Wednesday, February 06, 2008

How to party with yourself in World of Warcraft (Dual boxing)

I've been playing World of Warcraft for a few years now, on and off because of school or work. It's a fun game, my friends play and I currently have a level 70 undead warlock and a level 43 blood elf paladin. After I got tired of my warlock I started my paladin with my girlfriend, she choose a blood elf priest. Once we started to run through the old areas, I had my friend run us through a few harder instances with his level 70 mage.

After playing like this I really wanted to solo a instance using my higher level warlock but also play my paladin to level. I started thinking about how this would work and found a web site about Dual Boxing. Basically dual boxing is using two or more gaming accounts, either on the same computer or more to play at the same time. It sounds funny, but what you get is a very powerful combo of 2 or more players that you can control as one.

With a simple software like Keyclone you can control the characters pretty simple. Here's my testing done with two mages from the same computer.



It's not great, I am only level 2 but shows how the software passes from one screen to the next. Now it's not as easy as playing one character. A major problem I found is that questing items have to be picked up by both parties, so you need to keep switching screens back and forth.

So far, I really haven't had time to figure it out much but I think it's harder than I expected. A problem I'm having is keeping the two characters together, they keep running away from each other after a few minutes. Also many items in WoW need interaction such as right clicking gathering items and quest items.

It's fun but because of school and limited time. I'm going to hold off on any more testing until this summer.

Here's someone who's gotten the multibox idea down much better. It's in the battlegrounds and you can see just how powerful 5 people working as one becomes.



Cheap guitars and basses

In my previous post I spoke about cheaper guitars, actually a classical guitar specifically. I found another site which has a bunch of cheaper guitars, Rondo Music, which sells a majority of guitars for under $200. Their selection isn't bad, a good amount of guitars, basses, even a few 6 strings.

While I haven't ordered from them, I'm interested in their basses. For a total cost of about $200, I could order a nice 6 string bass. Normally to play a bass like this you need to spend much more money but for a non-professional like myself I rather spend $200 for something I wasn't sure about.

After checking out this site and then Musician's Friend. I ordered a cheap 6 string bass from Musician's Friend. It's a Rogue LX406 Pro, has decent reviews from the site and other review sites.

I have a older Ibanez 4 string bass and wanted to try out a 6 string bass. Since starting my guitar class I am learning to not use the pick (ironically just after I got used to it) and wanted to see how different it is to playing a 6 string bass. At the local Guitar Center I had fun playing the 6 strings there but after seeing the price tags near $2000 I decided it was beyond my price range.

Dundracon

Next week, my girlfriend and I are attending Dundracon in San Ramon. I have never been to a gaming event before but it sounds like fun. She already told me it's a big event with hardcore gamers, so expect the worst. Basically it's a large event with various types of gaming, from pen and paper like Dungeons and Dragons to miniatures to board games.

I'm more of a video gamer so playing non-video games is a different experience. Every other weekend I play D&D with friends but I'm still confused with the details of how the game works. Our experienced DM knows the rules pretty well so it works out. :)

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