A few people have mentioned the idea of a single box server. While I understand the nostalgia and appeal of it, I think it's a bad idea and that people are romanticizing single boxing without thinking it through. Even the people who I saw mention it included that it needs to be policed and enforced. What that sounds to me like is people want to play a cat and mouse game trying to cheat their way through. I think that the ideal rule set is one that people enjoy and don't need to cheat at and I think the 3-box TAKP setup is the perfect compromise. To provoke some thought, let me give you some examples of every day occurrences in EverQuest. - You want to trade an item to your other character but nobody is on or you don't want them to know you have this item or whatever. Maybe you want to do this a lot because you tradeskill and your bank is full. - You died and you need a rez. You have another character that is a cleric, and actually your friend gave you their info, so it's 3am, nobody is around. Do you eat a death or do you cheat yourself and 2 box? - You need KEI so you can exp. It takes 15 minutes to med full without it and you can't even keep the camp clear. It's only for a buff then you're camping out immediately. Nobody will notice. - You looted a decrepit hide in the plane of hate on your cleric but your SK needs this MQ'd for their epic. Perhaps you can log on both with a VPN, at 3am, nobody around. - Someone called out a rotting Bloodfrenzy and nobody is going for it, 6 mins left on it, you can make it if you log on that friend's wiz and just TL yourself real quick, but probably not otherwise. - You're camping the drum in Siren's Grotto. You can't solo this camp, but if you just heal yourself with your friend's druid you can, and nobody knows it's not really your friend at the keys. You could invite a group to camp it with you but it's already a miserable camp, and likely anyone who comes to help you also wants the loot, and do you trust they'll be back to help you after they win one? It's been a week without a drop and you just want to be done with it. - You're camping basically anything that you need to progress your character. Nobody wants to sit at a camp with you while you're AFK for 6 days straight, so either you figure out how to solo this by possibly 2 boxing late at night while worrying about being caught, or you wait until someone wants to put in some nice 10 hour camping sessions with you while not working on their own characters. So be honest with yourself. Do you really want this, are you going to intentionally give up opportunities to progress just to stay true to this single box thing, or are you conflating single boxing with the early experience of exploration before everyone knew how to play? Is the single boxing relevant, or was it just how everybody played the first time? I think that if you look at any of those self imposed things people do to try to iron man some game, you'll find that most of them are cheaters, and even the people who are bringing this up are already saying that cheaters need to be policed. Who wants to play the part of the police? Is the goal to play cops versus robbers, or EverQuest? I think 2-box would alleviate some of those issues, but make others worse. Now you can camp some epic stuff but not all of it, you need that 3rd box. I personally like the 2-box idea on the surface but I think you would find that it's not enough for most people once they really think it out. 3 tends to be enough for most so the biggest temptations to break the rules are removed and it doesn't require constantly cheating yourself and your fellow players. 3 isn't enough for everybody either, but for many it is and it's a rule set that we can agree on instead of asking for someone to watch us play so we don't cheat. Looking for thoughtful honest responses to change my mind but I guess I'll settle for flames and rants.
I know you technically were looking for “responses to change your mind” but I agree with you 100% as a casual player over the years. You could maybe make the argument for a 2 box limit instead of 3 but that ship has sailed and I think both have their pros/cons. Even if you could snap your fingers and magically make it a 1 box server that didn’t need policing we simply do not have the population to support a true 1 box server - I’m sure some would argue that 1 box would attract more p99ers supposedly but I doubt that is true and even if it were I’m not sure that is the culture I would want here. At the end of the day I play here not because it is POP EQ (even though that is my favorite era)… I play here because it is a good place to play for someone in their late 30s/early 40s who grew up and has a career, got married, has some kids/dogs and responsibilities but still likes to play some EQ on occasion. 3 box allows me to log in at 7am on a weekend before the rest of my house is up and play by myself if there’s no groups around which is great. A 1 box server I would be significantly limited in classes and playstyles and would probably just quit. Edit: As an aside as a super casual dude who probably plays <4 hours a week over the past 3 years it has been a great ride and thanks to all the devs/other players
While a single-box server sounds like a special kind of hell to me - just imagine the fun of trying to thread the needle between "not enough people" and "too many people" in a demanding, size-limited raid zone like Time - if I were making up the rules for a brand new server myself, I would probably settle on two-boxing. A second box means you can rez and port and move items on your own, and that you can level a melee class without being absolutely dependent on finding groups at all times. It also means you retain the flexibility to shrink or grow the size of a raid by doing more or less two-boxing. At the same time, you can no longer be your own mini-group, bringing heals, DPS, and a tank to the table on your own. You wouldn't see so many chanter boxes dragging around AFK bard bots like sad vestigial appendages. One person three-boxing clerics or wizards couldn't have such an outsized impact on raids, either. Two-boxers often seem more "awake" to me than three-boxers, and are more fun both to group and to raid with. Almost nobody three-boxes particularly well, and those who do tend to have a sort of zombie-like quality.
Nothing stops anyone from single boxing here, what's the problem? Or maybe we ask the dev's to change the Priests of Discord to lock your forum account to a "one active account" status instead of flagging them for PVP....Let them get the cool red text names so we all know how hard-core they are.
but bro, don't you know that your special single box PoP server with your own particular ruleset will instantly get a 1,000 active concurrent player population at all times, so all those niches will be always available to be outsourced bro trust me bro
I think the 3+1 limit is perfect as-is. I spent most of my time in Everquest 3-boxing from 2001-2011, and I wanted to revisit some of those experiences with the benefit of hindsight (and the knowledge that there won't be an endless treadmill of expansions).
As a TAKP player from the beginning, I think three boxing is ultimately too enabling and powerful for what this game was meant to be. I also believe the server probably wouldn't have been as successful as it has been without some flexibility. Ultimately I think a 2 box server with half as many allowed game accounts per person probably would have been best. Too late now though and I'm not restarting an umpteenth time
I started playing on P99 Green not soon after it launched and I hadn't played EQ in ~20 years, so I was more or less relearning the game. I remember grouping my High Elf Enchanter with a Cleric in Beholder's Maze near the EK ZL - killing mudmen and minotaurs, enjoying some peak nostalgia. I'm chatting with the Cleric who's pulling and obviously much more experienced at the game ("wow, I had no idea this was such a fun duo" - me) and over the few hours that we're grouping, the Cleric has a level 50 Enchanter 'buddy' who happens to drop by and cast Clarity on us. I remember thinking, "Man, it's cool that this guy will run over here just to help two noobs out with buffs!" A couple years later, I join the TAKP Discord and see both those character names on one person If it's not people covertly boxing then it's Discord batphones, screen sharing or account info swapping etc. In my experience it concentrates towards the end game into cliquish and greedy behavior. Which maybe some people enjoy because it's "competition" but as someone who just wants to bop around Norrath and have fun, it's not my cup of tea. For anyone trying to learn the game, I'd recommend single boxing on a progression server. But most of the playerbase has been playing off and on for decades and the community reflects that. I completely agree that the attraction of single box only is wrapped up in nostalgia, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. I'm very happy with the 3 box limit here and lack of automation. I don't have an interest in (always) single boxing or playing on a progression server again.
I understand the argument and I wouldn’t mind being able to four box, but I also think playing short term on a single box TAKP copy would be fun for at least a while, especially if it started with POK + classic progression. Cheating and drama aside, playing with a group of six real people is just a totally different experience. It creates more drama, more excitement, and more interaction. Some of the most fun I ever had on TAKP was during the first few weeks of PoP when flags were limited and we actually had to group with more then two people to exp in BoT. Again, I understand there are huge downsides, I love the three box limit, BUT I do believe a single box server would provide at least a few months of fun. This is all from the perspective of a player. I completely understand how as a developer/moderator of a server that it is just a much bigger PITA.
2 or 4+ would be fun to shake up the meta. Single box sounds unenjoyable, not because sitting around LFG is boring (which it is) but because most EQ classes solo are dull. The fun comes in mixing abilities and finding synergies.
Singlebox would be nice on a classic based server (Vanilla + RoK + SoV), cause "back in the days", it was most unusual, someone had a machine, to run multible instances of EQ (or had multiple PCs, to run at once), cause shit was expansive. I personal play singlebox on TAKP, cause i can't stand it, to control multible characters and it takes the fun out of it (my personal perspective).
My opinion is single box servers have shit tons of drama because people don't have anything to do except chat and eventually they run out of stuff to talk about, get bored, and create drama.
The benefits that come with allowing 3-boxing without mandating it far outweigh any of the negatives for all the reasons Solar mentioned and more. No one forces anyone to single box, and single boxers are pretty much always welcomed. I also agree that, as the difficulty scales up in PoP, it's nice to single box instead of being spread out over 3 characters, but to have the flexibility to go to old zones and 3 box is wonderful. I know I'm not the best 3-boxer and that I can play any 1 of my classes better if I'm single boxing, but a lot of content doesn't require a 3-boxer to be perfect to still accomplish their goals without having to resort to automation.
I would prefer a server that is 1 box or 2 box. There are upsides and downsides to both. I find grouping with 5 other real people to be much more fun than grouping with one guy boxing 3 characters. I think 2 boxing is better than 3 boxing, as people are much more encouraged to group with others. With 2 box you can progress on your own without having to sit around lfg for an hour waiting for a group invite and you'd be encouraged to group much more than if you were 3 boxing where you can do a lot more on your own without needing help from other players, which ruins the game for me. This is a grouping game. On the other hand with 1 boxing, many classes will need other players to make any meaningful progress, and it can be a nightmare to police a 1box server. The one big thing about 1 box servers for me is that everyone is on an even playing field, when I play 1 box on a 3 box server I don't like the feeling of knowing that everyone who is 3 boxing will be infinitely better at doing stuff than myself who doesn't like 3 boxing. On a 1 box server you know that *probably* no one is boxing, so you can play 1 box without feeling like a level 1 gnome warrior in a room of lvl 65 max aa full best in slot ogre warriors. I'd like to play on a 2 or 1 box server more than I'd like to play on a 3 box server. Just my opinion though.
A 2 box server would suffer from low class diversity. Pretty much everyone would be <healer> + <melee>. 3 box teams usually don't have room for rogues or necros. 2 boxing would make certain classes even more scarce. Person 1: /shout clr / sk duo LFG Person 2: /shout come join me at fiends. Dru / pal Person 3: /shout Can I come? I'm running dru / bst That seems fine for a fiends group. But would be bad for the overall server health.
I think 1-box, with minor QOL (Mousewheel, buff timers, auto-stand to cast) would be insanely perfect, and there's a massive amount of interest in the idea. Call it Al'Kabor+, if you will, because that's what it is. The major issues TAKP has suffered from for 1-box interest is the client, and the presence of 2 or 3 boxers in tandem with 1-boxers. There's also a secondary issue with Planes of Power and how older content is trivialized, but we'll get to that later. In practice, and in theory, 1-boxers would be incentivized to join up with 3-boxers and be their '4th' player. There's a parasocial element here where not inviting someone would result in less experience. But it's more of a contract and not a requirement to invite more players. In reality, the 1-boxers mostly feel like a burden on the 3-boxing players, even if they get into a group with a 3-boxer for additional passive experience, the ability they're able to provide on their own is significantly less, and they're often forced out for the 3-boxer's friends as opposed to being an asset to their team. EverQuest is a social, group-based game. You can solo, but it's never the sole focus. In fact, I've been quoted as calling EverQuest a chatroom with optional D&D elements. Players like Project 1999 because of its 1-box policy and their forced social interactions. In terms of concurrent users, they blast every other server - including Classless 2.0, which had the 2nd or 3rd highest concurrent documented user count and was solo friendly - out of the water, with over 1000, to 2000 users. TAKP is hands down the best place to play era-accurate EverQuest if you wish to 3-box. Project 1999 is the best place to play EverQuest as people remember it - even though they use a client from 2004, they've successfully removed major parts of the client that would detract from the "Classic" feeling, while keeping a semblance of modern Quality of Life intact. An Al'Kabor+ server would include the mouse wheel camera, buff timers, and other quality of life options from future clients. Boxers are a bit more resistant to this, as their character is just a window to the game world they're playing, and once they're in position, they generally don't care where they move, or what their character can see - their other ones may be able to. There are no reasons to play on TAKP if you're a single box player. You're always a second rate citizen - your best chance at earning experience is with another human being playing 3 characters. You're only there to slightly improve their experience gain. You can progress, join guilds, and be successful - but you're not likely able to play the class you want to, and you'll always be at a statistic disadvantage compared to someone with 3 characters online at once. You're not ever in groups to help them accomplish anything as a team - unless of course you have a niche benefit from the class you play that compliments their playstyle. Raids are the only place in which you have a purpose... provided your class and gear benefits the raid in some way. So, how would this be helped with 1-box? You might think, "Oh, you'll be even less useful if you play an undervalued class if you don't fit in their group." You'd be right, but you may opt to make groups and compositions work in which they would normally suffer under a 3-box policy. Often times on P99, you will invite a Rogue to fear kite with your Necromancer simply because they're the only person available. You'll invite a Paladin to trio with your Warrior and Monk, as it's better with friends than simply alone. This design philosophy was partially accidental - but it still works in the current year. In a Dungeons and Dragons game, you may end up with a campaign where you don't have a cleric. You have your physical, material friends to socialize with. If none of them wish to roleplay a cleric, then so be it - you may not have one, but you have your friends. In a 2 or 3-box policy, you may opt to level up a 'friend' yourself. In early EQ (and honestly, in life, too), we have the friends around us, and the ones we met along the way. That single mentality is what defines EverQuest as a game, and honestly, the MMO RPG genre's roots - we play it because it's a social experience, and anything like making imaginary friends that heal us detracts from the experience. If we're not valued as a member of a game we join, we're not playing a game at that point - we're playing a task with a bar that goes up. Removing the socialization from EverQuest not only trivializes it as a game, but as a genre, and anything short of a 1-boxing policy does exactly that. Planes of Power presents its own problems for a 1-box server. The content generally trivializes older zones, due to the difficulty of Planes zones - however, charming & aggro kiting allows for much faster experience gains than previous expansions. Eventually, you only return to older content to farm it. I'm not really sure of a great solution for that problem without drastically changing how Planes of Power is played. So, what would be the formalized ruleset of the above? I'd say: * Time-Locked Progression Server - x Months of Classic, x Months of Kunark, x Months of Velious, 3 Months of Luclin, Planes of Power * One-Box Policy, enforced by IP. * Plane of Knowledge can be ported into during any era, but Knowledge books are not present in any town. Plane of Knowledge would be one-way to any city. There would be no soulbinder in Knowledge, nor binding allowed. * MBGs, and other 'AK-uracies' are enabled, such as pet pulling, archery dealing full damage, et al. Egregious bugs are left disabled, such as SK's Mental Corruption which allows unlimited mana. Shakerpaging and other types of AOE farming would be enabled. * No active cheats, such as warping, instant-camp, and automation. Enforce anti-cheat measures on the server side. * Selective Clientside Quality of Life - Mouse Wheel Camera, Buff Timers, Auto-Stand on Cast. Additional QOL may be added in the future. Planes of Power single-box changes: * Planes of Power zones have experience modifiers reduced to be in line with previous expansions. The NPC stats remain unchanged. * Planes of Power zones allow entry based on level as they do on TAKP. I would be absolutely thrilled to return to create a server with the above ruleset, but only if it could run it alongside TAKProject on its loginserver. The only restriction being that you have to use a specific client module that has the QOL enabled - and that module would deny those features being used on the normal TAKP server, as to not pollute the existing server. Thoughts?
Thanks Secrets, I think you have some good stuff there but I see it as you personally wanting to single box, and want others to want to play the same way. I don't know how you make people want to group with you, but taking away their ability to solo doesn't immediately force them to want to do that. I think many of us would just rather log off/quit after a while. I do share your nostalgia and surely everyone has good memories of being grouped and playing with real people, but I think you can do this naturally without having to force it. My take on this is that if you have to restrict people, it's not voluntary, they're just being forced to play by another person's rules. Nothing stops you from single boxing, but you're saying that you feel like a second class player for doing that among 3 boxers. If there really is massive interest, could not those single box players self impose this restriction on themselves and just play with each other, make a guild for this like how <Vintage> stayed level 60 on AK? Or could they just log off their boxes and play single when the opportunity presents itself? (I do this on TAKP when I can) I guess single box sounds good to me on the surface but I really don't think you can expect that 5 other people will want to do what you want, at the same time you want, whenever you log on to play. I think we all know that when single boxing you end up spending most of your time doing nothing hoping for a group, and that's where being able to multi box can help you stay in game and be available for when a group is actually forming. It's the flexibility and freedom to play both ways that's valuable, so that you can do both, and not be told you have to play a specific way. Single boxing could work but I think you'd have to preplan groups for people on a forum, get together on Sundays or something. I don't think it's a terrible idea that way, but I think you'd want to vet people and make it an invite only community, rather than something where you're having to police all the people cheating your system. I don't think you'd want people who cheat in your community, just people like yourself who are voluntarily choosing this and don't mind it.
On Al'Kabor, two-boxers were pretty common before the advent of free-to-play, and this was not the case. I myself rolled ENC + DRU when I started up on AK. There's pretty much no class that can't be effective in some duo. You'll see at least as many ENC/MAG/NEC + healer as melee + healer duos, and plenty of caster + caster and caster + bard duos built around kiting solo and grouping indoors. Healers, of course, will be ubiquitous on any box server, just as they are on TAKP.
What if instead of imposing limits on players, you encouraged players to play in a way that harbors the social aspect of the game? Example: If you want a server with more single boxers, don't limit everyone from boxing, which will just create a bigger problem of cheating. Instead, create an incentive to single-box. Reward the single boxed accounts with a higher XP gain. (Is that at all possible?) I'm guessing probably not, but would be cool to have, say, 25% XP bonus if you are only logged into one active character at the time of XP kill. Then each additional box you login would reduce your bonus (10% with duo box, 0% with 3-box, etc.) This would be a bonus that is totally separate from (but in addition to) group member XP bonus as it currently exists. Just an idea, but I think it would be best to encourage single or duo box play to the greatest extent, while also not limiting players from challenging themselves to bigger targets with 3 boxes. (So they could still run a full group with just 1 other buddy) Then you also don't have the LFG problem seen on p99. You can kill with your 3-box team until an LFG spot opens up for a single box, since that would be the preferrable situation to land in.
Personally I’m staying here, already invested so much time and don’t want to start over. You know what’s great tho? The source code is open now, those who want change can make their own server. The bones are there, just need to tweak it to how they want it. I would love to just have a 4th sometimes for the times I can find someone to grp with or don’t even want to grp just want to grind out levels on an alt or aaxp. I appreciate all the hard work all the devs here do. Thank you all for making this server enjoyable to play on.
I want people to play by those rules, not because I want control, but because I feel I am not alone in those rules. It's been nearly a decade, and I still feel the same. I'm not interested in debating the rules of the ruleset I wish to make. I've done that enough internally at TAKProject back in the day, and I feel every member of the team has done that enough internally as it is. Part of any 'campaign' in D&D terms, or 'server' in EQ ones, means ownership over design and philosophy. Any concessions made on ideas on behalf of the players for the DM in a D&D game ends up diluting the waters behind design - and compromises are often made at the expense of integrity. It's why TAKProject was originally open source to begin with - it just so happened that the lowest common denominator of terrible people had forked the project initially, and their intent was with malice to harm the project. My intent has been to keep it open and keep communication open so we always have the best version of EverQuest available for everyone. This is the philosophy that drove me to create the EQMac hack back in 2011, contribute the ability to make TAKP via its netcode in 2013, and I feel I have had a tad bit of character growth myself since then - both in a hobby and professional capacity. I think the notion of creating a space to bring players into their own guild like Vintage would not work, as the quality of life adjustments suggested for single-box play would simply not be there, and would forever taint TAKProject's existing 3-box population. I'd be willing to put my weight behind the above idea not because I want control, but because I believe it's fun, and people will play it because it's fun, and games are supposed to be fun. Plenty of people have fun the way TAKProject designed their ruleset. And I think the kinds of people TAKProject attracts and the people that Project 1999 attracts have some overlap. But for the most part, they're irrevocably separate, and there would be no dilution of the playerbase of TAKProject - instead, I think some folks may want to play there instead of the single-box server and vis a vis. I'd prefer to do this with the TAKProject team supporting it (not directly, but at least use of their loginserver), but mostly staying detached because I genuinely think there's still work that can be done - and keeping the game locked in the classic era for a period of time would also be beneficial upstream to TAKProject. Torven has also mentioned that our classic era NPCs 'need a lot of work'. What better way than a second server where that content would be the primary focus?
I think single box players having a bonus for socializing on a 1-box server is a fantastic idea. There should be a flat bonus to grouping for each player you add with experience still being shared. The '4th person' experience formula quirk would need to be dropped for a 1-box server.
I think Sycamore put it well but penalizing people for boxing is the same thing as banning boxing to me - not letting people play the way they want and using tech stuff to try to force their behavior to change. If you get a single box thing going I'd be willing to try it and I would help you if you wanted help, but I guess I'm skeptical that there's massive interest and that people won't just try to cheat.
First, people would absolutely try and cheat on a single box server. This is EverQuest after all… Second, a TAKP based single box progression server would be popular and I have no doubts about that. If it were a “hardcore” server without rotations, I feel that it would draw in a bunch of people who hate the zone re-vamps, have nostalgia for a true progression experience, and would have the potential to bring back a lot of people who miss the cut throat competition of a non-instanced and difficult server. The demand for such servers clearly exists, as every year the live progression servers have thousands of players for the first few weeks, and often remain popular until the end of PoP. Having said all this, I for one would not want to moderate such a server. It would be a train fest, drama filled, lawyer quest battleground. I have no doubts it would be popular, that doesn’t mean it would be “good” or should happen or that I wish being in charge of such a server on anyone. I am the polar opposite of anti-boxing. I love TAKP and three boxing has allowed me to enjoy EverQuest in a way I never could have otherwise. Nonetheless, it’s fundamentally a different experience from single box or mostly single box servers. Lots of people love those experiences as well. I don’t think such a server would have the same staying power as TAKP, but I guarantee it would have a large population when it launched, and if progression of xpacs was relatively fast (6 months or less) it would stay popular until Quarm was dead.
take all your ideas of grouping with 5 other single boxers and look at it through the lense of there being 47 people online across all the classic, kunark, velious, luclin and pop zones then tell me how great it sounds
Congrats to the devs on a fantastic project and following through with open source. What an amazing thing for EQEmu community!
