Gamer Plays Over 30 Warcraft Characters 189
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."
WOW (Score:5, Funny)
He's the biggest nerd in the world
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
How can you kill, that which has no life?
Re:WOW (Score:4, Funny)
How can you put a comma, where one makes no sense?
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
HoiPolli is William Shatner's slashdot account. Shatner can put commas where mere mortals fear to punctuate.
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Because I cut and pasted, that website which had bad punctuation.
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Don't rag on the GP for this. That's exactly how the quote was read. Get on youtube and search for "Southpark Warcraft" if you don't believe me.
WOW (Score:2)
Actually the title should read 30 WOW characters, not Warcraft characters.
Warcraft don't mean WOW.
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Even worse, if he has 36 ACCOUNTS he can have multiple CHARACTERS on each account, so it may be many more than 30.
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- Local spelling nazi at your service.
Noob (Score:4, Funny)
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"How do you kill that which has no life?"
-b
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends partly on whether you're a language descriptionist or a prescriptionist.
However, anecdotally the negative connotation seems stronger with "nerd" than "geek"--which can be seen in things like "Geek Squad" (you can be sure marketing's focus groups tried out "nerd squad") where geeks are helpful, and movies like "Revenge of the Nerds" where the nerds are losers.
In this instance, the person in question is definitely in the "needs to seriously consider getting a life" category.
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"in this instance"
Wait? we are instanced? I thought I was logged out!
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Hmm, I cant agree.
The "geek squad" is an old phrase to mock a group of nerds. "Hey there goes the geek squad!"
Like nerd, its also been reclaimed, although geek seems to be a lesser form of nerd, or less of a nerd.
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the geekiest part of it is... (Score:2)
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Geek means fascinated with technology, knows how it works, has social skills.
Nerd means fascinated with technology, knows how it works, has no social skills.
If you want to see the visible difference, watch Wargames, specifically the part where David goes to Jim and Malvin for help. Jim is a geek, Malvin is a nerd.
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Malvin: "But Jim, you're givin away our best tricks!"
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As I and my college roommates have always said, "I'm a geek. It's like a nerd but with a social life."
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*Off to learn*
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What about the person who spends all day every day locked up in his living room, being useful to society for the first 10 hours of his day, and then spends the rest of his life either playing WoW or immersed in web pages learning new shit alla time, huh??
What then, eh, mister I-know-all-the-geekly-ways-so-well, eh? Look in a mirror any time lately, eh?
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The only people who have been helpful and informative were nerds who knew stuff.
I still have yet to meet a geek who watches nothing but star wars (star trek, star gate, whatever) all day, tell me something new/interesting/useful, because they are merely being entertained by technology and doing nothing useful with it.
For one to argue "I'm being entertained and learning at the same time!" th
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There's your problem. Just there, emphasis mine. Welcome to the world of "I don't care what you think, my definition of the word is the right one". And btw, his use of the word nerd is good. Just check it out here [google.com].
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There's your problem. Just there, emphasis mine. Welcome to the world of "I don't care what you think, my definition of the word is the right one". And btw, his use of the word nerd is good. Just check it out here [google.com]
Emphasis mine, you're putting words into people's mouths. No, it's not that "I don't care what you think", I'm stating a personal opinion.
The following link seems to point more to nerd being intelligent (more than a geek), which is what I'm saying. To call someone intelligent for playing 36 WoW characters all day... He may be "smart" to use the "tools" (if you read the original article several links down to the actual forum post) to run this setup, but that's about it. Whether he is smart enough to know
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What's with people using the word nerd incorrectly?
So you implied that it wasn't a personal opinion.
Aside of that, I don't understand why people are bashing guys like this one. I have absolutely no problem with him paying 36 accounts to have his fun. If he can pay his bills, no harm done. If it's an addiction, get a treatment. If it's not, spend as much as you'd like.
I've seen people spend much more than 3000$ a year on hobbies. So where's the problem? Why is WoW different than building a car piece by piece? I currently pla
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I agree considering I'm a nerd myself - but there are vast degrees of nerd?
Cool nerd - aka Data from the Goonies
Loser nerds - aka this WOW character
Reminds me of Dwight Shrutes 2nd 2nd life to further remove himself from reality.
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With all the people I've ever known, a geek is someone that is knowledgeable about tech and has social skills, whereas a nerd is someone that is very well versed in any number of sciences but has no social skills.
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What I'm impressed with is (Score:4, Funny)
that he managed to get all that hardware into his parent's basement.
Why stop at 36? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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but you forgot about the outdoor raid content like Doom Lord Kazzak that can be encountered by the max of 40 people raids.
But this is of course a bit old, there have been people Multiboxing (http://www.wowwiki.com/Multiboxing) for some time now in WoW.
Re:Why stop at 36? (Score:4, Informative)
Raids are parties of 6-40 people divided into 2-8 groups of up to 5 players. The terms raid and raiding primarily and traditionally refer to PVE raid-specific instances and zones. If you're the party leader, you can convert your group into a raid group by accessing your "Social" Panel, selecting 'Raid' and choosing "Convert Group to Raid." From then on, anyone you invite will join your raid group (up to a maximum of 40).
Source, WoWWiki. [wowwiki.com]
40-person: * Molten Core * Onyxia's Lair * Blackwing Lair * Temple of Ahn'Qiraj * Naxxramas
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It might sound odd but some people still enjoy playing in those, without thinking about the loot :)
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He's doing it to raid Stormwind and Ironforge.
Re:Why stop at 36? (Score:5, Interesting)
5k/year for a hobby actually isn't too bad when it comes to hobbies. The time he puts in is probably above and beyond most other hobbies though.
It's funny because I was just talking to a friend about a 'hobby' I and some friends do and he was floored at the cost. Got me thinking it might be time to find a new, cheaper hobby lol...
Re:Why stop at 36? (Score:5, Funny)
It's funny because I was just talking to a friend about a 'hobby' I and some friends do and he was floored at the cost. Got me thinking it might be time to find a new, cheaper hobby lol...
By 'hobby' I assume you mean hookers. Hookers are a hobby now? Fuck stamp collecting, I'm doing that!
Re:Why stop at 36? (Score:4, Informative)
You're being funny ... but you're right. The people who frequent escorts do call it that. [msn.com]
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BTW, I can't say I'm surprised that some slasdotter has already modded you informative.
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Haha...no. I sometimes fish Kingfish tournaments with some friends of mine. Luckily one of them owns his own company and can foot most of the bill because there is no way I can handle the cost alone. Quick back of the napkin:
$200k 32ft center console boat (includes motors and electronics)
~$1k/fishing rod and we use 6 of them
$100s in bait and other tackle
We fished last weekend and used 300 gallons in gas ($900) and 2 dozen blue runners (live bait fish) that are about $15-$25 each. You can do it cheaper w
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I'm not an expert on stamp collecting, but I think you may have been doing it wrong.
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Once all this is set up, he probably doesn't play all that much more, if at all than than a lot of people that single box.
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5k/year for a hobby actually isn't too bad when it comes to hobbies.
Yeah compared to all possible hobbies. But it's quite a lot for a hobby that for someone only as nuts as the average MMO player costs under $200 a year. :P
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Then again, maybe he actually wanted 4 slots open to "show off"?
More likely he'd sell off his raid spots to people with a lot of gold seeking shortcuts to certain things. Mounts, weapons, tokens, what have you. And aside from that the hardest part of raiding is communicating and having everyone listen... Well he nixed that little problem and can probably do a lot of content with fewer than average characters. imho
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He probably ran into that 24 hrs per day cap.
It isn't the money that gets me, it is the time. WoW isn't THAT interesting. Just playing 1 char is enough of a time suck for me.
Re: Hours per day? (Score:2)
Would he have to mark out days? I'm thinkin' that he's running into the "47 hour straight exhaustion cap".
Actually, he has too many (Score:2)
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 f
I hope he does not have comcast cable (Score:2)
I hope he does not have comcast cable or the download cap may hit hard 11 systems = a lot of bandwidth.
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But keeping 11 systems uptodate can does he (Score:2)
But keeping 11 systems update can does he have a WSUS sever to keep the windows update bandwidth down.
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But keeping 11 systems update can does he have a WSUS sever to keep the windows update bandwidth down.
i lol'd
Re:I hope he does not have comcast cable (Score:4, Informative)
It's not the download that's the problem in an MMO, it's the upload. I perused the original forum thread about this (linked somewhere here at /.) and one guy said he could get a max of 25 WoW accounts working properly on a 1.5Mb upload (any more than that lagged too much). So for 36, he's probably at about 2.0Mb upload, and that ain't cheap. Your typical 8Mb down /768Kb up cable connection ain't gonna cut it.
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Come on, even an AC has to be smarter than that. Download patch once, copy to all systems.
that's ok (Score:2, Funny)
ACORN paid him $1 apiece to register his characters to vote.
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I don't know, but there is a real Leroy Jenkins [google.com] who lives in a battleground state.
More flamebait (Score:2)
I both admire and pity him (Score:2)
Re:I both admire and pity him (Score:5, Informative)
Someone should consider pointing him at http://www.wowdetox.com/ [wowdetox.com].
I'm not sure at which point a hobby becomes an addiction, but I think it's safe to say this guy is a bit beyond that.
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Someone once posted a link to this wiki article [wikipedia.org]. Without reading the article, just looking at the caption and the main graphic, I instantly realized I had a justification for never playing WoW again. I don't want to be that rat. I was being that rat. I never touched it again, sadly they have got an extra month of fees from me because I don't want to go near it to cancel.
Rather fitting though, it was all the slashdot articles that made me go, "WTF is this WoW all about anyways?" So it's only fitting that a s
Gamers in the Sack (Score:2)
Sadly, according to this link on the same site [yahoo.com], he may need help in pill form too.
Original Content Provider (Score:5, Informative)
/. 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 [dual-boxing.com]
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And Slashdot, being Slashdot, will be linked as the source a thousand times more.
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The Internet (Score:2)
"Working as intended."
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He got the shaft with patch 3.0.2 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
is that an air conditioner? (Score:3, Funny)
heh (Score:2)
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.
Re: Gaming (Score:2)
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.
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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.
MOM! Bedpan! (Score:2, Funny)
`nuff said.
Amazing... (Score:2)
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.
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I predict that the only thing Blizzard will do is continue to bill his credit card for $5,700 every six months.
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If he never uses them in PvP, you may be right. But looking at the increasing number of players doing 5-box teams, I predict the complaints are going to start coming in soon and the ban stick will hit. Considering that this is clearly an exploit and requires the use of third party software, it's almost surprising it hasn't happened yet.
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How so? I think this guy is delusional. I multi-box and to be honest targeting can be a real chore when someone pops up from behind or in the middle of your group - and I only do it with 3.
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His entire goal is to ultimately raid Stormwind and Ironforge by himself, so obviously he's got some kind of system to do PvP. As for instantly killing several players at once, he's using all shaman. Fire off earthshock x 7 = dead player. With 15 shaman, he can do that twice at the same time, and depending on the player/class he may not need that many, allowing him to kill 3 or even 4 virtually instantaneously. And obviously he's planning on something like that or he would not be planning city raids. Whethe
Xzin has done way before this guy. (Score:2)
http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=498 [dual-boxing.com]
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What's worse... he has both a job and a wife.
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What is this "wife" thingy you're referring to? A cool interface addon maybe! I'll go google it!
Re:Money (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Money (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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No, you're thinking of Discord Action Bars.
Re:Money (Score:5, Funny)
Female elves don't count as wives.
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No, but it does explain where Half-Elves come from.
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Pics or it didn't happen.
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You're only off on the cost by a factor of 12 or so. It's $5711 a year.
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Actually, that depends where you live. Around here, it's 3.5, 4.5, 5.5, counting the kitchen / living room / bedroom as full and bathrooms as .5. If you have two bathrooms then you have a full number, but that's usually for higher numbers (6-7-8) of total rooms.
Here, a very nice 4.5 rooms apartment cost around 430$ (US equivalent at the current rate)
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Seems real to me. Here is his guild.
http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Aegwynn&n=We+Are+Prepared&p=1 [wowarmory.com]
A whole lot of level 61 shaman, just as indicated in the story.
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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
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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
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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.