Da Mystery of Multiboxing – A brief tale of Automated Heroics Inc.

I have long been a fan of playing Massively Multiplayer Online games, but I really don’t like MMO gamers because they tend to be jackasses. At the time my MMO of choice was City of Heroes, which was popular with teenagers. Needless to say, the jackass factor was high. The game is best played with others tho, so I was often stuck playing with jackasses. You do what you gotta do to unlock those badges.

My gaming experience was sub optimal. So, I did what any hacker does when he is confronted with a problem: I started hacking. I found that I could multiplex keyboard commands through some networked software and came up with a workable multibox solution. The trick was it needed multiple computers. So I cobbled together some old desktops to make barely-passable gaming machines. At one point I had 8 of them running. It took a half hour to get all my bots logged into the game and another half hour to enter an instance, but being able to play on superhero teams where everyone did what I told them to do was sheer joy. My group was all robot-themed and my supergroup was called “Automated Heroics Inc.” and all of the player-character bios read like product descriptions in a catalog. I also had macros programmed so that all of them could do “The Robot” in sync. It was hilarious. Why didn’t I get any video of that?

Multiboxing can be tricky because each MMO is different about how it handles its controls, sessions, authentication, you name it. In the case of CoH, running multiple instances of the game on the same computer didn’t work well. It was fine if I alt-tabbed between the sessions and controlled the toons manually, but having sessions in windowed mode made them crash. The software that I used, Auto Hotkey, worked well when testing scripts with notepad windows, but when it came time to run them with CoH, it was shit show.

So I decided to keep AHK, but I used some junk PCs and old video cards to run the game. AHK has some networking features that let you push groups of keystrokes out to clients, so that if I pressed ‘0’ on my main PC, it would send a series of key presses and pauses to the other 7 machines. Because I am writing this several years after I did the project, I no longer have any of the files I used. Also CoH has been shut down for years, so example code wouldn’t be all that useful even if I had it. Here are a few things to consider though:

1. Hopefully your game has a free-to-play or freemium option so that you can set up multiple accounts for not much money. Running just one bot toon is way different from a tactical standpoint than running seven of them.
2. Hopefully your game has an auto-follow function, where you target a player and your toon moves whenever and where ever the target goes. This is so important for moving all of your bots in an orderly fashion.
3. Hopefully your game has an assist or auto-target function, where you target a player and your toon targets that player’s target. Much like the auto-follow feature, assist keeps everyone shooting at the same thing. I found that concentrating fire on the big critters first was the most effective way to initiate combat. If you time it right, you put them down fast and then mop up the minions.
4. If you have both auto-follow and assist, then you can round up your bot crew by mapping a key to tell each bot to target you, follow you, and assist you. Being able to get your toons to focus on you is an essential function because targeting can cause your bots to do dumb things like take off running or shoot at the wrong thing. On my “main” pc, I mapped this script to the same key that I used to target the enemy closest to me.
5. Multiboxed toons work best with ranged combat, especially area of effect attacks. You will want your crew to be mostly squishy DPS types and dudes that can heal and buff squishy DPS types. My bot crew was entirely ranged. I called them “The Firing Squad.”
6. An AOE that is centered on the player (A Player Based Area Of Effect, PBAOE, in CoH parlance) is great for mopping up a mob once it has closed distance with your crew.
7. Another great use is AOE heals. Even if they’re weak, you can have two or more toons dropping their heals as part of their attack sequence. Often, your toons will either have a PBAOE attack, or a PBAOE heal. If you are dropping PBAOEs when the enemy moves into melee range, you will likely need AOE heals too, so just have everyone drop them at once.
8. I mostly used my bots to level my support toons that were hard to solo, like controllers and tanks. It’s decent practice for keeping a team alive, but it’s not the same skill at playing with real humans.
9. Multiboxing isn’t about playing an indiviual bot toon well. It’s about using the entire group of bot toons to support your main toon[s]. There are some key differences between playing a main toon vs. playing a bot toon:
   • Your bots will probably never be alone, so there’s no need to balance offense with defense. A “real” toon needs to be well rounded, bot toons are highly specialized insects.
   • Your bots should have two basic specialties: shooting or healing. They should be going pew pew pew or heal heal heal pretty much all the time.
   • Putting up shields and other buffs can be a pain to script but it’s worth it: Targeting a team member, drop one or more buffs on them, target the next team member, etc.
   • There will be multiple buffers dropping different buffs, so don’t focus so much on making each buff powerful, focus on making each buff mana/energy efficient with short cool down periods so you can lay them down fast and often. Once the buff process is scripted, running it between each mob isn’t a big deal.

In CoH, there were two character classes, the Corruptor and the Defender that both combined blasting stuff with healing and buffs. The Corruptor’s primary power set was offense and the secondary power set was support, while the Defender was the exact opposite. A third class, the Blaster, was exclusively focused on offense. I had two Blasters, four Corruptors and one Defender. The corruptors could buff everyone up before a fight, then my main toon would pull a mob, the bots would open fire, and if the mob got close, I had the Blasters drop their PBAOE blasts and then the Defender and the Corruptors dropped heals. The benefit of their damage abilities was obvious, but the shields and heals were equally important for helping to level my tank and controller. At higher levels, the bots all had a sniper-type attack that was long range, accurate, and did lots of damage with a long cool down timer. I could generally have everyone target a mob’s boss/lieutenant and drop him in order to pull the rest of the mob. I would then use my tank or controller to tie up the mob while the firing squad picked off minions one at a time. If anything survived that and actually made it to melee range, I would drop the PBAOE blasts, AKA “The Nukes”, along with the heals. The stragglers then got picked off by the firing squad and we rebuffed and took on another mob.

The things you learn about keyboards
Getting your bot toons to do things involved creating macros for each toon to execute certain actions, noting the times that certain animations took, and then mapping those macros to shortcut keys and using AHK to script the key presses for those shortcuts. You have to learn a lot about your game’s behavior, but you also have to learn about keyboards.

Keyboard behavior plays a major part in getting your scripts right. I had the hardest time getting my bots to do simple things like run because I didn’t understand that pushing a key down, and letting go of it are two different events. It was so hard to get those bastards to run, that I ended up relying on the auto-follow feature for basically all movement.

It’s hard to imagine all of the realtime events that go into pressing keys on a keyboard until you have to simulate key presses with software. One thing I wanted to do make the bots do was spread out so that they didn’t all get hit with enemy AOEs. I never did get it right, so I just kept everyone close together and used lots of heals.

I miss all my robot minions. I hope that some day a similar MMO will emerge that will let me rebuild Automated Heroics Inc. so I can record some goddamn video of my dancing robots.