Selo Truebox

Looking forward to hearing what you end up deciding on TLP server end-state.

Hopefully the rules stay exactly the same for Selo's with only 2 changes. Its moved to a Sub/F2P model and Truebox is removed. That way we can get some new blood on the server with F2P players and old players swing back to Selo's with Truebox removed.

Halved unlocks will absolutely be removed, 100% unequivocal on that, it would be a crazy stupid advantage for any single live-era server to have that and every single other live server would be justifiably pissed & up in arms over that.

Nothing stopping them from transferring to Selo's. Would be a nice little cash infusion to the company.

Depends on how many would transfer and how many would rage quit and how many would stay quit

I mean.... last expansion many people were complaining about there being too much loot from ToV Raid chests on the forums quite a lot. I am not sure people would even want to raid content twice as often for loot they feel is too common to start with.

The really interesting thing about that is they've done mini "trials" of this in the past.

Personally, I saw it firsthand in an active batphone guild (rip) where even though half lockouts sound good, to EQ addicts (i.e. anyone on Selo and most other longterm players) the task of keeping up with half lockouts is simply bad, and likely unsustainable.

Now, you could say, with impeccable rationality, that you don't have to use them but they are there for those who do. But you're also talking about a community of players that would gladly kill bats for 8 hours on a Saturday afternoon if it got them the best digital pixel. Simply put, half lockouts double burnout.

As far as Selo ruleset, it could make sense that they get half lockouts for old content, and that'd be cool... and then we talk about the effect that would have on Live... Well.... we've said it before and if ANY Live server gets AOC then it will be a very popular server. Now, if a TLP that hits Live does not get f2p that's gonna hurt a lot... so there's that.

The more I look at the churn at burn nature of DBG the more I think TLP's will just become normal Live servers and anything TLP will just be turned off. The other leading option is a standard TLP Live server dumping ground that has the standard TLP things like no f2p, weekly AOC, and whatever else we get. Similar to the dumping ground, they could potentially offer TLP characters that hit live a free transfer to any Live server. Then they don't really need to do any work, but the player isn't Fippy'd off.

It'll be interesting to see if they do anything though, and maybe they just ignore us altogether like Fippy. There aren't many on Selo, but Phinny seems to have about double our population, so cumulatively they should be interested in retaining these players.

The interesting part about just turning off TLP features is that they seem tohave indicated in the request to remove truebox that is just isn't as easy as setting Truebox=False and calling it a day. It's entirely possible the easiest way to make a TLP a live Server would be to server transfer people to a Live server and just retire Selo/Phinny completely.

In the past the dev's statement has been "We made these rules at the start, it wouldn't be fair to change things halfway through a server's life."

Seems like a fair solution to this mess would be to allow TLPs past a certain expansion to vote on removing the restriction with a supermajority vote. I suspect even with a high bar, it'd pass easily on later TLPs.

No they haven't, that's just something that keeps getting repeated by people on the forums who refuse to accept that they don't remove truebox because they don't want to.

It would be nice if the next round of truebox TLPs had a disclaimer up front that true box would be removed at a certain point. Then the 2 or 3 people who care about that can decide not to play on the server.

Sorry, thought that was info posted on the forums, but it was something dreamweaver told me on discord

[COLOR=var(--text-muted)]dreamweaver07/21/2020

[COLOR=var(--text-normal)]No it's not just a toggle, unfortunately.[/COLOR]

[/COLOR]

[11:24 AM]

[COLOR=var(--text-normal)]But it's a longer conversation the team is having about changing the announced rules of the servers. I've pointed them at the thread so they're aware of the player discussions.

[/COLOR]

Wow, made a dog's breakfast of that copy/paste..

This might help:

dreamweaver 07/21/2020 [11:24 AM]
No it's not just a toggle, unfortunately.

But it's a longer conversation the team is having about changing the announced rules of the servers. I've pointed them at the thread so they're aware of the player discussions.

Lol thanks, not sure what happened there.

I think the discussion on Truebox and what purpose Truebox has on TLP evolved as players actually went through the game, the perception of it shifts over time & as the server unlocks expansions & suffers from the attrition typical of TLP servers. It is noteworthy that Live servers & Ragefire do not have Truebox & their populations of players eventually stabilised while Truebox servers see continued attrition across their entire life cycle.

There was certainly a period of time for which Truebox mattered, since it was a response to the "Magefire" scenario that took place in the early days of the Ragefire server, where we had a bunch of players running around the open world multi-boxing 6 to 24 sometimes more Magician characters to take down raid mobs, often by themselves, sometimes in conjunction with traditional guild raid forces.

Phinigel as a server was itself a response to the problems initially seen on Ragefire, it's why Agents of Change were created in the first place, but as the server aged the Truebox feature became much more of a hinderance than the help it initially provided in early expansions, while the AoC feature has only grown in popularity transforming from a means of allowing more guilds to access content in the "Pre-DZ" expansions into a very desirable Quality of Life Feature as the TLP servers aged & that desirability is easy to see with many players on live servers calling for AoC to be made available on live servers too.

On live servers up until Depths of Darkhollow you could only have 1 client running per machine, a sort of pre-Truebox environment that the Truebox code emulates, the removal of that 1 client per machine restriction is very likely the cause for the live servers lasting as long as they have & not losing more players than they did.
You can easily argue that the TLP server players would be better served by TLP servers mirroring that evolution that took place on live servers by removing the Truebox during that same timeframe on TLP.

After those client changes on live servers and during 2012 while live EQ was in the Veil of Alaris expansion the Free to Play your Way was introduced - the enabling Free to Play on TLP was experimented with for a short time & proved quite popular for players who wanted to return to their old servers & say hi to friends who still played there, I think there is another conversation to be had about further mirroring the Live server evolution on TLP servers by also enabling F2P on TLP servers that have unlocked VoA.

TL;DR: Truebox has its "time & place" TLP servers more closely mirroring the historical changes of live servers in regards to multi-boxing & free to play would help ensure those TLP servers remain healthier for longer & help more players play the game deeper into the expansions & help secure a larger future "expansion buying" population when those TLP eventually catch up to live status.

TL;DR: Agents of Change were created to alleviate the bottlenecks of content on TLP in pre-DZ expansions but I believe that they also offer a very popular & desirable QoL feature once the TLP servers are no longer accessing them as whole raid forces, that being able to access them long after guilds are no longer utilising them for progression is a nice perk of TLP, I think it would be a very community-spirited move for DarkPaw to enable them on Live Servers as a QoL feature though I would restrict them to only be available to All-access players initially and perhaps have a marketplace unlock available for F2P accounts should they wish to use them later on. They may not have been designed as a QoL feature but they definitely become one over time.

This wasn't really the case. EQWindows and similar variants allowed boxing multiple characters on one computer pretty early on--I was using it by velious, but I think it was around earlier. Many players used it and SOE never had an issue with it, although even back then there were the "boxing = cheating" players that assumed it must be against the rules.

I boxed on one machine way before DoDH too, what you had to do though was install multiple copies of EQ into different directories on your hard drive and log them in one at a time, was kind of clunky but worked.
After DoDH you could log in multiple times with just one client installed.