End True Box on Phinigel

What went wrong with Ragefire early on was the lack of Agents of Change to allow everyone to access raid content and the financial opportunities for people selling krono/loot. The problem was not the number of boxers. Ragefire is in Omens now. There are lots of box crews (including some 24-boxers), and even with the Omens launch (where everyone was scrambling to get flagged for Anguish), there was an inter-guild discussion, guilds spawned their own picks, and people (including the large box crews) stayed out of each other's business. No drama, no hassles.

Back in GoD, guilds had their own Qvic picks for goat farming and to the best of my knowledge, none of us ever had goats stolen in our own guild picks.

The problem with classic is that there are a limited number of useful/compelling camps and there is a lot of money to be made by rolling a mage crew and camping everything to force people to buy it from you. Even on true-box servers, this did not change at all. Bad (or even merely anti-social) players can exploit/bypass the Truebox code, or simply KS people with a 6-box mage crew/enchanter charm group regardless of whether the server is Truebox or not.

Truebox is bad. Boxing is an incredibly great income source for DBG, and thus very good for the long term health of the game. I would say it was the AoCs, far more than anything else, that made Phinny such a huge success.

I personally think Truebox restrictions, if they must exist, should be dropped when GoD comes out. By that time, mobs hit brutally hard and content is actually dangerous. Everything is no-drop. By that time, there's no need for those types of restrictions at all.

You still couldn't use I S Boxer (unless they removed that restriction) so probably not a risk.

Yeah, like buying one PC per account. /boggle

Hopefully if they remove truebox code they will allow I S Boxer. I would love for them to leave M Q restrictions in place, but I S Boxer window layout is so much better than alt tabbing.

Maybe someday I'll get an opportunity to try it.

I used to play on Phinigel, but I do not anymore. Therefore, take this with a grain of salt because honestly my opinion shouldn't matter. Those people who play on Phinigel is who's opinions matter the most on this topic.

But...

I am interested in seeing just how a "Truebox" server ends up working out when it gets up to the most recent Everquest expansions. Will it become a ghost town because people can't get the groups necessary to progress, or will it thrive because the interdependence on others creates a stronger bond among the community?

Quite frankly, this is an opportunity for the MMORPG industry to see what happens if you design a game to highly encourage playing with others. If they get rid of TrueBox code on Phinigel before it hits the more modern Everquest expansions, we will never know.

HAHAHHA this is the funniest thread ever. Be careful what you wish for, anybody?

TrueBox was never more than a marketing trap for the whiners who point the finger at everybody else for their own in-game inadequacies. Boxers spend more money on the game than non-boxers. Boxers play the game more than non-boxers. Boxers are the heart of most guilds and most groups.

Stopping boxing doesn't make anybody want to play with you more. The only thing TrueBox does is alienate boxers. When boxers leave, DBG doesn't lose one account, they lose 2-6+ accounts.

And trying to claim that boxers aren't "regular" players is wrong. Until DBG shows us real numbers, I have no doubt that boxing players outnumber non-box players. And if you actually tallied up the number of paying accounts from each category, there wouldn't be any comparison.

You claimed that it wasn't enough to hold your attention, and the response in this thread would indicate people are a lot more open to getting rid of TrueBox now that they've had a chance to suffer through it. How much more do you think should be done in the name of science?

A half dozen people complaining on a forum is a far cry from the actual populous of that server. The number of people to eventually quit the server because of Truebox rule set will not be known until the server completely fails (if it fails).

Has Phinigel as a server completely come to a halt? I honestly don't know. I'm asking. If it has, then the experiment is over, and we know the answer. If it has not, then the experiment appears to be still going.

If Phinny is getting truebox removed can Ragefire/Lockjaw also get AoCs?

Except the "experiment" as you put it changed too many things simultaneously to try and remove complaints stemming from boxing. Who's to say just putting in MOTM and making it handle pets like it did wouldn't have been enough? DBG introduced solutions to lessen the effect of heavily scripted box crews (MOTM, Mark of the Old Ways, and actionable offenses that got accounts banned) and solutions to allow everyone to experience content (pick zones, AOCs).

This is one of the things that makes Coirnav so disappointing, its just Phinigel again without tweaking one of the variables to see if they can grab even more people to play.

In my opinion, the only server to successfully use Truebox towards the purpose of that server was Quarm.

Now that Phinigel is no longer in the forefront of DBG's mind, why not experiment with it by turning off Truebox and letting it pan out to see what the number change is? If people really, truly need Truebox to continue playing, there's always Coirnav and Agnarr.

I really don't know why they won't give it to you guys, especially now that you're past 90% of them. Only Relic and Theater of Blood are left that will be AoCed if they did introduce it for RF/LJ.

Plus I'd love to see the tiny dragon model or croc model for the AoCs there....

Even though I personally would like to see Truebox gone, I think this ^^ is a horrible way of appproaching things. If Daybreak starts screwing with the core rules of a server several years into progression just to see how things pan out, then no one should have any confidence that any of the server rules they establish will continue into the future, and people are going to be much less willing to invest long term into a server. If they changed a rule on Phinigel on a whim, and made it unplayable for me, "Well you can always restart on Coirnav" would not be an acceptable solution.

If they remove Truebox, I hope they only do it with a server poll and a vast majority in favor. Polling has been a major negative as it has been employed in the past, but I think in this case it would not only be appropriate but necessary.

The mark of delineation here is macaroni quest. That's what makes the euphemistic 'true box' servers vastly different from previous TLPs. I suspect an active decision was made not to let every one have their cake and eat it too by putting AoC's on rage/lock or removing the current restrictions from true box servers.

13 guilds have finished PoR in era and two more are one kill away from completing it, so i would say its still progressing nicely.

though saying that Phinny will progress to a live server even if no one is playing on it, unlike previous versions there is no need to vote to unlock, it well happen automatically, it will never get Stuck.

Please Please end truebox!!

I have packed away 5 PC's canceled subs on 5 of them and am just logging in to raid. It was to hard work boxing etc Great when it was runnign well, but as soon as you die I found it stessfull etc. The room got red hot with 6 pc's and 7 monitors in etc etc, nevermind the wife moaning like hell!

I will resub 2-3 of my accounts the day truebox is lifted!

This will never happen, and shouldn't if they want anyone to trust them in the future. You don't change the rules on everyone because some people change their minds about what they want.

Go play on live. Or Ragefire. Or Lockjaw.

You're right, they shouldn't change their mind because everyone on the server wants it after the original design of the server stops serving its purpose.

I look forward to Ragefire and Lockjaw having 6 months of OoW 6 months of DoN 6 months of DoDH and 6 months of PoR as a result. 2 years stuck at level 70 farming Demiplane for a year and Deathknell for six months, can't wait!

They should remove Truebox requirements on Phinigel soon as it has served its purpose. They should also throw AoCs on all servers to be honest, there's no real reason to not have them be available to every player on every server at this point.

I wouldn't mind seeing AoC on Live servers to have Access. To see/fight older raid bosses and not worry about them being perma camped.

Apparently, you didn't think it through very well before starting on the server. The rest of us should not have to pay for it.

And you don't get to decide when Truebox has served its purpose for everyone else. It will never stop serving its purpose for me, and I suspect, many others.