat if you want to invest time to do it. I suppose if this sort of thing begins to negatively impact the game world Blizzard can take some steps mitigate it.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Holy crap where do you live!? I paid 575 to live in a crappy two bedroom apartment - and that was relatively cheap!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
has 36 Slashdot accounts.
Man, I want some of what all you guys have got. Where I live it's $1,000 and up for a studio.
Some people spend more than that a month on their car... others drive a 10 year old car and have no payments. The money isn't that hard to come by if you want to spend it badly enough. The real question, is what you're spending it on actually worth it?
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
it has to be a ranged character that is easy to use and can heal. it would be too hard to run around people with enh shammies while multiboxing.
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