Josh Strife Hayes is one of the biggest YouTubers when it comes to MMORPGs. In his new video he wants to become the most efficient MMO player in the world.
How does Hayes want to achieve that? The well-known YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes (950,000+ subscribers alone on the main channel, via YouTube) has set himself the goal in his new video of becoming the most efficient MMO player in the world. To do this, he wants to play as many genre representatives in parallel on just one PC.
For this, the YouTuber teamed up with the experts from OverclockersUK and spent days working on his new system. MMORPGs are often quite hardware-hungry, and when several run in their own windows in parallel, even modern PCs can struggle.
The MMOs started for the test should not only remain playable performance-wise, but Hayes also wanted to find a way to actually farm and make progress in them in parallel.
For this, he needed multiple monitors (one screen for each 4 MMORPGs) and an in-game activity that exists in almost every MMORPG and makes this kind of multitasking progression possible.
And indeed, the YouTuber found exactly such a feature: fishing! In many games, you have to click to start fishing and click again to collect the catch. Perfect! Some MMORPGs even offer auto-fishing.
What hurdles did the YouTuber have to overcome? While testing and combining the games, the YouTuber encountered various problems and challenges:
- Some MMOs have no fishing system at all, in others it takes a long time to learn fishing. Sometimes Hayes could switch to other comparable gathering activities.
- In some games, the interface becomes illegible due to the small windowed mode.
- The anti-cheat system of an MMORPG recognized all other running games as malware, leading to problems.
- In some of the older MMORPGs, there were difficulties with account registration and logging into accounts that hadn’t been launched for many years.
To actually achieve something like simultaneous farming in 16 parallel running games, the YouTuber documented the duration of the fishing animations in each of the MMOs. From this, he could determine an order in which he had to complete the respective process to ensure that there was no inactive period of more than 1 or 2 seconds in any game.
However, the YouTuber could only achieve this without EverQuest II – which had been a fixed part of the test until then. Here, the fishing animation is so fast that there simply isn’t time for the other games. Brighter Shores took its place instead.
E-fish-icient couldn’t get any better
What is the result of the test? In the end, Josh Strife Hayes had installed 20 MMOs and over 1 terabyte of data. Here is the list of games:
- Albion Online
- AdventureQuest Worlds
- Black Desert
- Brighter Shores
- Dungeons & Dragons Online
- The Elder Scrolls Online
- Final Fantasy XIV
- Fishing Planet
- Guild Wars 2
- EverQuest
- EverQuest II
- Lost Ark
- The Lord of the Rings Online
- Neverwinter
- New World Aeternum
- RuneScape
- Old School RuneScape
- Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Wizard101
- World of Warcraft
The system is therefore set up, the games selected. If everything goes according to plan, Hayes is fishing in 15 MMORPGs and still has a few seconds to play Dungeons & Dragons Online. On YouTube you can watch a failed attempt as well as the final successful and probably most efficient fishing round in the world starting at 31:50:
Hayes celebrates the success with the following words: “These 5 seconds are the most efficient MMORPG gameplay in history.” When the 16 selected games ran in parallel on one PC and 4 monitors, the memory usage was, by the way, at 92 percent.
How does the community react to the video? They celebrate the video with over 23,670 thumbs up and more than 2,485 comments.
- TheNejD writes under the video: “To be honest, it sounds like something an MMO player would really do, prepare for three days to achieve the most efficient five seconds of their life.”
- foragingadventures jokes on YouTube: “Nice to see Josh finally taking MMOs seriously.”
- TheKurdong has criticism: “The biggest offense Josh committed is that he doesn’t let us hear how all 16 MMORPGs sound simultaneously.”
- MojoBoogum loves puns: “‘If I can fish in every game I play, I’m e-fish-icient.’ Bravo, sir.”
- Sr_Bebop0 fears the worst: “We are now entering the ‘Chinese MMO gold farmer Josh Strife’ arc.”
In another video, Josh Strife Hayes explained that he once actually received an order from an agency to produce a video about MapleStory. This video has also been completed (and according to Hayes, turned out really well), but it will probably never go live. You can read the story here: 21-year-old MMORPG hires big YouTuber for video, doesn’t pay for honest critique and forbids publication
