In a previous post I showed you a few clips of me playing multiple World of Warcraft characters at once, thus assuring me a nudge of prestige in the Geek Afterlife.

Tonight, instead of going to bed early I’m going to post a couple of screenshots of me “multiboxing” at work, too. Only this time instead of running three characters through a virtual landscape, I’m directing 4 macho computers to bombard our test website with a lot of traffic. Even geekier, I’m writing code that tells a Controller to tell 4 Agents to run specific requests at particular load levels, etc. The specifics are interesting to me and no one else, so I’ll just skip to the screenshots:

Agents and Controllers

Agents in Action…

Anyway, if you see me striding around in a cape bellowing something like “I HAVE MINIONS!!!”, this will go some way towards explaining why.

A while ago I promised you a trip into the darkest, nerdiest underbrush: a post about my forays into the world of WoW multiboxing. Are you excited? Good.

A few weekends ago I picked up a few trial World of Warcraft discs for $2 each, and created two new characters on them. Then, using some helpful advice from the forums at Dual-boxing.com and a $20 program called Keyclone, I was well on my way to having 3 toons questing and leveling together.

Here’s a screenshot of my desktop, so you can see what I’m talking about:

I made a paladin named Quinz, and two mages named Brooklyn and Brronx. If I was a crazy person and I wanted to level all of these characters to 70, I would have made two more mages named Manhattan and Staten, but… this was just an experiment to see what it’s like to play with multiple characters. Here’s a shot of my gals in combat:

Paladins are tough, low-damage characters; mages are fragile, high-damage characters. Together they make a pretty good team. The mages follow the paladin around, and attack whatever she tells them to; she can heal if someone gets damaged, and at higher levels she can resurrect a teammate if something goes wrong.

Setting up the macros and Keyclone took about an hour, and getting my head around basic combat took another hour. Macros and a few addons can make accepting quests slightly more convenient, but maintaining 3 toons gets to be pretty tedious. By far the most daunting aspect of the whole thing is managing three inventories and clicking on three screens for all the little tasks that can’t be macro’d. Since the mages were on trial accounts, they couldn’t trade, mail or use the Auction House, so there was some tedium after I hit level 6 and realized they didn’t have enough money to train their new skills… grinding copper by killing Frostmane Geomancers is not very efficient, even if you have a lot of firepower!

But by the time they were level 8, I was definitely getting the hang of things. Dual frostbolts to pull, two fireballs and fire blasts… BOOM! Mobs were usually dead by the time they got to Quinz. Brooklyn or Brronx died once or twice, but mostly it was pretty easy to stay out of trouble. Reacting to trouble is the hard part, so that’s where I started looking for a challenge.

At level 11, I went down to Westfall, a zone you usually don’t enter until you’re a little higher up, and decided to try the Forgotten Heirloom quest. The YouTube video below shows my 4 attempts to get this right. The pocketwatch is in a house guarded by a level 15 bad guy and his level 12 buddy. Three level 11 characters can definitely handle them, but it was pretty fun getting my combat skills up to snuff:

So… the pros and cons of multiboxing:

PRO

1. WoW is already like cocaine, and multiboxing is like crack. All of the nerdy joy of leveling, killing stuff, keeping things organized, figuring out puzzles, wandering around and exploring things is multiplied several times.
2. See #1.
3. See #1 again.

CON

1. “Oh my god, as if there wasn’t enough evidence that I need a girlfriend…”
2. Remember how the first 10 levels go kinda slow, and there are a ton of stupid little bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through? Multiply that by 3.
3. Getting things set up again after a character dies is a hassle. It’s almost easier if everyone dies, so you don’t have one or two standing around waiting and vulnerable. This is one reason why heading into the battlegrounds with 3-5 toons just seems ridiculous… my hat is off to anyone who figures that out.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the video!