Multiboxing involves using a program to allow one keyboard/mouse to control multiple characters to do the same thing at the same time.
if F5 is the hotkey to cast ebolt at current target, then all controlled characters will do that when the player hits that key.
If you're doing different things with the characters, you're not multiboxing, you're multi clienting.
That's not totally true. You could be multiclienting (legal) while having all the accounts cast the same spell at the same target, as long as you are toggling between the accounts to hit F5.
What multiboxing is essentially is automated game play (ie you aren't even touching the keyboard for said account) while using mutliple accounts so that you don't have to toggle between the accounts.
Example:
Multiclienting (legal): A sampire is swinging his axe at some boss and pressing the AI macro while also toggling over to a bard account to heal/cure the sampire (using a macro to cast spell & last target). The key here is that the player is toggling between accounts to press the macros.
Multiboxing (illegal): A sampire is swinging his axe at some boss while chaining AI also has a bard account to heal/cure the sampire automatically; ie the user doesn't need to hit any sort of heal/cure macro on the bard because it's done automatically.
That's a very basic example of something that might look very similar but one is legal and the other is illegal. The example above is pretty hard to spot the difference if the person is good at toggling back and forth.
Typically that's not what people do when they multibox though... at least that would be obvious to report. It's the 5-10 accounts all stacked on each other that automatically attack the any hostile while spam chaining AI almost instantly killing anything on the screen before you can even press a macro to target hostile.
LMAO There is no way they will cast the same spell all at the SAME time your toggling will cause a delay from one client to the other I do not care how fast you think you are.
Hmmm... I wonder, if these Third Party unauthorized utilities for the UO Client, might allow, for each of the UO clients open, to enter a delay of X seconds for each of the clients so that the player still only presses 1 key to send the same exact Macro to all of the clients without having to toggle from one client to another only, the actions will not be at the exact same time for all of the opened client but there will be delays for them all so as to simulate the toggling of the various UO opened clients while, instead, that toggling did not take place as the Macro took care of it all....
And, because of the delay, if there was monitoring or a Game Master showing up, the player could say that it was not multi-boxing because of the delays but multi-clienting when, instead, the toggling across the various opened clients did not take place thanking to the macro having delays for each and every of the opened UO clients...
Just wondering whether this might or not be a "feature" of certain unauthorized Third Party utilities since I have no knowledge of them and so can't know for certain... but, one would guess, technically this, perhaps, could be at least a theoretical possibility... or it could not ?
You can do a delay. It's not a Third Party Application for the UO Client. A Key Cloning application has nothing to do with the UO client. To the client it would just look like any other input coming from your operating system. A lot of other games have this issue. It's not traceable. EDIT: Well, not directly traceable... I don't know what their data looks like, but I'd imagine there's some creative ways you could manually tell what's going on if you wanted to put in that level of effort one by one.
You can do a delay, but to do a delay and to move and to do it smoothly without looking like it is what it is would be quite a feat.
Also adding a delay and making all that happen would almost defeat the purpose. It wouldn't make it inefficient, but it would definitely make it a lot less efficient.
Well, the delay would have the purpose to give"some" ground to say that it is multi-clienting (because claiming to be toggling through the various clients, hence the delays...) and not multi-boxing as it would look much like had the macro key controlled the various characters to act at the same one split moment...
It does not have to be a huge delay, 1 or 2 seconds could perhaps be enough, one could imagine, just to make room to say that there is toggling through the clients while, instead, there is not...
Sure, it would not be as efficient as having all characters act at once but one could imagine the lowered efficiency to have a purpose, of course, if a delay is technically possible with these Third Party utilities which, I do not know whether or not it is.
Bottom line is, to my opinion, that, if we want to get rid of all of these cheating methods, the one and only way, to my viewing, should be "self-shutting" the Ultima Online client when the use of unauthorized Third Party utilities is detected along with running UO, rather then trying to patch up this or that unwanted use of these unauthorized Third Party utilities with restrictions or changes to game play that in the end affect and hurt more regular players who do not use these Third Party utilities rather then those players who use them.
That is at least what my personal opinion about how this should be addressed is.