Using multiple accounts to your advantage on the auction

As an auctioneer you eventually reach the point where you just don't have enough time to get everything you want to do done on just one account. You wind up crafting during prime posting time or you're stuck managing a price war with an obsessive camper when you really need to be sourcing materials.

In a nutshell, multiple accounts allow you to multitask and multiply the amount of work you can get done in a given amount of time. You can do more than one thing at the same time and don't have to stop doing one thing (like posting auctions) to do another (like crafting on another character).


Here are some of the reasons you might want to consider running 2 (or more) accounts at the same time.

• You can run long /afk crafting queues on one account while posting auctions on another.
• You can spend a lot of time milling, prospecting or disenchanting items on one account while doing something else (posting, crafting, even raiding) on another account.
• You can raid, run 5 mans, level alts, farm,. PvP or whatever you want to do on one acocunt while keeping an eye on the auction on another account.
• You can do cross faction trading between your accounts without having to involve anyone else.
• You can have one toon scanning the auction to buy items while another posts.
• The more accounts and alts you have the more it confuses your competition. They can't just friend list a toon and watch login/logout patterns to figure out who's alt it is like they do with players limited to a single account.
• You can get more done in less time than on a single account.

You don't need multiple boxes to "multi-box". You can run more than one account on a single computer and you don't even need a particularly powerful computer to do it. My computer is a $500 custom built box I had built a year ago. It's not all that powerful yet it it's more than good enough for raiding on a single account and if I'm not raiding it can easily handle 3 accounts at the same time. I'm sure it could handle 4 and probably even more as long as I don't make any of the windows too big.

My computer specs:

• Athlon II X3 440 (triple core 3.0 Ghz)
• 4G DDR3 Ram
• AMD 5670 512MB video card
• Windows XP Home

Some tips for running multiple accounts on a single computer:

1. Run them in windowed mode on the desktop.
2. The size of the windows has a *HUGE* effect on framerates and mouse response time. Reducing the size of the windows has a far greater effect on performance than anything else so the very first thing you should do to improve performance is reduce the size of the windows.
3. Increase the size of the window you're actively playing for comfort.
4. Don't minimize windows and keep at least a small part of each window visible on the desktop (not completely hidden by other windows). Things will work a lot better this way.
5. Don't forget to do something (like jump or /say something) every now and then in mostly inactive windows (running long craft queues or whatever) to keep them from afking out.
6. Hotkey programs like Autoit can come in handy. For example you can setup a hotkey to send a jump command to all accounts to keep them from afking out. Or you could set it up so one keypress sends a mill command to one account, a prospect command to another and a disenchant command to a third. Use your imagination, just don't use hotkey programs to automate key presses because that's against the ToS.
7. To help keep the competition confused don't log all of your accounts in at the same time. Log one in and wait a while before you log in another account. The longer you wait the less likely your competitors will suspect it's you.