Limit on Boxes

Okay. However, boxed armies aren't really what I think is on the table. I would wager most are in favor of allowing 2-6 toons played by one person, and not a 12-24 box army. However, in deciding that 2-6 toon limit we should wait until we see what population is actually on the server. I mean at this point I believe gaeldar and minsc are busy with their own server; which is fairly fun - I enjoyed getting VT loot in mistmoore, made me giggle.

 

Nobody cares about 10 month old drama. I had an important point to make in that there was a very good reason why boxed armies 'weren't a problem' on Al'Kabor-- it's because warp hacking trainers prevented them/us from advancing past Rallos, NOT because boxing 20 accounts simultaneously made the end-game encounters too difficult. The cozy no-competition-with-boxed-armies position Destiny and Temerity enjoyed simply will not exist on TAKP's official server if you don't limit boxing. The elemental planes would turn into a situation like with Lord Inquisitor Seru during the last months of AK's life. Gaeldar probably wouldn't like me making this argument, but there it is. (although before the training began, we were planning on rotating in EPs)

On a side note, I really don't like hearing that guilds aren't responsible for the actions of their members. (particularly members with a leadership role) One's actions wearing a tag reflect on all those with the tag, like it or not. Double particularly when those bad actions benefit the entire guild.

Well if you're in favor of 'unlimited' then you're in favor of 20 character boxed armies. Some people are advocating for unlimited, so a distinction needs to be made. I would agree that a six box limit is a whole lot better than unlimited, but I'm not personally sure I would play on a server with that high a limit, at least not long-term.

 

I have not said where my preferences lie, whether its 2,3, 4, 5 - or 36 toons. I said lets wait for the server to open, see the population we could have - and decide from there. Wait for facts; then make rules based on facts. On AK I boxed 9 - without keycloning. On TGC I had 12 or so coming along - but it was too much like Fippy and I wasn't all that into Fippy so I left. And on fippy I boxed 5, a powerhouse team of rogue mage shaman druid bard. I don't know on this server whether 3 toons or 6 will float my boat more. I can tell you I am not in favor of a 2 toon limit only because I think it will create many many Xtoon/sham combos. But as far as the upper limit - my mind isn't made up until I see what the server has to deal with. (I am leaning toward no more than 6; being able to have a group is a handy tool, but having 9 allowed me and one other person to do some raid encounters with ease.)

 

To be fair here... The server rules do state no MQ/Zamiel/Faite automation scripts which help facilitate max-boxing.

After about 6~ characters, with no automation, performance falls way off. People who were playing 12+ toons simultaneously were doing it with automation. Pure and simple.

If a guild wants to do be full of 6-boxers and do raids with 9 people I'm all for that. Do what floats your boat IMO. Just so long as you are playing within the same rule set as everyone else on the server.

You get what you put into this game. If you want to monopolize content by mass boxing that is your prerogative. Farm all the ornate patterns and BoT named you wish to.

The one thing I do hope, is that this server has a civil raiding scene. One that existed for many years on Al'Kabor. It was a shame that some guilds disregarded LIS/VT rotations, it was a shame when players didn't leave up TZ/VZ for flagging runs when asked and it was a shame that certain players went out of their way to actively train guilds and ruin the nights of many people.

 

You set the rules and tone of the server to attract the type of community you want. Once you get the wrong type of people it's 100x more difficult to weed them back out. If this server becomes a sleepy low population community like Al'Kabor was for periods of its long life then so be it. AK had entire years like that -- such as after WoW was first released. Most summertimes were a season of reduced raid turnout for us. People get busy in RL. That's not a justification to blow up the server vision. Things can go unkilled. It's o-kay.

Norrath has a vast amount of content at all levels. On our Saturday raids during the summer a few years ago, Temerity was getting light turnouts. So we started doing retro raids into Velious. Some of our members hadn't seen the stuff, and we even picked up a *Velious* server first with a Vulak kill 6 years into the server's life. Or maybe we'd cancel a Sat. raid and folks could go off and do grouping targets (with actual groups not as creepy anon six boxers). Or grandmaster tradeskill. Or quest. Or try a new a new alt. There's plenty to do and that's why EQ lives on.

Worst thing you can do is lower standards to grow at any cost. This is true of guilds and this is true of servers. You gotta do what you can do with people you feel good about doing it with. The rest will come.

Zetro

 

So if the server is trying to emulate the AK server, that is the "vision" of the server correct?

Was there a boxing limit on AK?

/devils advocate

I honestly dont box more than 3 with out keycloning mages or wizards

 

Maybe that depends what *year* of Al'Kabor you want to see again. For most of AK's life I could count the hydras on a couple-few fingers. Factors were the ppc client, pay accounts and what fringes the community would tolerate. And I can tell you're playing devil's advocate, Furst, because you're a good guy and you don't want to emulate just the shit-pit Al'Kabor became at the end.

Zetro

 

Agreed, 2-3 persons killing raid mobs is obnoxious and defeats the the intent of the encounter. But a well patrolled server by staff will keep most of the annoying stuff to a min, so as far as I am concerned...its up to the admins how much babysitting they want to do. SIngle boxing will constant babysitting to make sure people arent doing more than one, and 6+ cheating/botting/screwing with people will surely increase.

 

But Zetro here's the rub; AK had periods of high population too - if you never had high population that might color your opinion. And for some of us, mobs going unkilled isn't necessarily okay. The phrase "all internet dragons must die" comes to mind. 6 boxing didn't ruin the raid atmosphere of AK, nor did it ruin the social aspect. I had a great time with many a person as a 6 boxer; some of which I might never have grouped with otherwise.

And I boxed 6 fairly well w/o any software helping me at all; when I did 9 I had melees that I didn't need to babysit that often. (ranger/sham/cleric/wizard/bard/enchanter for the main 6)

 

I would agree with this claim if one is boxing a variety of classes-- in fact I've said as much to my guildmates. However if somebody boxes just clerics, or just wizards, then I would disagree. You do not need boxing tools to effectively box 20 wizards or 10 clerics doing a rot. All you need to do is hit three buttons over and over again: alt-tab, 1. Wizards can be in-game macroed to cast 5 nukes with one keypress.

The arguments are getting repetitive in this thread now, but again I would like to say that it is simply not nearly as easy to catch people automating as they might think. Keycloning is the simplest of tools and is legal in every game I've ever heard of and can be done entirely with hardware. But even if we go the extreme route and ban it, it's a simple matter of putting /pauses in macros to delay casts to have your wizard army not cast in precise unison. So I ask you, how do you catch it?

This is the one thing you cannot reliably replicate. AK was what is was for many reasons, but the future is going to look a lot more like AK's last year than its first.

 

Yea the more I think about it, the above is starting to make me reconsider my thoughts on boxing and favor a no boxing rule.

 

What is easier to police, no boxes or 20 boxes with 3rd party programs?

 

20 boxes with 3rd party programs, easily

 

lol, no boxes at all would be much easier to police.

 

think before you talk Lenas, whats harder to do watch EVERY single person to see if they are boxing or not.

Or watch the handful of people who box 7+ people. It is a simple game of numbers, no boxing will be way more work

p99 does use their spyware to stop this, but when you have multiple people playing in one house you have to get special permission, and if you are like me and just boxed anyways with the special permission

 

You're really foolish if you think boxers can only be caught by someone actually watching them. Disallow simultaneous connections from the same location, done deal. The amount of people that would need exemption would be a fraction of the amount you'd have to keep an eye on otherwise.

 

I was able to get past it and never got caught /fail

 

I wouldn't play here without a box...period....playing with one toon sucks.

 

this post is devolving pretty fast haha

 

Its not so hard to make it seem like you are connecting from 2 locations. The point is that its easier to ensure people dont massively box because most won't have the hardware or skills to do it without 3rd party programming unless you are mass boxing 1 class which the community will easily pick up on. Secondly, I would like to highlight two emulated servers. Project 1999 and Project Everquest: The Grand Creation. One has a no box rule and its raid game and community are a cesspool of humanity, training, GM lawyering, IP cloning and the like abound. One has no rules about boxing and for the most part is fairly laid back, people do what they want and while highly contested mobs are killed the community has a chance at them - like most communities they are hostile toward outsiders but for the most part they accept everyone. Which community do we want to be like again and why? Just to say we are more social? Because I'd rather play alone in a friendly environment than with 60 people 30 of whom are total douchebags so that it can be "more social".
Furst and myself both played on Fippy in twisted legion. We were number one - we crushed everyone and did anything to achieve that. I don't know about Furst but I hated 90% of the people I played with, I'd rather not do that again.

And I believe we should limit boxes to some degree, but not the most extreme degree - from what I can tell it has not worked well in the past; and I see no reason why it would work well here to foster the type of community that made AK special, even in its last years.

 

Everyone has great points about boxing versus no-boxing. The people who are proposing a boxing limit seem to focus (and rightly so) on the fact boxers become anti-social and may not allow others in their group. So why not allow boxers, but if someone is reported in, say, two separate incidents of not allowing someone else into their boxed group then they are temporarily banned. Might this not promote friendly grouping but also allow those who are inherently friendly but want the opportunity to box their groups the ability to do so?
Also, if there is an eventual ban on boxing or a limit on number of boxes, I believe this should only be enforced while xping and not while guild raiding. Quite often scenarios exist that people may not be able to attend a flagging raid, or we need at least 4-5 healers to take down a boss but not enough have logged in BUT trusted friends have their log-ins... in those cases it's not as if someone is boxing to ignore or hog experience, but rather assisting the guild and raidmates.
What say you, denizens of Al'Kabor?

 

Chill people please.

No MQ or other software to help boxing, but allow people to build their armies if they want to. Doesnt mean the rest of us will have to. Ill be running Kazlan (SK) and Bazuuk (SHM) like i did on AK. Come group with me in Oasis and see if I have gotten any better at it.

/Kaz

 

It seems to me that the most important thing to grasp is that this will be an evolving process to which change can and will happen. Like Faults mentioned in an earlier post and I fully agree is that we start out with some limitations on the amount but things can change. It is a wait and see process. A 6-box should be perfectly fine as in the beginning the server population will be light and necessitate it. I definitely see the vast majority of the people rejoining their old guilds right at the start so finding groups should be easy even if playing solo. The main point is to not to allow yourself to get worked up about something just because at the start at least it is not exactly how you want it. There is no way possible to give everyone exactly what they want and no one here should feel any sense of entitlement. Just try to have fun and enjoy the fact that a few people are spending a lot of their free time to bring us something we all enjoying playing for free.

 

Total /revival of this thread, but, since I've been cited as the primary culprit of massively boxing on AK, I feel obliged to put my 2 cents in.

I have no problem with you making this argument, in fact, I agree with it.

I'm not going to sit here and argue that I didn't enjoy the army I had - it was fun seeing what we could do, whether all of us(6 or 7 humans?) or me alone. Although, I didn't set out on AK thinking "I'm going to box as many characters as possible!" It came from necessity. AK simply didn't have the population to support a third competitive guild. TSE tried and eventually many of those folks left for P99 or what not.(They also had a lot of massive boxing). In Virtue tried and I think ultimately a lack of population and potential recruits is what lead to their demise.

So, when I set out to make my guild, I was left with creating many boxes and recruiting other folks who boxed a lot of toons as well. The lack of population bred the necessity to play the amount of toons I did. Yes, I automated a CH rot which Torven spoke about - how else could we kill anything? No way I was going to find 7 clerics.

With all that out there, and as Faults has alluded to, if the population is there - I have no desire to have anymore than 6 toons. As a lot of other folks have said, having 1 group to play is incredibly convenient when it comes to camping things, etc. Outside of that, I do enjoy being a 'main' in a guild and playing just that toon. I've had my fun with massively boxing on AK, even with shakering for XP I spent 100s of hours xping all of those characters, no desire to do that again!

 

Boxing is fine imo as long as you arent monopolizing things with it. Reason I dont play on those other lesser servers is the lack of boxing allowed.

 

I think to preserve the experience of EQ you need to at least have a limit on boxing. I don't want to restrict people but I do fear of people getting a bad taste in their mouth by people monopolizing camps and just taking away from the community experience. If you box, you don't need people and the flip side of that, you limit the opportunities to interact with others. EQ is all about building relationships and banding together to reach a goal. I think it would be nice to people able to pop up a box or two to help level or play in off-peak hours but I don't think allowing someone to form an entire group by themselves will be healthy for the server long term.

 

I think a boxing limit should be flexible as the server progresses. Maybe 2 to 3 limit for classic and kunark and perhaps open another as each expansion is opened afterwards. There should be enough content available to support boxers and the people playing single accounts.

 

So, what are we talking for a box limit? 3 characters in classic? Unlimited in PoP?

Box limit so lame .. don't make this like P99.