Whether in World of Warcraft Classic or the current retail variant – at some point, everyone encounters multiboxers flying through the pampas with 10 druids at once or a boosting group that can be dragged through dungeons fully automatically to avoid having to level manually.

Both are a thorn in the eye of many WoW fans and also Blizzard, which is why a discussion in the forum of the “Community Council”, quasi a council of the players, has now led to a change.

What is the problem? The “/follow” command is just a nice convenience for most WoW veterans. You can use it to follow other characters for a while. This is nice when the doorbell rings or the phone rings and you don’t want to miss the connection to the raid or a long flight.

But the addon functionality of World of Warcraft allows for a lot more. For example, through various interface addons, it is possible for the boosting provider to write a message which, thanks to an addon, then causes the boosting customer to automatically go to “/follow” – all without the customer having to perform any keystrokes.

So the booster can use an addon to make the “pulled” characters follow him out of the dungeon and back in again fully automatically. This way the boosting customer doesn’t have to be at the PC at all and can go completely afk while the booster fulfills his part of the deal.

Why not just get rid of /follow? The “/follow” command is not only used by honest players to follow a colleague in the raid during a short afk break, but also has completely different uses.

For example, there are many WoW fans with physical limitations who find it difficult to perform a keystroke for every movement. Also, blind people often need the follow command to play with their friends or acquaintances in WoW.

These people then rely on aids, such as the “follow” command, to still enjoy World of Warcraft. Any restriction on this functionality would decrease the accessibility of the game, as Linaori also notes in the “Community Council” forum:

Removing the following would make the game virtually unplayable for many who rely on such accessibility.

We should find a way, [die Multiboxer und Botter] get rid of without limiting accessibility.

What does Blizzard want to do? The WoW developer “Pazorax” has come forward in the forum and stated that they want to take care of this matter. Exactly it says about it:

I’ve reached out to our interface and accessibility teams and we’re looking into this right now.

Basically, we agree that accessibility is important, but that doesn’t mean that any attempt to restrict botting or automation is an attack against accessibility. There are many actions that the game just requires hardware input for, and it makes sense that the /follow function would be added to that list based on what [weiter oben] was mentioned.

We are targeting this change for both Wrath of the Lich King Classic and Dragonflight release.

Before we make any changes like this, we are reaching out to players with physical limitations. To be clear, the change we plan to make will still allow people with disabilities to follow a guide, and that includes the use of macros or interface modifications that issue the follow command. The behavior this is intended to prevent is when interface addons are supposed to execute a follow command are based on getting a message from another source, such as another character.

How do multiboxers view this? From them comes mainly an exasperated sigh, because they find this change annoying at best. This is what Leialoha writes in the forum, who has been multiboxing since the release of the original Burning Crusade:

As long as Blizzard does not clearly forbid multiboxing, I will continue to multibox with the restrictions that have been enacted for it.

Regarding these changes that will ‘destroy’ our “/follow” WeakAura – that won’t stop me (or anyone else) from multiboxing. All we need to do is modify our macros to include a /follow command. (…)

So multiboxing won’t stop the change – and probably shouldn’t, but at least fully automated boosting through dungeons should then require the client to hook himself up to his booster and return to the PC every few minutes.