Banned For: Botting (Actually ISBoxing 6 Witches)

Some of you may know me for multiboxing in EVE online, D3 and some other misc small free to play games.

Well as the tittle reads I have been banned. Here is my experiance thus far:

While Obtaining my tentacle miss creations to blow up more maps I decided to take a break and eat, watch some TV and then continue farming. Well I noticed off in the distance on my main monitor that one of my clients was logged out, in short two minute increments all of them were eventually logged out.

At first I received an error stating that my accounts had been logged into too many times and to try again later. So I waited a whole five minutes and all of them said: "Your account has been banned by an administrator."

So I decided to log into the website and rather than logging me in it says You have been banned for botting. Kind of an interesting conclusion considering the amount of AFK time my toons spend in town doing absolutely nothing. If i were botting I think I would make use of that extra time to farm more items? All of my characters follow in sync (as best as collision detection lets me) and I just spam sparks while my pets kill everything. Since I'm a human I don't do the same motion exactly every time nor am I even close to being perfect. I need not say more since all of you understand being human and playing a video game is no shocker but some how I have been labeled as a bot.

I have received no email from them over this incident while I have already sent them an email and I await their response. Once I get a response I will promptly post it here. For those of you that are worried about getting banned for ISboxing here is a tip: Don't let anyone see you do it.

Must be some amazing bot they think I have to have 6 characters work together as if they were all BFFs.

Here is a screenshot of my banned login on the website and banned login for the game as well as Sheldon proving some rediculous point while eating lunch: http://imgur.com/7OULXFz

[Valerian]

As a note: Lax has received via email the official email response to this OP, and may follow up as needed.

I have received a warning myself.

I would indeed strongly recommend not letting anyone see you in town.

ISboxer is indeed recognized as botting since it's against GGG's TOS just like botting. They just don't allow key broadcasting. Chris has made that pretty clear in many posts.

Props to you for running 6 witches, I gave up and started only using 4. It was almost impossible for me to make them go into narrow pathways (like doors). I wonder how you do it.

I have received a warning myself.

I would indeed strongly recommend not letting anyone see you in town.

ISboxer is indeed recognized as botting since it's against GGG's TOS just like botting. They just don't allow key broadcasting. Chris has made that pretty clear in many posts.

Props to you for running 6 witches, I gave up and started only using 4. It was almost impossible for me to make them go into narrow pathways (like doors). I wonder how you do it.

Yeah Chris himself sent the email in response stating that using proxy to broadcast my keys is against his terms. So cat is pretty much out of the bag on this one.

As for how I get them through doors, in combat i spam skeletons as a front line so my characters do not get hit by anything, zombies normally are enough but they hang around and you cant push them forward to your liking. I normally enter the room with rapid clicking for each toon individually to go through the door or I broadcast through the door and run them into the corner, It just takes a little planning and practice and it becomes second nature. I finish maps pretty quickly since my pets do next to all the work aside from pickup drops.

[lax]

I have received a warning myself.

I would indeed strongly recommend not letting anyone see you in town.

ISboxer is indeed recognized as botting since it's against GGG's TOS just like botting. They just don't allow key broadcasting. Chris has made that pretty clear in many posts.

Props to you for running 6 witches, I gave up and started only using 4. It was almost impossible for me to make them go into narrow pathways (like doors). I wonder how you do it.

When I e-mailed Chris many moons ago, he indicated that they wouldn't ban for multiboxing and that they would try using game mechanics to mitigate "problem" behaviors. Which they have: there's almost no multiboxers in PoE because of the player collision mechanics alone. The only time there was, was when people were exploiting chaos orbs -- not exactly being Good Citizens, and pissing off the PoE community in the process. And when they did that, they clearly showed doing it without needing broadcasting, because they only actually played one of their 4 or however many guys and left the other far enough away that they could get the bonus.

From the Terms of Use, next to the registration: https://www.pathofexile.com/account/create

Utilising any form of automated software in relation to your access or use of the Website, Materials or Services is prohibited. Any contravention by you of these Terms of Use or any other terms or conditions notified to you by Grinding Gear Games or any behaviour which Grinding Gear Games deems in its sole discretion is not in keeping with the intended spirit of participation in POE, terminates the Licence Immediately.

The ToS says "any form of automated software" which means something different to different people, and frankly any software can be described as "automated" (why else would you use FRAPS if it was not "automatically" capturing video?). But, as it says, GGG's sole discretion.

Anyway, I have a feeling the "automated" part is pretty irrelevant. I suspect that this would incur the same penalty, even though it clearly does not involve "any form of automated software":

Source: https://sites.google.com/site/khromtor/oldrigs

I think it boils down to GGG changed their minds since I originally e-mailed Chris Wilson, due to player feedback after the chaos orb exploit. Those people gave the rest of anyone who wants to multibox PoE a bad name.

You really made my day with that pic lax. Is this your multiboxing prototype ?

Anyways yeah, the multiboxing in PoE really has a bad name because of this chaos recipe thing that went on and really did screw the economy for the time it lasted. Hell, I tried it for a bit after they nerfed it and it only gave chance orbs, but it still seemed worth it to me... (because of the occasionnal unique you get on top of a bunch of chances + chroms etc.). Now people will instantly report if they see something that looks remotely close to a multiboxer. My stance is that, if you actually play 4 different characters, it doesn't make a difference that you get 4x the loot since at the end of the day you will still have 4x more characters to gear up !

I hope over time their stance on the subject can lighten because multiboxing is actually insanely fun in PoE, there's a lot of different stuff you can do if you're willing to go that way.

[lax]

You really made my day with that pic lax. Is this your multiboxing prototype ?

Hah, no this was Zhek Kromtor's wooden dowel rig for EVE Online. He got temporarily banned (and unbanned) for multiboxing EVE Online via a similar argument as GGG's and then, because he could, he did it with this hardware solution that could not be possibly be construed as automation, or software related. That went about as viral as any multiboxing story, and CCP was sort of forced to change (or at least clarify) their stance a bit, to state that people don't need to set up elaborate systems of dowels in order to multibox. (Again, the rule only applied to software.)

I suspect in GGG's case they would go the other way on this and state that hardware is equally bannable. But, there is only one way to find out....

[sepiasafritos]

To my knowledge GGG has not implemented a program such as Warden with poe. So either they're scanning your IP for multiple connections or possibly you were seen and reported.

I've been boxing this entire time without knowing that there is some exploit on chaos orbs. So I guess my thanks goes out to all the idiots that exploited, now the legit get to pay the price and move on to another game. This is the first game I've ever had an issue with boxing, aside from when Intrepid Crossing alliance leaders came to bomb my 25 hulks mining a Large Asteroid cluster because they thought I was a bot. But that is completely different .

[sepiasafritos]

YeaImjason, I meant to ask did they ban only your chars that you were using for multiboxing? I thought you mentioned they didn't ban all of them. I ask because, as a result of seeing your post I moved all my of VAST(sarcasm) wealth that i have accrued from multiboxing, ( 10 chaos, 2 gcp) off of my main account in case my multiboxers were to get banned at least i wouldn't lose everything. Were you multiboxing very publically on a stream or something? I know the other guy who got banned was on the forums inciting rage to non multiboxers bragging about his wealth gained from the chaos exploit.

Basically I'm asking, I moved my good stuff to an account which i never multiboxed with, did they ban all of your accounts even ones u weren't using for multiboxing ? I'm trying to figure out of if they did it based on accounts that connected from your IP or just the ones they noted were part of your multiboxing group.

Not a gold farmer or anything just like that, just multiboxing with another friend for the min maxing of auras and conduit- discharge which i dont have a guild or something to make a cohesive group like kripparian or someone. Was about to make the switch from hotkeynet and buy Isboxer but I'm kinda double thinking that now that bans seem to be happening more and I would only be using isboxer for POE. Would be great if the Isboxer group and GGG could reach a half way point, ban the exploiters, not ban ppl having fun.
Thanks