Blizzard has clarified its position on multi-boxing in World of Warcraft – the practice of using multiple accounts on multiple PCs to play with several characters at once – by saying that it doesn't consider it hacking, but that it certainly isn't something that's supported by the game maker.

“Hackers” is a term often used to cover people partaking in a very broad range of activities, like exploiting game bugs/mechanics, stealing another person's private account information via keyloggers or phishing, and infiltrating a system's security to gain some level of control over the system or sensitive information held therein. The latter of the three is most accurately described as hacking,” reads the posting collected by MMO-Champion.

While Blizzard described each of those scenarios as breaking the game's Terms of Service, it said unequivocally that, “Multi-boxing in and of itself is not a violation, provided the player isn't using any macro scripts that automate gameplay beyond what is allowed through default macro and API specifications.”

This understandably annoyed a lot of fans, who see it as no more game breaking than bug exploitation. It's assumed that the reasons Blizzard doesn't crack down on it is because in most instances players need multiple subscriptions, which means more money for the publisher.

When this was brought up, Blizzard's response was: “We don't support multi-boxing, we never have, and we have no current plans to do so. There's a major difference between verifying a person is not violating the Terms of Use purely by playing multiple characters at once, and adding functionality into the game to officially offer support to anyone who wants to.”

KitGuru Says: I've never understood wanting to spend double, triple or more times the money, just to do better in a game. When you're grinding daily quests again and again, running multiple accounts to do them several times – you're making it into a job. It's supposed to be a game. Have fun with it.

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