New November Server

Im the same boat. I was pumped for this when it was first announced but after some thought, I too will be passing if it's a true box server. Just don't feel like dealing with 3-4 xpacs from now the amount of people LFG has dwindled and I have to pull some max 3 box crew out that work 10times as hard just to progress. But at the sametime I won't be boxing during House of Thule at all because I am sure there will be plenty of groups to join. But truebox server ends it for me. That will end my EQ career unless some huge turn of events.

Pantheon just tried to raise more money by releasing really overpriced crappy merchandise, it was so bad they took the store down after being called out on it. I wouldn't put much stock in them at this point.

I'm looking forward to this new server, but only if it's NOT true box
For all the obvious reasons people have already pointed out.

No to Truebox on new server... Yes to Wood Elf Beastlord and Froglok Monk!!

What was the merch?!

Getting impatient!

If the new server is truebox I will not play, otherwise I would give it a fair shot.

When phinny was announced they discussed the intent of changes being made. Instances were meant to give broad access so casuals COULD kill naggy. Truebox was intended to create a social atmosphere so that people would form groups with other human beings instead of loner box play. Shutting down hackers was not the stated goal of truebox and it turns out was just a consequence of some behind the scenes negotiations/threats/whatever between developers of eq and developer of the main hack.

Now in practice, truebox servers still had a ton of antisocial degenerates who play in a solo fashion without consideration for others (both rmt and hardcore raiders here) + people screaming bloody murder at the idea of needing to group with the unwashed pleb masses... but the goal at least was to not have it.

So with an 85 server and truebox the simple question isn't if they want hacks or not, of course they don't, and I suspect they could quite easily just gut the one-pc aspect of truebox at its core and leave the dirty remains the anti-scripting scraps. The problem is... do they (and do we) want that? A server that allows folks to just play their own group is a server that won't have a healthy lfg/social atmosphere outside of guilds.

It sounds like this is precisely what many if you want. A server to play by yourself, not NEED anyone else to group and only do it if you feel like, and ignore the community. I predict the lifespan there would be short lived, but I hope you get the chance at it.

Except that crap you say people hate is exactly what people like about Pantheon. What people who are interested in playing Pantheon want is for death to be meaningful and a fate to be avoided it all cost. They want cooperative team play. They want travel to feel meaningful and have significance. That is exactly the people that Brad is marketing the game to. He isn't even trying to be a game for everyone and that is a good thing but trying to be a game for everyone is exactly why all the modern MMOs keep failing one after another.

The reality is you can't be everything to everyone. You can't make a game feel cooperative, if every character can solo effectively. You can't make the travel feel meaningful if you have portals every 5 feet. You can't balance every class against each other for PvP if you want every class to feel unique for PvE. Trying to do this is what results in a mediocre game that no one likes and that has been what we have been seeing over and over again since WoW.

Also you have to define successful. Back in the day, 200k subscribers was considered a success. Today, people don't feel a game is successful unless it has millions. The reality is a game can be really be successful with only a few hundred thousand subscribers, just look at Eve Online. That game, at its peak had about 350k subscribers but generally has 200-250k active subscribers and they push out major content releases at least twice a year to this day. That is all Pantheon needs, a strong core of players, and if they get it, then it will be successful.

At some point you have to face the reality that you cannot do it all. The devs here are very honest about their limitations, eg necro dot revamp taking more time than they have. They realize their team and budgets are only so big, and make judgment calls on what can and especially can't be done.

Pantheon is going to flop because it will not do this.

They need to buckle down and just produce something that works. Maybe only a few classes at start. Maybe flesh out a decent level progression of zones. Come back and add more later. Whatever. Instead, Brad just keeps bellowing out lofty ideas and they sell hopium to the poor saps who haven't yet figured out that this company doesn't have the team or the funds to make good on it all. How many times do you have to watch the same thing repeated and nothing new, no cohh in a different zone or anything of the sort, before waking up to the reality: they've been at it over a decade and are not even close.

Pantheon isn't gonna kill eq.

See what you describe is exactly the environment I wouldn't play on, where everyone just solos. If I wanted that I can easily jump on the Classic WoW server or pick up one of the umpteen more modern MMOs that allow for you to solo everything. Honestly I don't get why people want to play a game designed to require grouping, solo, but seems the majority do for whatever reason.

That only works if the server has a healthy population. The population of a newly released tlp server still has only a fraction of a modern mmo server. Tlp server populations tend to die off dramatically after the first four expansions and a new one is released. I understand the concept of true box, but they keep it active on the servers for way longer than it needs to be. Most small raiding guilds rely heavily on boxing just to be able to raid, let alone grouping.

I hope it is true box. All the multi/mega boxers on live ruin the game for me. It's one of the reasons I don't play on live servers. It would be great to have one modern server where community/grouping is actually important, you know, like the game is supposed to be.

Dude, everyone complains about all the mega-ultra-multi-boxers on Truebox and you post this? Just no to Truebox, it will ruin the server before it starts. TRUEBOX DID NOT WORK! Everyone had to buy six laptops.

And no one is going to be grouping. Why would anyone want to listen to whiners, snowflakes, and otherwise other idiots that get offended when they wake up in the morning when you can grab a merc?

I try to be in good humor about these things. I have spoken out often enough against the problems with truebox & bots. It's just the way things are, bots and cheaters, people with fragile egos coming late to the party who use RMT to catch up, Kronos necessary to DB's bottom line, it is an unsolvable problem.

I wouldn't say truebox is a complete failure. It did demonstrate a lot of us like a living interactive world and cooperative play. As far as solving the downside, i come up empty. The mess with RMT has always been looked down upon by the largest part of the game world population. Mangler/truebox did work as it brought the best group of people together on the server I have ever seen. The down side is as a living server with lots of good people making play fun and interesting, it also attracted an element that was contrary to everything the server was supposed to be about. RMT has pretty much been around since day one, before Krono market anyway. Seems like Kronos are a necessary if evil part of the bottom line to keeping the game alive.

This is sad but true. What is even more sad is that even with all the Whiners, snowflake and other other idiots, still are more fun to group with than playing solo, molo or boxing 6 toons to avoid all that.

Just maybe 3 days on my then 45 Shaman I managed to pull together a completely lopsided and unbalanced group of players, none of which were a tank and I was the only healer. Then the puller who was a monk and could easily split singles, can't figure out their head from a whole in the ground and keeps pulling multiples who without someone taunting, immediately aggroed me the second I tossed out a heal. We somehow kept everything moving for quite some time until the Monk brought 5 at once and that is where things went down hill. 4 broke off and aggroed me and somehow, some way, I managed to kite them around in a small space without aggroing additional Mobs, while keeping the party healed. Twice I was reduced to 3% health and twice I somehow managed to pull out a self-heal at the brink of death and after what seemed like 20 minutes of barely suppressed panic, we manged to kill all 5 mobs without losing a single person. At the end of this, I had a huge grin on my face because it was the most fun I had, had in weeks and is now yet another memorable event I am sure I will talk about with my MMO buddies, years down the road.

However the story doesn't stop there. Despite the group starting off as whiners, snowflakes and other idiots, myself probably included in that somewhere, we stopped after that pull, chatted, got ourselves organized and came up with a plan. From that point forward, we made this crazy, lopsided group work and ended up with a solid and enjoyable 3+ hours of leveling and looting pleasure. Basically we figured out how to work together and suddenly the fact we were all whining, idiotic snowflakes didn't matter any more.

My point is, when you avoid interacting with people, you get none of these experiences. Hell I can only remember one really memorable event from almost 3 years in WoW and ironically that one event was an event in which I was grouped. The rest is just a blur. But when I look back to my time playing, EQ, I could probably fill a book with stories many of which will include Whiners, Snowflakes and idiots, myself included.

There are numerous benefits to having 6-boxers on a server, even if these individuals don't create new grouping opportunities. For one, they introduce new loot into the market, creating more supply and driving down prices. Some of them give away rotting gear, helping to gear up those who are waiting around for a group to form.

In HoT era and beyond, a lot of EQ comes down to doing quests/missions/progression or old fights. Often times you can't find 5 friends willing to go back and spend an evening running through Anguish for your Epic 2.0. A six boxer can bring their team to complete this content for you without the need to try to arrange the schedules of 6 different people to do old content. This dynamic is even more pronounced as you get closer to live with things such as Essence of the Dragon EoK progression or key flagging for Veeshan's Peak in Ring of Scale.

For those of you who haven't played in the more modern era of EQ, it is a very different world. In that world, the boxers are a boost to the server on nearly every dimension.

The experience you described is not one that is fun for me. I'm happy I don't have those experiences. You are taking your own personal definition of fun and assuming that everyone else enjoys the same thing, which is definitely not the case.

Playing with other people does not require you to be in the same group. One can still be social without needing to be in the same group. This is especially true with the ubiquity of voice communication. Thank goodness we're not limited to 1999 technology...

In my opinion:

• Grouping in EQ is usually the most fun for tanks. They get to strategize, pull, tank and kill.
• Grouping in EQ is sometimes fun for pullers and crowd control, but only if the tank doesn't do the pulling or can't handle the mobs.
• Grouping in EQ is mindless button spamming and staying out of the way for most DPS classes.
• Grouping in EQ is either mindlessly boring OR quite stressful for the team's pooper scooper (healer).

For me, that means that 4-5 out of every 6 players are really not able to experience the best joys of the game. Boxing (and mercs, which are just simple boxes) let's everybody experience all the roles.

Heroic Chars and mercs also help everybody have a chance to experience everything. For at least the duration of the first expansion, people will be able to start a new toon and be able to play with everybody else immediately, without ANY need to grind & level first. People will get to experiment with new classes without the extreme time investment. I'm excited!