Boxer Hate Discussion

Formal ruleset didn't do that, no - it was what the players "agreed to" - except quickly some decided they didn't care to follow that and since it was voluntary it quickly went to the wayside.

Problem are alot people 3+ boxing, final fall in the .ini game. You can dual box decent, but legit 6 box... Is so rare. All starts... /follow non work nice..., and you final have the full set of $.ini, a
the interactive map, and the premium tools.
So much friends losts in this cáncer. Never go to the AFK game dream, ruins all.

What "problem" is 2,3 or 6 boxing causing?

Do you want to blame boxing for their being less than 100,000 subscribers across ALL servers when the game used to have 500,000?
If you do that would be silly, it is vastly more complicated than that.

Boxing was a reaction to many inherent difficulties of EverQuest.
1. EQ having a pronounced dependence on forming groups.
2. The amount of time any player may have to spend to join or actually form a group and how easily groups can break up.
3. The unreliability of other players play time and commitment.
4. The smaller amount of players still playing the game.
5. Just how old the game is can mean the players still playing it are very heavily segregated into inwardly looking social structures, guilds, fellowships, cliques, in-game buddy-pairings that all make for the availability of players actively seeking others very much more difficult - particularly so on live servers but even on TLP there are established connections that persist so even a "fresh TLP" can have a whole lot of social baggage and history coming with the players even before it opens for business.
6. The lack of "fresh blood" into EQ, as EQ mostly appeals to current & former players familiar with the game rather than any significant number of actual new players means that players in EQ rarely get to meet anyone new to EQ so they rarely ever need to make allowances, rarely need to exercise their mentorship skills, rarely get to feel like the grizzled veteran helping out the genuinely green recruit who is buzzing with enthusiasm.

There's a ton of things EQ can do to make the game better but eliminating or curtailing boxing really is not one of them, what this game needs more of is just people playing it, more single players who want to group, more boxers, more soloers, more F2P people, more Live Players, more TLP players, just more people of every kind of EQ player.
How we get that is going to be a difficult puzzle to solve, but it starts with less in-fighting & blaming each other for the failures of the game and looking at what it does right and what needs to be better.

"Magic" Maps.
Most modern games show you the NPC around your local area, tracking is still great for long range locating of mobs but for short range how would indicating the mobs within the detection range of a characters "other senses" be a problem?
EverQuest could possibly mitigate much of the use of third party tools that show you too much client information by evolving it's mapping system, were it to indicate most nearby npc within range of your in-game avatar's senses.
No it will not stop everyone, but it will not only make seeking out that 3rd party tool less likely it levels the playing field a bit for those who definitely wouldn't to begin with.

Better Autofollow.
We all know that certain 3rd party tools can give players a far better way to have their boxes follow their lead character, including while swimming in water.
Plenty have suggested removing the existing autofollow to penalise boxers but that won;t stop the cheaters & actually could push more boxers towards doing so.
The sometimes terrible efficacy of the existing follow probably leads plenty of boxers to seek out that readily available alternative because a "good" autofollow is an absolutely massive Quality of Life improvement to a boxer once they've seen how good it "could" be.
Making the in game autofollow much better could probably avoid many players seeking out that alternative and the pandoras box of temptations it comes with.

Instead of whining & pointing the finger at boxers start thinking about what EQ can do to really address the core problems, most of the time the things you see going on are a reaction to something not the cause, boxing is, in my view at least, a symptom not a disease.

The reasons I box a lot myself are many, I do not box exclusively I will add, and having the option to box I have frequently not taken a group spot someone else clearly needs more than I do. I am rarely ever in a clique, mostly I am a player who is loyal to the guild rather than any clique within it - that comes at a cost though.

It is a pretty helpful to be able to see exactly how many mobs are in the room you are approaching, know exactly where they are to make it easy to figure out how to split or what you'll need to cc on incoming. Or to see a mob on the other side of a wall, and be able to target it and pull with taunt or pet pull, even if it has a long ways to path to you. Or to know that there's a group camping a certain area before you even get to them. Or to see which named are up in an open zone. Even if you reduced the map range to the distance you could visibly see mobs, it would be a huge advantage to have maps with spawns. (That's enough range, for instance, to see all of dead side guk from the safe hall / drop down point.)

Boxing is OK, the open use of full automation is just sickening at or away from your keyboard.
But more an more people move towards it because the benefit is just great and there is no downside.

I now fully automate my traders heavily because why not.

The things that make players box, time it takes to make a group etc. are not things they personally have complete control over.

Players have a limited ability to overcome that through making groups rather than waiting for a group, and most of us know that making groups can be very easy in a fully stocked guild of active players, or very hard in a near empty guild on a near empty server (or on one where almost nobody groups outside of their guild).
Of course if your guild gets low on players and you leave it to join a larger more active one that has a lot of social stigma attached, you can be viewed as a traitor by your former guild mates for example.

The use of automation however absolutely is a choice for the vast majority of boxers, for a tiny minority of disabled gamers it allows them to play well enough to enjoy the game perhaps and they would not be playing EQ at all without it.

What a sad, sad thread.

BOX ON BROTHERS

Skuz i can agree un majority of your points, the problem are the "better box tools" include hacks and bots. And is a pay to use app, then you know what you doing wen you subscribe for use a tools what include hacks, what majority of people final use, why he find a way to justify are legit use its. Like people are arging here.

Didn't it also somehow share game resources amongst the instances?

No, it isn't. And it isn't even difficult to do. I've been 5 and 6 boxing for over 15 years. I don't use - and have never used - the helper programs.

Depends on the 6 box, if it's some melee heavy setup I've only seen a few that look normal play.
Most have the automation feeling.

If it's the 3 mages + stuff then yes that 6 box is easy to control.

I can't do the 6 box heavy melee it's just too many clicks.
Down to 3 myself max.

Have you tried getting your APM up?

Yes I've exponentially increased my automation protocol methods on my traders.

You mean require a single install of EQ to draw upon? Unsure - I know I did at the time, but I only did it for that limited circumstance of helping flag that friend, until OoW or so myself after they'd made it a standard client ability.

Sort of. Each instance of EQ was in its own folder. When the assets are loaded into memory, they are just loaded once and shared amongst the instances. Seems a little lofty but I thought I remember that's part of what it did to save memory. We were mostly dealing with 2-4 GB RAM back then.

Oh some people may have needed to do that, I had a hell of a lot of RAM for the time though. Enough so that I found out a few years later I'd overbought due to a LTT thing explaining that the max addressable back then was less than I had in it. Of course it was a mismatched poorly paired set of RAM as well different timings/etc - really didn't know much about building at the time, lol. Just "MOAR +1" mentality.

I am a dirty boxer that plays more then one toon, I wish I didn't need so many damn computers Its hot up here, they cost extra money to run, you gotta invest into them etc . its an expensive hobby. Would be nice to have them on one comp again )

Didn't know EQW did that - cute. (Even though I did use it)

Was texture memory on the GPU also shared? Or would the GPU do that anyway?

For melees, you really only need one click per mob, especially once you are 60 and the game automates backstab/flying kick/etc for you.

Yeah, 32-bit Windows is only capable of accessing 4 GB of RAM. After the OS takes its share, the apps have about 3.5 (give or take) GB left to work with.