What is the point of truebox?

That's on you, not them. Noone is making you run your own group/raid/whatever. Shocking I know.

I thought Truebox was just to act as a bit of a brake back when mass mage armies were pissing off a lot of non box players.

It is a brake on that. I mean, if you remove truebox I know I'll be running at least 12 more toons than I do now. (1 bard + 5 mages) x 2.

Imagine the ranger armies in PoP.

Early on? To prevent the massive amount of box armies that would exist and clog the servers/zones/picks/etc.

Later on? I have no clue other than they don't care about the server at that point.

Fair point. It is something that could be removed say, 1 month after the next TLP releases. The issue is, I don't know if they have the ability to change truebox to non truebox other than with server merges and such.

If you're not able to understand why a normal MMO player would not want to feel forced to create that ridiculous NASA Mission Control setup to be on a level playing field then there is nothing I can say to persuade you. It should be common sense.

This nonsense is unique to really old MMOs like EQ. Boxing 6+ characters in a 22 year old game seems like a symptom of some kind of mania. It drives normal players away, which is something this game should be avoiding.

The overwhelming preference to truebox over non-truebox is proof that most people just want to play and enjoy 1 character. The vocal boxer minority on these forums notwithstanding.

Furthermore, Rivervale must be destroyed.

They removed truebox on tlps that reached live before they merged them. At the time it removed AoC and any other perks (heroic toons, fast Xp, etc) but since live has AoC now there should be no difference if they were to remove it at say tss when servers match live Xp anyways. No clue if truebox removal would interfere with expac unlocks but seems counter intuitive that it would.

Selo brought this up a lot, and the diehards there mostly stand by it: Around DoN truebox should come off of TLP's since the game was largely designed with boxing in mind by this point in addition to the brutal player attrition that feeds on itself in a feedback loop that hurts the server.

God help us if they make a server without Truebox.

Its bad enough we already got the 6+ box groups with Truebox. Expect everybody and they momma to 6+ box

Its pretty clear that many folks in this thread didn't play on Ragefire. Truebox was implemented after Ragefire/Lockjaw to address that mass boxing that existed in early expansions there. Fear/hate/etc were pretty much perma-camped by the infamous "mage armies" of 36-72 mages running from a single PC that just evaporated anything that spawned. Rizlona worked out since it was known from the start that the server was designed as such with this type of boxer in mind.

That said, I agree that removing the truebox restriction after a certain point is not a bad thing at all. I'd say even as early as Gates or OOW.

Ragefire didn't have instances or Aocs, hence truebox. Does it really matter anymore on a new TLP if it's truebox and the 18 boxer just cheats around it?

You don't even need to VM to get around it anymore or more than a single PC.
Trust me I hate the folks who box more than 6 because it's all highly automated anyhow. But with instances and AoCs and loot rules like on mischief it doesn't even matter anymore.

The real issue was and always is the company running these TLPs just doesn't enforce against any type of cheating period until it's way to late and the damage is already done.

Actually, Ragefire/Lockjaw is where instanced zones started. It was early on during Classic, as I recall moving to a camp spot in Lower Guk's base pick that had 50+ people in it, and then doing a /pickzone to zone over to that camp spot we didn't have to clear to. Then they changed it so /pickz would always put you at the succor spot of the zone.

Funny, it wasn't a disaster for Rizlona.

Servers have a significant network effect that pulls people to them regardless of the ruleset/boxing rules. Many people who went to aradune went there for reasons unrelated to the boxing rules because its where the people/their friends/their guild was going. You can't really look at the distribution of players between those two servers and say that it functions as a referendum on boxing - it probably has very little to do with it.

That said I agree with the premise of the thread. Truebox rules are another one of those poorly enforced aspects of TLPs that allow people who break the TOS to enjoy a better more seamless experience of the game/boxing than people that play to the letter of the law. The fact that you could have a very powerful PC capable of running multiple VMs but this isn't permitted, but owning 12 $100 laptops knitted together with KVM software and multi-client monitors is acceptable is just beyond any rational explanation. All it really serves to do is make the game an incredibly expensive, glitchy hobby for people who want to run their own boxed groups legitimately while conveying a huge advantage to people who break the rules.

They should either relax the specific rules they have in place against the use of VMs, or eliminate truebox entirely, because as of now it really only functions to degrade the experience of players who follow the rules.

They have mass banned people for using VMs in the past and there are ways for them to detect the use of different VM software while playing the game. Here again, this is another really arbitrary line for them to enforce, VMs offer little advantage over separate hardware other than being much cheaper to maintain/manage and being way less environmentally wasteful/costly.

I think you may underestimate the number of boxers compared to non-boxers

... They did.

The world didn't end.

Play the next TLP and count how many people are playing 1 char vs how many are boxing.

It's self-evident.

You've conflated instances with pick zones. Instances are private. Whoever creates them controls who is added to them. Pick zones are additional copies of open world zones, and anyone can zone into them. Instances for early era raid content on TLP servers started with Phinigel.

Of our 60 active mains 16 don't multibox. Our rules aren't particularly box friendly (mains trump boxes on loot rights, raid attendance priority, keying, etc). Of course we're past PoP so these are also the players who are actually going to stick around.

I think true box is a terrible idea.
There always was people boxing in each and every Eq era.
They should soften the rule, to limit the number of clients you can run to 2 or 3.