Addon Spotlight: Mac Dual-boxing 1
Addon Spotlight: Mac Dual-boxing 1
The new Recruit-A-Friend program has taken the World of Warcraft community by storm, perhaps more so in the dual- and multi-boxing circles. I’ll admit that while I advocate enjoying the leveling process and experiencing the lore through quests and in-game events, once you’ve hit 70 a couple of times, the magic tends to wane. With the coming of Wrath of the Lich King, we’ve had some time to re-evaluate our WoW experience. For many of us, finishing up some alts has become a way to prepare for the expansion. I’ve had a number of alts since I started playing, but have only managed to ding two paladins and a rogue. Each time I play in a battleground I see a member of another class do something crazy cool and ponder rolling whatever class it is.
With the RAF program in full effect, I decided that dual-boxing with the 300% XP and Summon Friend ability would be the most efficient way to get my alts Wrath-ready. This How-To is specifically for players using Macs, but in essence many of the principles remain true for PC users.
Setup
The first thing you need to do is set up your “friend’s” account. This is done via your Account Management interface on the official site. Simply send yourself an invite via the Recruit-A-Friend button. Once done, you can set up your new account by following the link in the email to your “friend”. This requires that you purchase a copy of the game for your second account. You can actually do it all online without having to install a second copy the hard way. (Although if you want copies of the discs, you’ll want to pick up a copy at a retail location.) Otherwise, you can simply copy your World of Warcraft folder in the Applications folder on your Mac. Once copied, paste the second copy to another folder. (You’ve got some options here, the important part is that your computer having and recognizing two instances of the game client.) I use an external harddrive to keep things easy, and have not noticed significant performance problems when playing the second copy from an external source.
Because I’m running OS X Leopard, I am able to run copies of WoW in different screen via the Spaces feature. (This creates a virtual second display for my “slave” account.) Otherwise, just stack the game clients. Once I have a copy of each client running with my characters logged in, I open up CloneKeys.
CloneKeys
CloneKeys is a free program used to clone keystrokes from one client to another. It has an ultra-simple interface that requires only one click to set up. In the interface, you’ll simply click the “Add” button and then click on your “slave” copy of WoW. From this point forward, anything you do in your “master” account will be cloned to your “slave” account. You can suspend and restart cloning by pressing the “Start” and “Stop” key. (It’s shaped like a STOP sign.)
Keybindings
This is where a fair amount of work is done to setup your two accounts to work well together. The basic idea here is to remove many of the keybindings from the slave, so that the master can fully function without “confusing” the slave with redundant keystrokes. As an example, I remove the W, S, A and D keybindings from the slave altogether, meanwhile I unbind the arrow keys from the master. This way, the master is controlled via the standard W, S, A and D keys, while the slave can be steeed using the arrow keys. As you can see, you’ll need to spend some time planning your keybindings. An important thing to keep in mind is that you will want to re-bind all of the slave’s actionbar buttons with unique keystrokes not used by the master. Let’s talk about why.
Filed under: World of Warcraft