The singular difference (length of service availability excluded) between this server and P99 (in my opinion), is the question of boxing. You can play on both servers using a Mac or PC, and despite the differences of timelines and configuration, it is essentially the same game. I am curious about exactly how much the "boxing" element encourages or discourages the development of community, and why? In a post, please explain how the element of "boxing" has effected your choice to play here.
I'll start My husband and I have a young child. We enjoyed Project 1999 for several years, however, found ourselves in a position very frequently where we could not "commit" ourselves to groups or situations where we knew we could not commit more than an hour of extended gameplay. Every class in a game makes or breaks a group, and so... we found that often times we were "soloing" because we could not commit to one. Raiding is different in that we either trade nights of "raid play", or we are blissfully able to play together because the grandparents have him for a sleepover. As an example, the only raid night on P99 I could commit to was our regularly scheduled Sky raid night... and I attended every single one for almost 2 years (it was "my" raid night). The 3-box limit has created a situation where we could combine necessary classes together to be able to do group-level encounters together, despite our real-life obligations for downtime, afk's etc. We have included another RL friend into this mix who understands our limitations, and often play 2/2/2 with him. Thank you TAKProject!
A few reasons: 1. There's a lot more gameplay available for someone who plays odd hours or who plays many hours, than there is for someone who just solos. You can only kite PoFire tables for so long before it gets boring. With boxing you have a wider variety of camps available to yourself, with more loot/quest rewards also being available as a byproduct. This leads to the game having more playability/content. Plus it takes more time to consume this content because instead of needing 20 pieces of equipment for your main you now need 20 x # Boxes. 2. You are able to play more actively. By this I mean I'm able to do more "things" and have less downtime while playing. Example: Solo Cleric on a raid from Velious-PoP. Cast Complete Heal. Wait 12 seconds. Cast Complete Heal. Repeat. Boxing 2 Clerics and a Druid on a raid. Cast Complete Heal, Tabs to Cleric 2, wait 3 seconds, Cast Complete Heal, wait 3 seconds, Cast Karana's Renewal, repeat. By having more keystrokes and playing more roles on a raid, I find I'm able to enjoy the game more than just hitting one button every 12-15 seconds. More so when you have a larger diversity of classes. I liked boxing Druid/Cleric/Bard/Wizard on raids. Got some CH Chain support with cleric, Nukes with Wizard, switch hitter on the Druid, Pulling on the bard until a mobs in camp then AFK 1 song. 3. I'm bad at grouping in EQ. Or atleast, I'm not a friendly person to group with. Not to say I'm mean or annoying to be around (atleast I don't think I am!), but when I'm grinding I get bored easily. And out of this boredom, comes decisions to try to entertain myself like multi pulls, trying named mobs, and overall risky behavior. With boxing, if I screw up and wipe, I don't really mind much and no one else cares. If there is no boxing, I find MANY people don't have the patience for my ADHD antics and get upset when I try to make a grind group more interesting (IMO). Many players would favor single pulls for 6 hours straight instead of trying out Diaku Overseer with a single charmed pet a few times. Plus, when I make these decisions I am not always the quickest to relay them into group chat and explain what other people may need to do for us to successfully killed the train I pulled or tag the named out of my train or down the named mob. Somehow my boxes are telepathic and know exactly what I wanted to happen! 4. It's a more diverse EQ experience, given you have several Alts/Boxes on hand. I would go to wager that during my year and change on Al'Kabor I attended raids with probably 50+ different class combinations. This always meant I was filling new roles on raids, and actively learning new things about encounters (MB in PoI is very different for a wizard than it is on a cleric or a knight for example). I always strived to be as self sufficient as possible. My end goal was a Time flagged character of every class. By the time Al'Kabor closed I had 5 Time, 8 EP4 flagged level 65s and 13 50+ Toons. This allowed me to fill most gaps that presented themselves in casual raiding, and allowed me to achieve mostly all my grouping goals regardless of whether something thought it was worth the time to do something like... the Saryrn key in PoTorment (which was a tough zone to drag anyone to). Plus as a guildmate it allowed me to be helpful to those who didn't box or needed a bit more firepower than their box crew could provide. Need a Rez, port, KEI, Virtue, Fo7, Pot9, FoE, Haste, SD, I can help! Need a corpse summon, I've got you! Need a 250+ TS combine done in Tailoring, Smithing, Pottery, Baking, JC, Brewing, Fletching, Tinkering or Alchemy - just provide me all the components! Need another charmed pet and cleric in BoT or Tactics or PoFire/Water, I can help there also. Etc. Granted the above is available without boxing but it takes far longer to amass such a set of character when you can't box. 5. Convenience, it's touched on a few areas above this, but it's very nice having a porter and a rezzer available to yourself whenever. Asking a cleric to Rez you in Kedge Keep on P99 is a 10-15 minute segment of that clerics day spent getting a port and running out there. It's very nice being able to Rez yourself and not have to inconvenience someone else to do so. The number of dumb places I've died at odd hours, it would've been a nightmare trying to get all sorts of random clerics to come Rez my characters. Also as someone who got 250 in all 7 TSes plus Tinkering, JC again on an enchanter and I was redoing them on my bard before the server shut down... Having mules available in Baz/PoK who can hold stacks of components for you and whom you can safely trade with while boxing makes for a much more pleasant Tradeskilling experience. Instead of having to hassle someone to transfer you items or having to drop transfer them.
Interesting. To answer the question directly: the issue of boxing has made no difference at all to my choice of server. I play here because I played on Al'Kabor, and was sad when it died, and happy to be involved in its resurrection. And also because many good friends from AK migrated here. That said, I definitely wouldn't be playing here if we'd voted for unlimited boxing, or even 6-boxing. In the last couple of years on AK, when everyone (else) had their own personal armies, the community stopped being fun for me, my small guild family excepted. Funnily enough, though, the reasons I don't box are rather similar to the reasons Darchon gives for boxing. I also like "risky behaviour", in the sense that I like the *difficulty* of EQ. I can't stand the idea of playing the game just to accumulate xp and/or loot as efficiently and easily as possible. Where's the pleasure in that? You might as well create a game where all you do is press buttons on a keyboard for ten minutes until an enormous sign pops up on screen and says "YOU WON!! YOU R AWESOME!!" My idea of EQ hell is plonking a bunch of characters in whichever zone has the highest ZEM, recruiting max level guildies to stuff them full of steroidal buffs, and then slaughtering mobs until you end the session eight levels higher than when you started. ("YOU WON!! YOU R AWESOME!!") Like Darchon, I love a challenge. There's nothing better than completing some ridiculously time-consuming in-game task, whether it be newbie armour sets, the VP key, the shawl quests, or (Darch's version) maxing out characters of every class. Soloing an enchanter turns out to be perfect for this sort of thing, since enchanters can go more or less anywhere and do more or less anything, given the patience to learn from the inevitable multiple deaths along the way. I also really enjoy the teamwork aspect of the game. There's nothing as pleasurable as a good group, or indeed a good raid. For me, this means hooking up with other people who can't accomplish what they want to accomplish on their own. Again, this is quite similar to Darchon's point about being a better/more helpful guildie -- just on a smaller scale. I suspect in the end it comes down to one's temperament. I just seem to be more comfortable, and happier, with a quieter, slower, more localised version of EQ than the one Darchon describes. (Plus it fits my life better -- I'm afk a lot doing things around the house.) I think the 3-box limit is working really well to balance out these (and other) differences in approach. I've had groups with boxers and enjoyed them very much. I've had groups with other soloers as well. I've even been able to log my own alts on at the same time as me, and sit in zone to give them Clarity and help them break camps, so I've dipped my toe into a version of boxing as well. It feels to me like we're all basically playing the same game, which is how AK felt until somewhere around 2012, when you'd suddenly find yourself shoved out of a zone by 18 people who were in fact just two people and who could do what you'd spent days trying to do in half an hour. That feeling of common endeavour is, I suspect, very important to the health of the community.
This is my reason. Play time is really hard to come by. I also love crawling in dungeon zones. Those two things don't jive really well so having shaman and cleric keeping my warrior upright is a good thing. I've been able to farm some items that were goal oriented pieces and explore places of the game I have never seen before. I can find a safe camp spot and tailor my play to XP killing , or if a little more time crawl oriented farming. Also I'm always paranoid of dying in a stupid way and having to leave my corpse to rot because I wasn't able to invest the time required to do a corpse run. Having a rezzer always on hand helps put that fear to ease a bit. Another nice part of having a crew that is the basis for a solid group is that you can be set up and doing your thing and if enough other real people want to join you can just drop toons to get as many real people in the group as possible. If people leave you can log a healer or slower back in and keep the group going. Some of my memorable EQ times have been just all the chatter that goes on while doing an otherwise mundane XP camp. Its nice to have the ability to start up that sort of group on your own for other people. Haven't managed a raid yet though!
I don't particularly mind boxing, but I find that I am not nearly as good at it as some other people. Coupled with a lack of knowledge about where to go and what to do as a boxer, it has led to a playing freeze where I am crippled by indecision. I log on three characters and usually say "great, now what?" or I go box for 15 minutes in Field of Bone and log after my first death. Knowing that I basically have to do everything by myself 98% of the time ends with me not logging in at all.
A few reasons why I would never go back to single boxing on a "classic" EQ server. 1. Playing 1 character there is simply not enough to do. On a warrior you bash what every 6 seconds? A cleric you hit CH like once a fight? When you have three characters there is enough buttons to press. Actually 4 would be better for me but I understand why there is a limit to 3 so that groups are more encouraged. 2. The game world opens up and you have the power to be able to take it on. If you are single boxing in EQ you are totally reliant on others to get anything done except in some cases with just a few "solo" classes. When you are boxing you are enabled to do what you want to do when you want to do it without having to /ooc lfg. 3. I find the meta game of different class combinations very interesting. I like how every class has a situation in which they excel at and partners they prefer working with. I like having to make trade offs in dps for more defense as I design my team.
Some of my most rose-tinted EQ memories are from playing an enchanter in various old-world and Kunark dungeons back in the days when boxing was very rare and chatty groups of 6 live people were the norm. Part of me will always be a little sad that that kind of group is so unheard of in latter-day EQ. On the other hand, the game has changed a lot since then, and so has the way I play it. I was very happy playing a single toon on Al'Kabor if I had a lot going on. Pulling for a raid, leading a raid, doing crowd control in a CC-heavy environment. I sometimes ended up boxing an extra toon or two - usually a cleric or support class - when I would really have preferred not to. A lot of the time, though, I'm with the one-toon-is-not-enough-to-do crowd. Dragging a cleric along with me helps keep me engaged (I had a friend back on Bristlebane who would read War and Peace only while raiding VT, and she finished it) and feels like a useful contribution to the raid or group. The kind of boxing I like best is where the roles of the toons I'm playing mesh well enough that I'm not giving up any effectiveness by playing more than one. The best example I can think of is the situation in which I'm playing two clerics in a group taking heavy damage from high-DPS adds; arguably, because the left hand knows instantaneously what the right hand is doing, I can play two clerics better than two people could play one cleric each. Mostly, though, that's not the case. I box an ENC/CLR/MAG trio on TAKP, and it's absolutely the case that when a big pull hits camp, I triage all the things that should really be happening at once, usually imperfectly. It's a compromise I make for the sake of convenience, but I dislike it sometimes. That said, I did enjoy, on rare occasions, a certain kind of big-group boxing on Al'Kabor. When you've got 5 or 6 toons running, it's no longer the case that you're trying to play them all in the way you'd play a single toon; instead, each is a tool filling some kind of role, and figuring out how to get an encounter done within the constraints of how many toons you can box and how many things you can focus on at a time is like solving a puzzle. I had to be in a weird mood for this, and I won't miss it on TAKP, but doing the hedge maze event by myself was a bizarre kind of fun.
Like others have said, gone are the days I can play 4-12 hours straight making groups, recruiting members, etc. These days I get an hour here, and hour there. Two hours straight if I'm lucky. I log in, group my trio and quickly start exping/questing. Baby duty or real life calls and I'm off the game quickly. If I do have a free afternoon, I love starting a group with my trio, and if possible, shedding my alts for other people. That social aspect is a huge reason I play this game, but it can't always be group-based.
Just to mention...I do really miss the 6-man 6 different people experience with a chatty group. Unfortunately that is not feasible on this server unless you have a pre-made 6 man. It has however been replaced with an active guild chat and I find that is just fine.
I started out as a noob ranja on AK. Took me a while to learn how to solo effectively, but on AK it was a must. AK was a true soloist paradise back when I started on the server in '05 and I spent a long time solo playing. Then I switched to a pally main. Suddenly, I didn't have the solo ability that I had grown so accustomed to, so I started boxing. I've always had spare computers around so it was a fairly natural progression for me to start running alts on my extra puters. Then I learned how to raid. Suddenly there was need for support classes, and since AK had such a small population many players would box alts on raids. I started boxing a cleric primarily and set about growing an army of alts. By the time they closed AK, I had 8 level 65 toons many with complex raiding keys etc... I never liked boxing, but it became such a necessity I never thought too hard about why I did it. I just did it. TBH, these days, one of my favorite things to do is to log Elrontaur on Dev and solo around in the empty zones. Boxing serves an important purpose, but I love the times when I can play with real folks. Even if it's only one other person.
Very much this. Being inefficient with one other person often times is much more fun, I think, than being extremely efficient with many boxed characters.
Its not so much that I like boxing. I hate playing one char. One does not keep my brain busy enough, making me bored. Two is better. Three works best. One? Boring. Thats why I box. H
Some of my best memories of AK were leveling up my first toon with random folks I met on the server. Everyone was so helpful and willing to group with noob meat like me. AK was always different than any other server for that reason alone.
Pushing the limits of three seems much more exciting that one so the added level of difficultly is more fun. There's so much that can be done with three that even though the population is low, I feel like I can get out and experience so much more of what EQ can offer. Sure, the social aspect of grouping is great... but I don't want my ability to experience the other parts of the game to hinge on that. I've experienced far more of the game with boxing that I ever did solo. My least fun experiences from live include LFG for hours on end because [insert one of the many reasons here].
I've never boxed nor will I although the reasons for boxing are many and varied and understandable. To me, this game is all about the social interaction. I'd rather sit and chat in PoK with a guild mate or friend or someone I don't know then be part of a boxed group where people are too busy switching screens while they are watching a movie in RL to type a response other then, brb or afk or doesn't that gnome smell bad. Remove the social aspect and then I have to ask myself why I am playing a 16 year old computer game. To each their own.
There's a number of reasons. The main one is that I don't want to depend on others if they aren't there to depend on. An EQ server has a relatively narrow window of time where grouping is readily available. For the vast majority of any given server's lifespan, it either has too small a playerbase for consistent grouping or it has grown too stagnant for it. P99 is the latter, and has been for ages, with everyone either having the characters they want or just resorting to PLing or twinked soloing. You can still find groups, but not with any real consistency or any variety of options. This server is the opposite, with far too few players to reliably form groups if boxing weren't allowed. Secondly, EQ is just such a simple game that I have no fun playing a single character. It's so passive and slow when played that way. It was okay a dozen years ago, but when the game is no longer new and you know how to play it optimally, playing one character is just not enough. The mechanics are too primitive, boxing is the only way to make it a bit challenging and interactive. I wouldn't play EQ without boxing.
Because even when EQ first came out and overtime I inevitably found myself soloing when groups weren't available. So the simple answer is, because I can do more things on my own. Plus it's fun
I generally don't box. I enjoy the challenge of playing a solo Enchantress, so that's what I do. Is it the most efficient? No. Is it the most fun? Fuck yeah it is.
I've been boxing since 2000, so I really never done one character with EQ. There was about three months (Oct/Nov/Dec) that I used my friend's account to try the game out since my friend wanted me to play with him. I was super bored but decided to play the game to play with him since he refused to play Asheron's Call with me, which in my opinion was a much more fun game at the time. I picked up two copies of the game to try and see if I could run two characters, I found myself having a lot more fun running with two, however at the time I was on two computers. It is also the reason I didn't last long on P99, the inability to box made the game too boring for me. I kept adding accounts over the years, by the time 2012 came around I was running around with 18 accounts doing my own raid content (not current mind you, like 3-4 expansions behind) I had retired from the game in 2014 and when I went back for the progression server earlier this year I had limited myself to six since running 18 was very extreme and I noticed changes in my mood. I would say 8 or 9 is the most I can box these days before I enter the world of douche asshole. I'm having fun here running with just 2-3 accounts (depending on my team) but if I could I would go up to six just because that is the pinnacle of my personal challenge. 18 may seem hard but it was actually easier to run 18 than just 6. So, why do I like boxing? It gives me a challenge that playing with one character does not provide for me.
The single biggest difference for me between TAKP and P99 is the raid scene not boxing, and the future prospect of luclin and pop. The toxicity and player/GM manipulation of things on p99 just eats away at your soul once you want to get into end game. I'm not really a fan of boxing, I feel it breaks immersion but I do it because its pretty much required to get things done on a low pop server.
Some really great replies in this thread. Personally, I don't like to box...but then again I've never really experienced boxing. On live I just played my one toon, either my necro or my enchanter, and sometimes my shaman. Never boxed them. Boxing is interesting and new to me. A part of me enjoys it because it allows me the flexibility to level when I otherwise couldn't (because EQ is not a solo game), but I definitely MISS grouping with people and having a group where I can sorta be slack. In a way, I feel like a good EQ player can play one toon at 110% efficiency, two toons at 80% efficiency or three toons at 50% efficiency. Now those numbers may vary based on which classes, etc, but I truly believe that the more boxes you add the less effective the output and result. I personally don't love boxing, but I do it because it provides me some sweet chances to try things I could never have previously tried (like leveling SK/Cleric/Bard). In other scenarios (like the necro/druid I run) it's just an insanely OP way to have fun and level up/grind.
It depends on what boxes you pick. If you pick 3 bards then i would say you are running the bards at around 50% efficiency or less each. However with a composition like war/cleric/mage you can pretty easily run at 95% efficiency or more. For instance: You have a macro on cleric to assist warrior and cast pacify. You target the mobs you wanted pacified on the warrior and quickly switch to cleric to pacify the room. This is so MUCH easier to do when there is just one person involved. It's very easy to switch to cleric when heals are needed and switch to mage to send in pet and nuke once or twice a mob. No way this comp would work at 50% efficiency with a skilled player. In some cases you are actually more efficient when you are in control of more characters...for instance to coordinate with a group to set up that macro to pacify a room is time consuming. I remember dying a lot as a tank because a cleric missed the ch. This happens because maybe he is not familiar with how much damage my tank takes vs another tank or for lack of attention. If i miss the CH it's my fault...so nice to have control over that. I have found in grouping with others that if a tank controls there own healer...heals are missed far less often. Just food for thought.
I look back fondly of my time on live only playing 1 character, but I can enjoy playing 2-3 characters as I did on PEQ. MQ2 or not, after that it got increasingly more unfun. I'm finding it semi-difficult adjusting to 3 boxing without MQ2, I don't like full bot mode on my 2nd and 3rd boxes, but it was nice having a little extra help with minor things (auto BS, maintain self buffs, etc). I expect I'll get used to it though, or that by the time I'm max level, level up my wizard and replace my druid with it in my 3 box, I'll be back to the same 3 box setup I used to enjoy for groups/raids. Regardless of my willingness to multibox, I've always liked playing my characters solo here and there too. EXP, Camps, LFG, or what not. I especially found it enjoyable and IMHO best for anyone to play the classes they never played before and are now leveling/recently leveled up, solo a lot. I never played a Enchanter on live, and it was my 3rd char on PEQ. Through solo boxing it I was able to find out how much I enjoyed it, as well as better understand its role in groups or how to charm solo, etc. You can easily miss out on a lot of the depth/fun of a class by boxing it.
Bored, perhaps. I was the sole CH Chain in one of my guilds a few years back six boxing clerics. I was considering doing three clerics here just to see how it compares to when I did it years ago. A lot of mechanic alterations over the years that are not on this server, so could be an interesting experiment. Then again, I may just do two clerics and some sort of melee just to make it a wee bit quicker.
For me it is one the main reasons I came here. I have played on most of the emu servers and they all have pros and cons but this place is my favorite. I played EQ from 1999 up to about 2004 ish. I only ever played one character and I had fun. Since then I tried every emu you can think of. The first one I played was Winters Roar/Shards of Dalaya, and you can 2 box on that server. I just played as one character to begin with because I was wary of multiboxing, sounded like complex stressful work to me, so I just levelled up a chanter and did fine like that. But at max level I made another character and levelled it up, and at first I just used it to buff my chanter, but in the end I started playing both together. Then I got hooked! I could do more content, and it was far more exciting to play. I played there for several years and then gave p99 a try. I had fun there, levelled up a Necro to 55 and had many groups, like the good ole days. I find a lot of the EQ characters are really boring to play by themselves, but some of the casters can be really good fun, either solo or in a group. But even so, I still missed having a second character, you can just do so much more like that and it is more exciting. I played Vanguard a lot at this point and did a lot of multiboxing in that game too, even when it required a subscription I would pay for 2 and had a great time. I then played EQ Mac and had a 6 box party of my own. I had a lot of fun playing that, loved it in fact, got to about level 54 by the time it was shut down But I did find it quite tedious playing 6 characters. It was fun in some ways but mostly I found it too much and it bugged me that I wasn't playing them to their potential. I would engage with Warrior and move to the cleric to start a HoT, then move to the Druid to start a DoT, then move to the Wiz to start a nuke etc.. It worked but it was not really fun and it was a bit hard going. I love the idea of having a whole party under my control though, it is like a tactical RPG like Baldur's Gate or something, but real time, and with better combat etc. I then tried PEQ, and in that server you are allowed to use macroquest. I ended up running an entire raid of 18 characters by myself. I levelled up a group at a time and then grouped all 3 groups together and I did raiding, all by myself. It was a lot of fun too but again, it gets boring after a while and this time was because it was just too automated. I really enjoyed having to setup all the macros and then fine tuning them, it took ages and a lot of effort but I liked it. But in the end, I basically had an entire raid that would behave perfectly, every time, with no mistakes ever, and no delays ever. I would basically just play it as a Warrior, I would engage a raid mob or whatever and the entire raid would automatically join in and do whatever needed doing. DPS would attack without stealing aggro, healers would wait for me to be injured and would then heal me with the appropriate spell, buffers would make sure everyone was fully buffed all the time, etc. It was kind of amazing to experience but ultimately I just got bored because it is so automated and it also trivializes everything. I felt like I wasn't even playing the game anymore. I also tried modern EQ at some point and that was the same experience. With the overpowered mercs you could do anything by yourself and there was no real challenge or danger anymore. The game was very dumbed down. In the end I decided the ultimate middle ground would be a game that was true to old EQ, locked in time at PoP which gives you many years of content to enjoy and yet wont go weird and dumbed down with the later expansions. And with 2 or 3 boxing allowed, that way you can 'solo' but do group content by yourself, and yet you have to focus and play well and be fully involved in all the characters. And it also means grouping will still happen, and it has, so far I've grouped about 5 times on this server and I'm only level 30's so far. So for me this server is the best of everything. My favorite era of EQ, enough characters to box to let me go to the fun dungeons and camp the useful items for myself and I don't just have to kite spectres or something day after day. And yet not so many characters that it becomes too tedious or too automated.
