True Box what a failure

P99 has maybe 800 people playing on a busy night. Mangler has thousands.

I don't have a problem with boxing with the except of the 8+ mage armies that take over zones.

I think an important distinction between P1999 and TLPs is Advanced looting.

Suspending advanced looting until, maybe, 10 expansions in when everyone quits anyways, would probably go a long way to discouraging your average AHK botter.

Unfortunately, it would probably give an advantage to EMQUETOO botters who can probably navigate around such a pedestrian issue.

Ideally, if DBG could somehow limit households to 2-3 accounts, the vast majority of these issues would go away... Not sure if that's even possible at this point though.

No it's really not.

Truebox feels like a good compromise to me. It avoids what we had on Ragefire. You can box but it's enough of a hassle that most people aren't going to do more than 2 or usually 3 at most.

I think the bigger issue is how attitudes have changed and what the community deems as acceptable or tolerable behavior coupled with a complete abandonment of the PnP. There are no consequences for bad behavior and we have no way to police it ourselves.

Anyone who spends any amount of time on these servers knows which content and camps this can most frequently be seen at. A GM could pop-in and observe automated gameplay or see the same person monopolizing content for days on end. They choose to turn a blind eye to it and that is pretty disappointing.

Private servers manage to handle this stuff better than the paid staff here so I just don't buy the argument that it is too time-consuming or they don't have the resources. A conscious decision is being made to ignore these issues so long as krono continues to be purchased and consumed.

These are the issues, not boxing.

For a One Box server the First step is remove /autofollow .

Remove Kronos on that particular server ( boxers love kronos )

Then a GM can check player reports and watch suspect players . Might take a few mins then issue ban or suspension if obvious botting/boxing .

The GM doesn't even need to work 40 hrs a week , just a few hours a day really .

They could ban people using same IP like P99. But many would cry that they play with their "fictional spouse" etc who only plays when they need ports or rezs .

Would take more than a few hours a day.... Even BLATENT hackers/scripter with zero regards or cares about their accounts getting banned are around for weeks/months before action is taken against them.. If any every is. They want to be 100% sure that they are in fact breaking the rules.

They will never remove kronos, Its how they make their money off these servers.

The reason it is so easy for P99 to enforce the rule is because they start out without IP exemptions, then make you prove you arent boxing to get an exemption. Also spoiler alert, A lot of people on P99 box and dont get caught.

Also removing autofollow would stop some people, but not the major offenders.

Guess who else loves kronos? Daybreak.

I'm glad other people are starting to see this. The problem is Daybreak's abandonment of any rules of engagement or PnP. You think this kind of behavior exists solely because of boxing? When Sam Da Man Deathwalker put, arguably, the first spotlight on mass boxing, guilds already had been keeping other guilds locked out of entire raid zones by killing or purposefully failing raid encounters they didn't even need any more for years - and that was WITH PnP and rules of engagement.

It's important to remember that without true box that 12 crew turns into 30-40 box army.

One of the dumbest sayings ever. Whoever said the customer is always right has only ever been a customer and never worked in the service. Sometimes the customer is in every way wrong, and a total ***hole, and are in no way right.

I'm pretty sure that GM's have ways of telling if a character is automated. The big thing is /afk play which is what gets the suspensions.

As long as the characters are only doing things that you can do without the 3rd party software they're pretty safe

I hear a couple of dudes in their basement are able to do it just fine for free on a certain server which shall not be named here.

I think one full time GM would be plenty, possibly even only half a full time position would be needed.
I mean such a GM would not have to find every cheater out there, there are plenty players out there who /report people and all the GM has to do is be invisible and observe long enough to make a decision. Alone knowing that a GM is monitoring the server will be enough to discourage most bad behavior or botting. The problem is not if it is possible, but that if Daybreak should offer such a service, they would put themselves in a bad light with all the other servers that aren't getting this kind of service.

A thought experiment: They make a GM monitored server, and it cost 5$ more a month - Would you pay ? I bet a lot of people would.
Lets say over a 1 year period, an average of 1000 players are subbed every month, that is 5000$ .. enough to pay the salary of a GM maybe ?
And I mean (as much as I really dislike p1999 as a reference for anything good) they have no problems with people breaking their rules, and I am pretty sure there is not one person "working" full time to make that happen.

Personally, The box haters are hating on the wrong thing.. they think boxing is what breaks their game, but it is really krono that is .. without krono 95% of ALL boxers would be gone and the boxing "problem" would be like it has been in the past - A NON issue. However, I think if you box haters want a completely box free server, you should have the right to get that... there should be servers with rulesets for everyone.

At the end of the day, there are two possible mindsets in EQ - either I take anything I want, or I can share with other people. Neither mentality is exclusive to either boxers or single-account players, and any "solutions" aimed at either population mistake the actual cause.

Fortunately, your ridiculous ideas will never see the light of day.

I do not think that truebox is a failure. I think it is solid server design feature.

I think the failure is in the policing of the rule set by those running the game.

If you're going to have rules for a server, then you should police those rules accordingly. Showing up a day later AFTER many people have reported someone for potentially botting, and simply saying "hey are you there" is in my opinion a failure to enforce the rules set forth on the server.

There should be GMs that their whole job is to go around the world to known hot spots and actively look for people breaking the rules. Nobody should have to report someone to get them investigated.

Any GM that doesn't know the handful of hot spot botter locations for each expansion and actively go checking in on these locations on a regular basis should be educated on the game and given instruction to do so.

It is not hard to tell if someone is automating game play.

1. DO NOT say anything.
2. DO NOT send a tell.
3. DO NOT be visible.
4. DO NOT do anything that can be seen as a trigger for a bot to notify the owner that they are being interacted with by a GM.
5. Teleport the player to another location in the same zone
6. spawn a mob every so often
7. observe them trying to attack it
8. Despawn the mob before they kill it
9. Do this for a few minutes, and see if they ever say or do anything other than target mob and attack/send pet.

While I mostly agree - the line gets blurry when folks claim to be listening to audio triggers and just reflexively pushing buttons while watching Netflix. The claim is that they're not watching the screen and thus can't respond in a timely manner to tells and anomalies in their camp, but they are physically at the keyboard. In reality, we know they have an AHK script automating their characters while watching , but it's quite difficult to prove.

I believe DBG allows the "wild wild west" attitude to help players deal with these sorts of things, but it's really not that effective. For instance, I can snipe a particular boxer's Ice Giants for about 2-3 spawns until he/she notices and then I have no possible chance of out-dps'ing a group of 4 mages with my single character. So he/she can actively play for a few cycles, starve me out of exp/loot, and I'll probably leave because active play time is more valuable than semi-afk time.

It's a tough thing - but there doesn't seem to be a simple solution. Many of the boxers can circumvent the rules by pleading ignorance and/or setting up really primitive triggers to let them know something odd is happening and to come back to the keyboard. Additionally, many of them probably are at the keyboard, just not actively playing the game and can easily respond to GM tells or whatever weird stuff they want to do.

Just bind yourself at the IG fort in Everfrost, and every time you die, pick off a couple giants before heading back to whatever you're doing. It's oddly satisfying.

On Manglar the AC island is camped almost 24/7 by Qaden and his bot army, both picks with Felan in the other pick. It is so obvious he is not true boxing it , he has been reported many times with no action. So this product I paid for was falsely advertised.

Q: How is this server different from other Progression Servers?

Mangler is a “True Box Server” like Coirnav. On a True Box Server, each player will only be able to play on one EverQuest account from each one of their computers.

So why shouldn't I get my money back? I can and so can you if you paid by Visa or Master card you can have your money refunded by the credit card company by up to 4 months. First ask for a refund from Day Break, they will refuse then fill out a fraud forum for visa stating you did not get what you paid for from Day Break, what was advertised and you will get your full refund, which includes all the Kronos you may have bought as well.

You don't have any rights. You do have the choice to buy the service or not. That's it.

The company exists to make money and they do rulesets that they think will be profitable. Anything beyond that is wishful thinking.

If there's enough of an outcry, they make some changes and make a large portion of the people happy. It's happened in the past, most recently with the initial rulesets of Selo/Mangler.

At this point, there's not enough of an outcry for a no boxes possible server, OR they've decided it's not worth the extra cost, or most likely a combination of the two.

This, the vocal MINORITY on the forums may be furious, a few may quit, but all in all DBG has the server numbers...

If they look and see hey, like 40/4000 people unsubbed, and attribute maybe 25% of that because of boxers that is 10 accounts, they probably dont care. I bet that is the case here, a few vocal people flood the forums but the other 99.9% that dont have anger problems or feel entitled to their "make me my ruleset server" will continue to play.