How is boxing a grp of toons, a game design flaw?

It’s not that many that raid on Live. It’s like 15-18% of the overall members are raiders and box accounts based off the report that was released when they got sold.

People group with others all the time, we need to stop making the leap from not wanting to form groups with random people to everyone is boxing.

so the anti boxes wants a new server where after your group with a toon you can not group with that same toon for the next 24 hours - ha ha

Again, wrong. Just because you, personally, dislike boxers and spend 100% of your game time grouping with random strangers does not give you any power to force your gameplay style on everyone else.

And I never said "I'm better than everyone else", I'll happily admit there are far more skilled players in the game than me.

I also never said "It's not because the game is "full of ***hats that train you"."
I simply said that most groupers have probably, at some point over the last 20+ years of playing this game, grouped with some people they would rather not group with again.
I'm also sure people have grouped with some absolutely amazing people, I know I have.

We get it, you don't like boxers and apparently it is your self appointed mission in life to try to get boxing (and guilds, fellowships, instanced zones, etc) removed from the game.

Have fun with that.

You are pushing a false narrative. Plenty of people on every server grp..

And. How do you fix free will in an mmo??

Also.. curious.. why nobody wants to address the fact that higher skilled players in alot of instances don't like to play lessor skilled players ?

It's like yall tryna act like that never happens.. or refuse to talk about it.

Group content isn't really pug friendly, outside of missions of which there are only 4 per expansion and each carries a lockout timer that lasts beyond the typical playsession.

Partisian and Merc quests have no incentives to be repeated which reduces the number of people doing them. To make it even harder to pug, solo tasks are used in a lot of the merc/partisan quests making collaboration and catching people up more of a headache. Of course it can be overcome but it just adds more complication to getting a pug together to do actual group content. Making the reliance on solo tasks even worse there is no way to share tasks (that I am aware of) with another player.

Which leaves us with missions, which have good replay value, but there are very few of. And named camps which there are a ton of but honestly it's the least entertaining content the game has to offer. I personally don't camp named anymore, I do them once for the achievement and that's it. Camping them takes too much time, I find it boring, and worthwhile rewards are too few and far between. I also exclusively box named camps. On the off chance I get an ore, spell or aug I am not rolling on it.

If Darkpaw would increase the rewards for partisan/merc quests (expansion currency and better xp at a minimum)make the quests more 'shareable' between a group which may have members coming and going then perhaps that would help revive the group game.

You should stop taking things so personally. I have said before that I have nothing against the people who box. Many people box out of necessity because they can't easily find a group.

But I have always said that boxing is detrimental to the game. And I am hardly the only or first one to make that point.

Go look on the TLP forums, go look at cached posts on the old vet forums. Go look at the hundreds of posts of Battleblade from 15 years ago if you're bored.

Plenty of people have recognized that boxing is detrimental to the social fabric of the game, including some developers.

Stop being a drama queen. It is my opinion.

If anything some people on this forum are so hardened in favor of boxing that they think I am a threat to them by simply posting my opinions. They try to safeguard the status quo at all cost.

Players up in arms about the fact that I point out that boxing undermines the community. Including you.

You quoted me in this thread my friend, not the other way around. It is not me who had a problem with your posts, it is you who had a problem with mine.

Even when I say I am not against people who box, they constantly feel threatened, as if I have a magic wand that can take away their boxes.

Boxing doesn't undermine the community and there are plenty of people who are still grouping. Just because not everyone likes to group with random players doesn't mean that there is a problem or that there is anything wrong with that mindset.

Sorry for not reading 9 pages of replies before I add my own, but for a topic started yesterday morning, that is a lot of reading to catch up on before I throw in my 2 cents.

I started playing in Oct. 1999 and played a lot (too much) through the release of PoP before taking a year+ break. In that time, I rarely came across people routinely playing more than one character at a time for more than a buff, rez, or necro corpse summoning bot. When I came back from that break, OoW was current and most of the people I knew had moved to either EQ2 or WoW. That is when I started to see people boxing. I even moved my alt to a separate account (you could do that then) and started boxing myself. My main was (is) a warrior, and the alt was a wiz. Not exactly a ready-made group, but it was handy to have a pocket porter and I played regularly with a friend that boxed a mage and druid along with another that played a shaman (single account). We stuck it out through most of TSS before we both tried EQ2 for a few years (boxing there as well, since we already had the accounts, though it was certainly less 'needed' in that game, even before mercs).

I then came back to EQ about 5 years ago and picked up boxing with mercs, eventually adding a 3rd account. (My main group was then WAR/WIZ/RNG + 2 healer mercs and a dps merc.) But I would eventually start hitting a wall in the most current content and made alt teams before things got too frustrating. I currently have 5 teams of 3 at 110+ and a couple more below 100. My friend with the mage/druid duo (she added a 3rd account, shaman, to her team before I did), also has many alt teams, though she plays less frequently that I was, so fewer of hers are that high.

[Side note: neither of us ever use any 3rd party programs, relying entirely on socials to run 5 line macros.]

Why did we get into boxing? Quite simply, because we didn't like pick up groups enough to want that to be our daily thing and soloing our main characters wasn't viable.

To answer the OP's question, that is why the common practice of boxing is a design flaw for the current game. It wasn't for the first several years, because the game populations were dense enough that even shy or semi-anti-social people like us were able to find regular groups of close friends to advance our characters. That boxing wasn't anywhere near as common then as it is now illustrates the point perfectly, not to mention that people couldn't box a full group on a single computer the way that you would be able to later. Boxing simply wasn't needed for the vast majority of players with a wide variety of playstyles and social circles to enjoy the game. But now it is very different.

And the game is still designed for playing a single character at a time. There are no in-game tools that make boxing 'easy', just doable up to a point. And only the fact that the game's software engine is 20+ year old tech allows people to box multiple accounts on the same computer with decent performance.

If people want to box, that is always their prerogative. But the game should still be able to stand on its own as enjoyable with a single account, full stop. Any argument that boxing is a solution to people getting frustrated with the time and effort of finding a group and being unable to advance their character much at high levels with just a single account is missing the point of the basic game design. EQ is not an RPG like Baldur's Gate (another favorite of mine from the same era as original EQ), where it is designed and intended for you to control your own character + up to 5 other NPCs that can join your party. You are supposed to get invested in a single character at a time and group with other players of different classes to tackle content that would significantly advance your character's power and move through the story. That was The Vision (TM).

Grouping is how people get together, start talking to each other, and how people usually make friends in MMO.

So yes, grouping is one of the most important, if not the most important, part of building a community in MMO.

And yes, servers where people only box on their own, bypass the process of grouping, and therefore it undoes the community aspect.

It's not rocket science.

Right, and therefore MMO implement solo content, that should be rewarding. Something that used to be possible in early EQ. Plenty of people solo'd in early EQ, plenty of people were extremely casual players.

But developers have chosen to severely restrict soloing as the game progressed over the years, with mobs that became harder and harder to solo. I remember being very upset with developers in beta that they released cooling chambers in the state they did, but my worries were ignored. I remember many people quit that expansion.

Again, design flaws imo, forcing some people to quit, and others to box, to overcome the increase in difficulty in the game.

Are you changing your argument?

The whole "let's force people to group" train of thought probably got some aspects of soloing tactics and XP nerfed:

Nerfed:
Swarming/Swarm Kiting
Bard Kiting
SK Kiting
Uber Damage Shields

On the other hand, you can still solo in game but people expect uber XP and rewards (instant gratification).

Less Nerfed:
Root/Rott
Pet Tanking
Single Kiting
Charming/Charm Kiting

The only real criticism is that mobs in outdoor zones can be too close. ToV/CoV did a decent job of safe spots (e.g. shoreline of Cobalt Scar or Western Wastes). The other anomaly has been mob spells and procs from TBL to CoV but then people complain about "easy mode" and lack of challenge if under-tuned.

In terms of levels, you can easily molo to level 65 with an Apprentice Tank Merc. Thereafter, comes the problem: soloing is still extremely feasible but XP is no longer a gravy train so people start to complain about the solo game.

In terms of class selection, some classes such as rogues and warriors have been more dependent on groups. It comes with the territory. Could they use a survivability buff or new tactics (throwing knives)? Sure.

Not looking to debate, just curious...

Do you box? If not, do you group with the same 5-11 people the majority of the time (clique/fellowship)?

have no choice but to box during my game times. noone plays (or most are getting ready to log) so is either i box or i spend hours looking for group with no luck. (100% group failure) so at the moment am at a point of either quitting game (if i can't box) or getting accounts suspended/banned (when DGB decides they don't like botter's) because of my physical disability and lack of people looking for groups.

And grouping is still happening every day not to mention that there are people who don't box and are not grouping with random people. Your complaint about people boxing is not what is making people not want to form groups with random players.

And that is a different issue but even adding solo content won't cause players who are not grouping with random players to start grouping with random players.

The argument against boxing didn't used to be about boxing undermining the social fabric of EQ. People could still easily find group up to around DoD, it went downhill fast after that.

No, the argument back then was that multiboxing is paying for power.

Remember how upset people were when EQ introduced items that affected EQ's gameplay through a cash shop like XP potions. Smedley promised it would never happen, yet he did it anyway and people blasted him for it on the old vet forums. Selling cash shop items was what failed games did before they went belly up.

Multiboxing is paying for power was the argument, it is still a valid argument, I just don't care about the argument anymore since the power differences in gear are ridiculous now anyway. Everything would need an overhaul to bring players back into a level playing field where they can group.

Strawberry = Battleblade. It makes sense now.

Didn't read much of this. Just going to reply on the game design.

EQ came out in 99. Facebook and Twitter didn't exist. People interacted in chat rooms real time. They could play D&D in them like people do now with discord.

EQ wasn't designed as a game. It was designed as a social platform. It was a chat room with a fantasy game element. It took the chat room D&D imagination and put it on screen. People had long downtimes to med and etc back then because they chatted up the chat room that was the group window during that down time. Classes were built unable to solo because you don't play board games by yourself.

WoW, ESO, etc all came out much later. They were designed more as games. WoW in 2004 still had more of the social element. The games that came later focused more on being a game and less on being a social platform. More solo happens in WoW because it is much less of a chatroom.

Boxing isn't about the progression of the internet and computers allowing it. It is about the progression of chat methods. Now we have team speak and discord, etc. People can speak 200 WPM, comprehend 400 WPM but only type 70WPM. This not only increased the communication rate by 300-500% but it completely freed up all of the typing time for key presses.

EQ has thus progressed to be a more active game with run aways, leaps, spell spamming etc, not because of the internet, but because clerics don't need 10 seconds of a Complete Heal cast to type a sentence now. They just say what they want to say. Gameplay and the internet didn't change clerics. Communication technology did.

The game design is not flawed. It's just out dated. It is a chat room with a game, not a game with a chatroom. It has low actions per minute. If EQ is thought of like Final Fantasy games where you control a turn based group in combat, it is a great game built for boxing. But fundamentally it is a chatroom, so people argue it's a single player game because that is what it was suppose to be.

The real shame is people wanting to undermine what makes other people happy since that other person is doing happy differently.