Selo Truebox

You are probably going to be very disappointed then, the second it goes live it will be just the same as any other live server - I am willing to bet all those extras will be switched off immediately.
I reckon leaving them on causes more problems than they solve & would generate a lot of completely justifiable whining from live servers that have supported the game since the beginning.

It would be nice if the AoC were enabled for all-access accounts on live servers as a QoL feature so they could reasonably be kept on the mature TLP but I just don't see that happening.

If they wanted a pay to play live server maybe Selo would keep its benefits. But I am betting it will either merge or just become another live server. Serious raid guilds would probably not transfer here considering with no free accounts (in that instance) they lose the 10+ accounts they use for farming etc. Also if Selo kept truebox who'd want to play that?

Especially considering nothing says you'll be able to transfer to Selo once it hits live. Server transfer eligibility is not coded by expac, they have to manually flag each combination. With that in mind, even if it did keep everything that makes it special is
1/2 lockouts
Double xp
AoC enabled
Truebox
Something that would entice love players to abandon all their toons, lose free to play access for mules/boxes and have to start over with tradeskills, clickies, chase items, achievements etc?

I’d like to see a TLP dumping ground server where all TLPs merge upon reaching Live era. I’d like to see some of the sever rules stay, but I think you’d have to block transfers to from non-TLP servers. Different TLP rulesets could cause issues, but I’d be ok with all TLPs shifting to a Rizlona ruleset server upon completion. Probably just hopes and dreams though.

Rizlona is basically Live with aoc? I'm not entirely sure but that was my understanding.

Hard to argue against it. If selo is leading the pack as a later generation tlp then its clear truebox is just going to murder any tlp that hits live. Eq this late was simply designed around the idea that the game is to be boxed I believe.

I've said before if Selo hit the final expansion, lost truebox, but kept all of its other benefits it could be used by players to level chars super fast then xfer them to a live server of their choice. If selo keeps their bonuses after the final expansion I don't see many people playing here as it would simply be boring. You can max the expansion in a month.. Then what? So Selo would basically be used as a breading ground for alts and DPG would make money via transfers and (I'd assume) gold status to play on Selo.

I don't know exact unlocks but I believe we will be the first expac to live. (Taken from Zam) We should hit live (the new expac) in March. Phini (currently one expac in front of us) will be live in May. Miragul would be next in September. After that it'd be a year at least before another server would dump on to Selo. Basically it's a cool "welcome a new audience" kind of deal but the time frames are not feasible. What should be done in this case is to go ahead and dump Miragul + Phini to Selo. Or Selo + Miragul to Phini.

I think Selo will hit live and one of 2 things will happen. It will be converted to a live server with live server rules. OR it will continue to exist how it is but be in the current expansion for months until the next one. They will take their time deciding Selo's fate because there's not enough people here to care about. But eventually it will be merged or turned into live or whatever. Either way no one will like the decision.

Bottom line if Truebox is not a hard feature to turn off they should go ahead and do it and make the server happy. We know they read these posts. They know we want it turned off. But as I said. There's not enough people here to care about. Enjoy limbo in March.

Only so far as it & live servers don't have Truebox, TLP have AoC, faster respawns & then there are the unlock related restrictions.
e.g. XP will be less than live up until the server unlocks TSS plus gear, trade-skills & quests that must wait on unlocks before completion, Veteran AA etc. etc.

I agree.

It could even easily be argued that Truebox starts to do more harm than good as early as Depths of Darkhollow or even before that, by the time a TLP is hitting live that damage has escalated and simply acts as a disincentive to returning as the populations are far lower & the ability to mitigate the lower population is & has been completely hamstrung by having Truebox for quite some time.
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Were the Truebox feature removed from TLP during DoDH then there is a significant reason to believe that the attrition would be lessened by a lot in later expansions, though it definitely would not prevent most of it.
Certainly the removal of the 1 Client per pc restriction that used to exist on Live servers sometime around DoDH has helped them to retain active players far longer than the Truebox TLP servers have managed, you only have to see how well Ragefire has retained players versus Phinigel to have a very obvious example & that's even with Ragefire having no AoC.

That's a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it's wrong
Much like you would think the developers design raids for guilds that can field up to 54 players but often cannot - they don't do that either.
We might also be given to thinking that the developers know their customers are all becoming old farts & many are even retirees/pensioners and develop the content with that in mind, well not so far they haven't.

Despite the fact that boxing is highly prevalent in group content & that the game has mercenaries neither of those things has been, is or in all likelihood ever will be taken into account when the group & raid game are designed because the developers maybe don't think they need to, perhaps just don't want to or possibly don't actually know how to because it has never been done before and it would be too much work/resource allocation to figure out how to do that well.

The design philosophies of EverQuest are pretty deeply rooted in the game being designed for a set number of real players whether that is group or raid content, the game is so old that it's tools are not up to the task of making the content any other way and it most certainly cannot "scale" in any way to account for variations in the group or raid composition, either you build your group & raid to fit the content or you will have difficulties with it.

Playing through Ring of Scale on a TLP which is fairly similar at this stage to a live server of the time except that it misses a contingent of casuals who mostly don't raid you come to appreciate that the content is absolutely built for a group of 6 real players and absolutely makes no concessions for boxers or mercenary users, similarly the raids are difficult enough that if you do not bring enough players of the right classes you will simply not beat the events.
That's only 2 expansions away from Live and I am seeing none of the design take into account lower numbers of players, boxers or mercenary users, in fact you could almost draw the conclusion that many of the events were expressly built to dissuade boxing & mercenary use in-era.
I'm a fairly solid boxer (without using any 3rd party help to box) and as a 3 box that uses a merc tank with 2 group-geared characters & just 1 Raid geared character the group content kicks the crap out of me, Boxers with a Group geared tank fare somewhat better, Boxers who run with a raid geared tank main fare a lot better, but unless you have 3rd party help so that you can run a 4/5 or 6 box crew and can rely much less on mercs the content is pretty brutal.

Boxing is very sub-optimal, by a lot, it is best suited to be used by players doing content out-of-era, and if they rely on mercs then that pushes the content they can reasonably expect to be able to do back a little further even.

So in RoS for example on Phinigel 4-5 real players for group content (after a month or so of grouping with 6 real players), Raids being 40-48 characters with a few of those being 2-boxers, a few key classes missing though & your raid is in danger of being called off or you have to go do some older content, you can fill some gaps with boxers bringing 2 characters along but you won't have more than a handful of boxers who can manage 2 boxing on a raid well.

Oh I disagree. Anyone who has boxed some of the mid to late expansions knows that the devs were downright punitive toward boxers in how they designed especially some of the group content. Clearly some of it was meant to encourage doing the content with six real people over a six box crew. Thinking especially around VoA and later, doing VoA progression with a six box crew is downright miserable at many points.

Can't comment on boxing 6 people. But so far with 4 real people, 1 boxed shaman, 1 heal merc we haven't had a big problem clearing the expansions of group content. We did require the help of a real cleric in TBM due to some mechanics and the overtune bugs from TBM. Other then that it has not been bad. I would assume some of the missions in EoK would have been hard with a box crew but maybe only 1-2 of them.

Either way if the topic is truebox then whether you can do it or not is irrelevant. Remove truebox and give the people the option to try.

100% this. Whatever they do, someone will complain about it.

We are on the same page I think & both think the group game is built for 6 real players & does not give any consideration towards boxers & merc boxers in particular, and could definitely be considered anti-boxer & anti-merc in some cases at least, though I don;t think it applies in all content there are some real stand outs that say "yes the devs hate people who box or who need to rely on mercs for this mission".

Specific Cases I would point at for that:

VoA - Reclaiming Argath
RoF - Zalikor's Lair
CoTF - The Doomscale Horde
TBM - Defenders of the Faith & both Anashti Missions
RoS - Cactii & Sabretooths in Overthere ignoring merc tanks completely and every single group mission has a very high dps requirement, as a full group of raiders these are not easy until very deep into the expansion god knows how groupers managed these in era.

TBL - not quite there on Phinigel but from what I read & hear Groupers really never got out of the starter zones in significant numbers as the trials were so high in challenge for them as to be all but skipped while they hoped the expansion which followed turned out easier, and boxers - 99% fuggedaboutit, one mission, Fight Fire, is about all they will see & do on repeat for currency. So back to the Full group of raiders required for group content....seems like the trend which started in mid-EoK continues & even ramped up until Tov pared back the stiff challenges a lot.

Reclaiming Argath was one of the ones I was thinking of.

Most missions in these later Eras, at least through EoK have not been overly difficult to box TBH.

Isn't reclaming Argath the one where you can just stand on the ship and have a single character dropping bombs?

The argath mission is easy but it doesn't allow mercs so people who rely on a healer merc need help with it. I suspect this was because they couldn't get mercs to work with the airship rather than a design decision.

I don't think its reasonable to expect to be able to clear all content with a weak 3 box crew. If they tune around such a weak set up nothing would be remotely interesting for any group of actual people. Its also ridiculous to state that you need a full group of raiders for any group content.

You should be able to do some content 3 boxing and make some progress but there should be some harder things too. None of the 105 group content has been particularly difficult outside of the TBM instances which are hitting too hard due to the scaling bug.

As the poster above me states it excludes mercs right off the bat.

The disc you stand on constantly rotates as well as rotating around a path between the towers as the wizards/mages on those towers hurl spells at you.
You get given a gun to attack those mobs on the towers with so Melee aren;t 100% useless, but there are quite a lot of them and you only have a short time being in LoS of any one of them due to all the rotating going on, doing that on 3 screens was really nauseating but trying to box that took me hours the first go as my Bard & Shaman Nukes/D.o.T.'s weren't so great and my Berserker was doing terrible dps with that gun. I guess if you had a proper caster DPS you could do it as one player only needing to be active, but you need decent heals too.

It depends on having a tank.

If you have to rely a Merc tank week one in RoS is an absolute nightmare, my raid geared Level 107 (thanks to experience glyphs) Berserker in almost full EoK raid gear was getting utterly decimated by OT zone trash with my boxed Shaman & 2 Merc healers trying to hold him up thanks to the Cactii & Sabretooths having an ignore merc tanks completely "feature", they check every second it seems & if the tank is a merc is swaps to the next player on hatelist so it seems like a deliberate intent to neuter anyone using merc tanks. At level 110 with some RoS gears I can just about tank the OT trash as a Raid geared Berserker when it ignores Merc tanks but that first week or so was hell.

In Skyfire the Merc Tank fared better was still getting one-rounded at times but until level 110 it was painful.

Overall it felt like RoS was designed purely for 6 raiders in a group to begin with and all at level 110, no ramp-up in zones you come into RoS needing to have levlled to 110 in EoK it felt like, the group missions as a 3 box? forget it even with level 110 a single raid geared main & 2 full conflagrant boxes cannot do it unless maybe the raid geared main is a what? yes a Tank, and one of your boxes is a necro.

So unless your 3 box has a raid geared tank you are going to have a bad time in RoS.

..............................

Back on Topic - all TLP should get Truebox removed once they unlock Depths of Darkhollow & Free to Play enabled once they unlock Veil of Alaris - in my honest opinion.

Agree. Reclaiming Argath and its ilk fortunately died a well-deserved death. Most of the other you mention I just decided aren't worth it for a 5-box in group gear. I took one shot at Fall Foilage (aka Cactii) and never went back. Like Harry Callahan said, "A man's got to know his limitations."

I'm getting along okay in open world zones (minus ToV, of course) but I can't say as I'm happy with the direction the game went in starting with EoK.

This.

Forcing Truebox on the extreme late expansions is nonsensical. By that point in EQ boxing was extremely common place.

Truebox really should be removed at some point. During or after the level 70 slog would make sense. Its closer to the modern game than what came before and populations are usually devastated by the level 70 stretch.

In DoDH most relevant content is instanced and the population is diminished enough that pick up groups are hard to come by. Removing truebox somewhere between DoDH and TSS would do wonders for allowing guilds to survive and continue progressing towards live.

I've seen you saying this for awhile Skuz and to be honest I suspect you aren't a very good boxer. I'm a mediocre at best boxer and have done a lot of the content you talk about casually on live servers in a boxed team before I did TLPs. We have multiple people who casually boxed through all of the group content in VoA, TBM, EoK etc, including the hard missions you mentioned. We have one person who has regularly cleared all of these expansions with 4 characters and I assume 2 mercs when he's in a 6 person dz.

I know some of our boxers have had an easier time at some of the missions you have highlighted as being "too hard to box", than my real static group does. Mainly because most of them you can actually break the encounter and plow through it with extremely high DPS, so if you have a box group with stacked DPS versus a human controlled group that has a Tank / Cleric / Enchanter / 2 "non-meta DPS" classes and a random sixth utility class (which basically describes my static crew), you genuinely do like 1/3rd the DPS of someone's box crew stacked with the right mains and aDPS.