Ok, so we’ve all heard stories about, or know someone-who-knows-someone, who have legitimately become addicted to MMO’s. It’s fairly common place to hear about how someone’s “real-life,” has been completely messed up by their, “pretend world.” Ok, I’m big enough to admit than even I have, at times either shunned work, a family gathering, or some sort of “should-do” responsibility at one time or another. But just like the saying goes, there is always someone worse off than you.
Sure I’ve read about people that have gotten a divorce over World of Warcraft, met and fell in love and gotten married even, but this couple take things to a whole new level, literally. Now many even dire hard fans are not familiar with the term “dual-boxing,” while I’d heard of it, I’ve never heard anything like this.
Dual-boxing is when you control two wow characters in an MMO at the same time. Now I’d even heard of multi-boxing, where a player could control three or four characters simultaneously. (As if two wasn’t enough at one time). So what kind of term would you come up with for someone who controls 23 characters at once? I can’t imagine. But lets take that one step further, what if you had two people controlling 23 characters at the same time sitting on the same couch? Well just when you think you’ve heard it all, listen up.
Believe me, I couldn’t even make this up, my mind couldn’t do 23 things at once. Today I was on a dual-boxing forum when I drop in on this heated argument. This guy and his girlfriend each control 23 characters at once for a combined total of 46 characters! Can you imagine being parked in front of 46 monitors playing your wow accounts non stop?
Now I had heard of a couple that were triple-boxers. They said they never set out with that goal in mind, they just found that they could rock solid when working a raid together. Imagine what the pair of twenty-three’ers can do? Now I found it amazing that these two find time for a relationship, but hey, to each their own I guess.
I know it sounds unbelievable, but here’s some of the dialog from this far out forum:
“I started boxing in 2001 in EverQuest. At first it was dual boxing, then triple, then quad, then I 6 boxed for a long time. My girlfriend began boxing and I decided to “kick it up a notch” and we began doing our own raids. In 2005 we started playing WoW. “
[...]
“I went through alot of hardware along the way. At first it was X-Keys and KVMs, then I went with Cherry programmable keyboards and KVMs. I never felt the urge to go monitor crazy — like many boxers I focused my attention on a single screen, had another monitor locked onto another character, and finally the 3rd monitor cycled through the KVM.”
“If you count the number of PCs, you’ll get 47. My girlfriend controls 23 warcraft accounts and I control 23 warcraft accounts. The other one is a server. All but 2 of those pcs are diskless. It got to the point that updating 46 pcs just took too long, the hard drives added to the electric bill and generated heat, so I found a good PXE solution that works great.”