What is the chance they actually substantially change Tormax?

Definitely don't think chances are high for a drastic makeover.

simple things like bonus loot, faster exp, and allowing boxing would give people who don't enjoy random or free trade a viable alternative.

Either way this will be up there with Yelinak as the least popular Phinny clone to date. Each one is subsequently less enjoyable then the last.

If they ever want the traditional TLP to be popular again they need to hold back on them until like 2034.

They must have data points proving they raked in just an obscene amount of krono revenue from permanently low pop yelinak in order to just keep spitting out these dead servers.

I never paid krono for my gear back when I was raiding on Mischief and I had BIS.

AE PLing exists on every server, even Oakwynd where it is far more difficult to accomplish

Huh? Tell me you never played on Mischief without telling me you never played on Mischief. No one is out there locking down all the good camps and forcing people to buy gear from them. That is not at all how a random loot server works.

Again this reads like someone's assumptions of how it would play out, except they are not how it actually played out.

How it actually plays out

1.) Less toxicity because no one really cares about getting Camp A because Camps C, D, E, and F all drop the same gear.

2.) Plenty of gear to go around. You don't need to buy gear because enough of it actually drops on raids.

3.) Swapping mains when you are burnt out for a fresh start is easy, meaning people stick around longer.

4.) Returning after you do take a break is a breeze, meaning people don't actually quit forever and then feel like they will never be able to catch up and are forced to roll on the newest server. They can go back to Mischief and get caught back up easily, and that is what they do.

5.) Gearing up alts is easy, meaning more people are out there leveling and playing the game outside of raids.

The formula works, Mischief never would have made it to HoT with an amazing population if it didn't. I don't even think this server will have a big impact on the Mischief population. I am the only person in my guild who will be trying it. Everyone else wants to stick around and keep moving forward.

Heck, even I am going to keep my character on Mischief topped off on levels moving forward, because I give my friend group till Velious before they all bail and then I will likely go back to Mischief. Beastlords are in a really nice spot on Mischief.

That makes no sense. FT makes the content worthwhile because you can obtain additional items.

It makes perfect sense. If those items were desired, people would go there. FT wouldn't change that. This isn't quantum physics. It's common sense.

As much hype as they put on the 25th anniversary, you'd think they could do better than a copy/paste. I've been thinking recently that it might be time for a regime change at DayPaw. It's almost as if their collect try hards are broken.

It's been time for that for years. It's a miracle the current regime is still operational.

What Larsen is saying, you basically are running a showboat server. The poor will collect cans, the rich will ask their dad if they can, etc.

All to create a showboat.

Why not sell a reagent that if you consume it, equips you with era X bis + epic, but just for 10 minutes?

I would walk around naked all day except for raids. I'd pay direct. I have cash. Cut out the farmers. DPG? Sounds sweet, no? People will still farm and such. Just do the maths and figure out a price that is a bit more than farmer-bought gear.

This is classic line building in business. This is how you make more money on a FT server.

Except that isn't how it actually works.

Loot is so plentiful that no one needs to pay for it.

There are no havenots on Mischief, everyone can get what they want, just by playing the game. No Krono needed to get BIS gear.

Anti-Free trade folks always paint this picture that everyone just buys loot from a handful of people and strut around pretending they earned it. What actually happens is that everyone can get loot from raids and no one needs to spend krono or plat on it if they don't wish to. No one cares what someone else is wearing or how they obtained it.

Mischief loot servers are actually the easiest servers to play as 100% found loot only. I plan on doing that on Teek.

Honestly if they kept everything the same and just removed Truebox entirely I'd play Tormax. But I think that's as much of a "drastic change" as a complete overhaul these days as they seem to so married to the concept of Truebox that they won't consider any other option.

I would argue Free Trade is a huge windfall to Daybreak...

People buying an item rather than farm it themself means more krono sales...

So if the point is to make money...I would think most TLP's would be FT going forward...

If they made servers relaxed on launch 3 per PC they would get more subscriptions. Why they care about true box through OoW makes zero sense.

I actually liked Heirloom on Oakwynd...but I can see the allure of free trade...the number of items I leave on corpses because I have no need to loot it but could have sold it....in a game where the economy is a HUGE part of the game.

Yeah, I'm afraid that they are. You know, playing on Coirnav and having 3 laptops and a desktop in the Texas summer had my room running hot and I was like "WTF am I even doing this for?" I enjoy boxing and it's nice being able to fit spots that might be needed for offnight raids, or fill group slots.

Played on Rizlona and swore I'd never touch a truebox server again. I'm sure I'm not alone in that category too.

What I'd love to see is they just copy/paste Teek to Tormax. That way, when populations dip, they could just have a plan to merge once they relax truebox on the other server. It solves so much:

Boom lower queue on Teek that is going to drive a lot of players away.
Boom neither server dies a slow, tragic, painful death
Boom they've gotten interest from a larger segment of the population that might not play TLP otherwise

But I'm afraid the misguided hate for people that enjoy boxing (which is a different subject entirely from the mage bots that sit on named spawns...) has solidified True-box as their standard go-to. And it's quite sad too, random loot solves a lot of the mage botting problem.

This is what I don't understand. I feel like I'm made to be the minority as someone who just wants to 6-12box and play the game as a solo adventure and socialize with friends when it's time to raid. People talk boing and immediately start bringing up these giant armies who steal camps and roll over people and blah blah blah. I like to box, I'm not a rude person, and I leave a camp alone if it's taken.

I can't imagine I'm not the only person who plays the game with a similar mindset.

The more I read the threads posted in the last few days, the more I doubt Tormax will get changed. Folks can't even decide what they want it changed to. Remove Truebox, add FTE, add Mischief loot, Make an Oakwynd clone. Ya'll are all over the place and without a single strong push for an idea I doubt DBG will listen.

You sound like a lovely person, and I have no desire to play on a server filled with people just like you. Boxing servers don't have the same community feel for me. It feels like they devolve into 90% of players just boxing their own little group and playing as a solo adventurer and it detracts a great deal from what makes an EQ community shine. Yeah, you can chat in guild and folks raid together, but for everything else everyone plays by themselves. Boxing and non boxing communities don't mix, they just don't. They should never be pushed onto a server together.

If it's not changed , that is fine.

I know about 30 people that all box , that probably won't be playing the servers or even the game until the next FTE server.

This is xxx TLP , it's not like this is something new. I know a lot of people do not want to rehash a toxic server environment and enjoyed FTE.

I know speaking for myself , it was enjoyable to do zones that where train fests before FTE. Mistmoore castle being a prime example.

There are a lot of other options besides EQ.

Nope, I played on Rizlona from classic until PoR. There was maybe two instances where my guild, or group had any type of negative experience with other boxeres. One of those was a raid mob in OW, over Tormax, amusingly enough. Someone asked us to wait on tormax so they could turn in a quest item, and we did. As it turns out, they just needed time to get more of their raid force. They out dpsed us, and got the kill. It was frustrating but also, who cares?

Rizlona was the low drama of the two servers. In fact, a lot of people came to Rizlona when they got their warnings on Aradune for boxing (a lot of times, they weren't... allegedly).

So, I say all of that to say, boxers aren't the issue. It's a specific type of boxer. But the average person on these forums see a boxer and equate that to the bad behavior. So, we get truebox, which clearly hasn't fixed the issues.

It reminds me of changes they made to pets and HT. DZs were the solution, but now we have 45 minute fights in Vex Thal and ToV because of a knee-jerk reaction that had a much simplier solution.

I can see this point of view. I think there's more to it. The boxing I've done on other TLPs were generally 3 chars, maybe 4. I always had open spots for someone and would kick a box if someone wanted to join.

When we start talking about people boxing more. I can see how those playstyles could be considered incompatible.

Playing with a boxer isn't fun. Typically they are too busy managing their team to engage with anyone else in the group, especially if they are boxing more than one other character. It's like playing with a group full of mercs who just auto kill for you. Very boring.

Even if you had nothing but benevolent boxers the two communities still don't mesh. Allowing for unrestricted boxing makes finding people to group with much harder, which encourages more people to box, which makes groups harder to find, it's a vicious cycle that ends up with the singleton players either leaving the server or resorting to boxing their own teams.

Yeah, there are plenty of boxers out there who wouldn't be grouping with people anyway, or the opposite, they are happy to drop a box for someone. But no singleton player wants their main grouping opportunity to be asking a boxer friend to drop a box, might as well just pay for a PL at that point. It isn't about bad actors, I think most boxers are decent folks just trying to play the game. It's just that unrestricted boxing breaks down the community ties that being dependent on other people builds up on a server.

Truebox, for all it's flaws, does a better job at maintaining a strong, interconnected, community, in my opinion, and I won't play on a boxing server again. I don't have anything against there being a boxing server, truebox should stay the standard though.

I will just say, we can agree to disagree. I agree that extreme boxing is not compatible and truebox has it's place in preventing it. However, boxing 2 or 3 chars has been part of EQ forever and I'd say is something that is helpful and beneficial.

Having played a cleric boxer on almost any server that I've played on, I can't tell you the amount of times that I've had to play my cleric to get a raid or group started, sometimes at the expense of my main. On Coirnav, my guild split DZs and would 100% not have been successful without the cleric boxes that tagged along. That would have meant people sitting around instead of raiding. True community building there, I'd say.

If you've ever been a part of a group that got started because someone brought along a healer box or a raid that a cleric box helped get rolling, then I think you may want to reconsider some of the salt towards those folks. If you haven't, then we are somehow playing very different games and I am in actual shock that you've managed to get a completely different experience than I have from EQ. Or maybe you just don't stick long enough with TLPs to have run into those issues?