Selo Truebox

Casual player on a dead server is having casual problems. Shocking. You planned your characters poorly for late game Everquest knowing the ruleset of the server you picked. If you really want to play by yourself and can't afford more computers/accounts you should have moved to a live server months ago.

DW should close this thread because this company doesn't care about Selo and they certainly don't care about your 25 person euro guild struggling through content on Phinny.

Your best bet is to stop wasting your time crying about how garbage your tank merc is and replace one of your characters with a tank or pet class. Truebox is a poorly coded nightmare that gets worse in every era after PoP but they clearly have no intention of fixing it.

Totally agree. For me, it is more about "Do I have to do this? What will happen if I don't?" I decided RoS progression didn't matter for my group so rather than beat my head against the wall I simply opted not to do it. Also, I am keeping 8 characters going so I have to do everything at least twice. I opted not to do EOK progression also, and that bit me in the because of the green sarnak AE blockers. Those AEs persist into RoS which is something I did not know while we were in EoK.

FWIW my main group is SK, shaman, monk, bard, mage with a cleric merc.

Can we get a dislike button?

He runs warrior main, then some combo of shm, necro, rng, brd depending on how many laptops he has set up at the time.

Out of curiosity if truebox was magically lifted. How do you guys feel about silver accounts on Selo? This is something I have no experience with so I don't know how good/bad it is. But assuming we can multi-box on one PC it seems cool to have another account up for mules and such.

My thoughts are at the very least it would bring more bazaar mules that are up all the time. Unless you cant bazaar on silver.

Thing is I also use the bard or shaman on our raids from time to time to help gap-fill but the warrior would be more or less useless (if you play a tank on raids it really should be a main) so it's not entirely selfish reasons why I am self-restricted as there are other extenuating reasons, my other option would be swap mains to a tank but the whole reason I am here on Phinny was to play as a zerker through the content i missed after I quit in 2008. When I had a job I ran 5 (Warrior & Cleric on their own accounts), but something has to give when your budget can't stretch that far.

I'm all for it. The less restrictive it is to be on the server, the better imo.


Right, I suspected as much. Until they fix mercs (lmao), really your options are limited. On Selo, someone in your position I would just say to ask for a tank to set a time for help, or offer to help myself.

Think you need a gold account to have a bazaar trader. I doubt they would allow FTP accounts to play on a TLP until we hit the expansions that have to be purchased then maybe they would consider it.

TLP require all-access to even log into them, Once Selo hits live server status is should have Truebox removed & F2P enabled.

The Thread really is calling for the older TLP, perhaps even all TLP to have Truebox removed much earlier, Live servers removed the one client per pc restriction in DoDH so that's when I would ;ike to see it removed from TLP servers.

Free to Play was introduced on live during 2012 during Veil of Alaris, I think enabling F2P on TLP once they reach VoA also has a lot of merit but I'm not going to die on that hill if they say no F2P until the TLP reach live.

I think all of us on Selo and Phinny (and probably Miragul although I hear from them less), know that nothing is getting changed for us before we finish up our march to live. At this point it's more just that for the health of future "later era" TLPs, the team really needs to consider that Truebox has serious flaws.

MOTM is an imperfect solution to the obvious problem of trying to deliver an experience that feels like old school EverQuest in a game client and code base that cannot 100% deliver old school EverQuest in a trivial fashion. I think MOTM mostly works pretty well at that, I could nitpick some aspects of it but it's mostly getting the job done. I think Truebox kind of falls into that same concept, except unlike MOTM which is not present on mobs after Planes of Power, the current design of Truebox is that a server is expected to maintain it essentially forever. This is in contravention to how EQ was actually played in these eras. Boxing had become "quite common" by Planes of Power even in EQ's original timeline, albeit certainly nothing like modern times. But by the mid-2000s which is the level 70-75 era of EQ expansions boxing really was very very common.

We can argue about whether the game was designed around boxing or not, but the reality is someone retreading these grounds on a Truebox server in the late 2010s-2020s is playing a very artificial and constrained version of the game that players who did this originally did not play. On top of that I think Truebox has significant technical issues when the game's natural increase in abilities arises and when people start using multibinds more. I have people in my guild who have to do all kinds of weird things to adhere to Truebox rules without "Trueboxing" themselves (part of the Truebox code's feature set is that it will disconnect all of your clients if there's too many simultaneous commands coming from too many clients.) We have people in my guild who actually are doing Truebox fully legitimate, meaning multiple physical numpads and laptops, and rapidly pressing keys--and getting mass disconnected for it. They have had to alter their playstyles and other things to continue boxing into modern eras because of ability bloat and such. This to me is just a strong indication that while Truebox is probably an acceptable bandage for early EQ, as it stands now it isn't good for later era EQ.

No one wants to maintain MOTM all the way to live, so it's weird to me we seem to think Truebox should be maintained all the way to live. I'll note that the same reasons for MOTM existing continue to exist past Planes of Power, in the level 65-100 expansions I can 100% gaurantee you all the player power changes over the years have made player DPS massively, massively higher in those eras than they ever were when guilds beat that content the first time in era. Why not put some level of MOTM on all those expansions to "adjust" for that? The answer is that just wouldn't be a good idea, it would make these servers less enjoyable and more tedious, very similar to keeping Truebox through these same eras.

Early EQ is a LOT easier for the reasons you said. All the changes have made DPS in earlier EQ way higher then it was originally. As I went through content with CI I kept telling Rasper that it seemed so much easier. Even "guild killers" like Brath and RT we beat in a few go's. MoTM seems like a good idea to start as it prevents people from roflstomping their way through current content. But the time frame for removing MotM is absurd. I argued this point when we had MotM on Selo. By the time MotM is removed all the gear is 100% worthless other then clicks. If it was removed earlier then some people could still get some benefit out of the items.

The same could be said about Truebox and F2P. This whole post pretty much covers the fact that by the time these things come into play its to late to be of much use. By removing Truebox in DoDh there would probably be an influx of box accounts therefor more subs, more people on the server. Allowing silvers in the VoA era may keep people playing therefor extending subs and keeping the server healthy. But all of this apparently falls on deaf ears.

I'm sure our assumption of nothing changing until we hit live is accurate. If they read through this post and change a future TLP to allow Truebox at some point before live, you're welcome. If they don't. Sucks for you.

Multibinds with a lot of abilities on multiple characters is basically an instant Truebox disconnect. I'm one of the aforementioned people, I have 5 numpads lined up side by side to form a sort of psuedo keyboard, where each "region" (which is actually a physical numpad) controls a different character.

My experience with that tells me that Truebox must take into account how many abilities are being activated at once, because if I isolate myself down to just two characters, I started being able to reliably Truebox myself as soon as I moved from spamming a single spell on my cleric, to using a multibind that spams 5 spells. I had similiar problems when I tried to move my DPS boxes from a single button that had an ingame macro that fired off 5 abilities, to a multibind that fired off 5 abilities.

With my setup, it's very easy to spam a multibind on 4-5 characters at once (basically spread my fingers out over 2-3 numpads, and just hammer each key), but actually doing so will instantly Truebox disconnect you unless you add some pretty severe work arounds, or just give up on having some characters be very useful, and let them be mostly just auto attack/melody AFK bots.

MotM on UF content would be awesome.

Also I was able to 4box Fell Foliage on test at 106 with war/sham/bard/ber. I just switched to and killed the adds til the boss was at 25% then killed him. Berserker died at 5% when i muscle-memoried dicho without checking if he had the debuff, otherwise it was pretty smooth.

There is also some truebox mojo where it basically remembers how often and recently you trueboxed yourself... i.e. if you don't lay off it gets worse and faster.

Its all part of the mystery really, but just another reason why literally nobody would join selo (read... any future tlp in late EQ with truebox) given the other options.

If there's content I'd need 3 cleric mercs on, I quit.

It's the keypresses, not the abilities. You can spam the same key with a hotkey that doesn't fire any abilities and it will still d/c you. EG try making a hotkey that does /gsay to level up language, put it on hotkey 2 on just two characters, and spam both. You will d/c in short order. You generally need to just not press the same button on multiple characters in close proximity.

Really well thought-out post.

This^

Using keybinds was problematic for me, using social macros, while not as efficient as keybinds pretty much reduced disconnects while boxing to almost zero.

On my setup my shaman has their assist & slow macro on key 1, my bard has an assist and bellow macro on key 2 to further break-up same-key presses and reduce the chances for Truebox disconnects.