Idea: live server without mercs, truebox enabled

The problem with trueboxing servers to some degree disregards the rather fair number of players and families who front more than one all access account. (my family has six recurring) That's thumbing a nose at a pretty sizeble chunk of potential marketplace and Krono.

Mercenaries were inroduced for a reason. Once the main population of any given server leaves legacy content, there are just no groups until the player is in groupable range of maximum level. which takes exponentially longer alone.

I'm not a huge fan of box armies, but truthfully I'd put a ten spot down on "One or fewer capable raidguilds on the sever somewhere about... mid.. Underfoot." without at least Limited boxing earlier than where it has been on previous servers.

Thanks for all the thoughtful replies.

I should have clarified in my original post that this is even more about sign-posting that this new server is "grouping preferred", to draw like-minded players who generally prefer to play together to the server.

I suspect most live servers have some small % of people who are still trying to form pickup groups to varying degrees of success, and by bringing them all together on a grouping preferred server, I think there'd be enough people at all levels willing to group up. e.g. swap to lower level alts if no one is playing in a higher level zone, etc.

The no-merc and true box element of it is to encourage the grouping nature of the server, since if a merc is available or boxing is very easy, people would naturally sometimes use them to get through some rough content. And that's a group that could have been made! In particular, healer mercs are too indispensible (even though a real player is better )to make playing cleric or druid viable for pickup groups on most live servers.

I completely agree this change would make no sense on a normal live server, which is why I think it should be a special ruleset server. But it is also completely distinct from the purpose of TLP servers. TLP starts from "old school EQ" and moves forward, so it only incidentally lacks mercs, which encourages grouping. I'd love to have a server where I can play any and all expansions with other people, for the fun of grouping together and seeing what we can do.

I see enough "how can I find a group?" posts on these forums that I suspect there's a modest-but-reasonable population that would enjoy this server if it existed.

Anyway, thanks for taking a look.

- Mirthe

It's not something I would really use, but I do think the idea of making it like a testserver copy toons over(but faster since it would ONLY copy their inventory, and have to make most things notrade- cept like temporary things, food, drink etc) then figure out a fair way, similar to shroud bank, to transfer loot back. I don't think a special currency is the answer though. There could be restrictions like no free-trade copies. But the benefits of grouping on such a server need to be equivalent to on normal servers, otherwise what's the point? Seems like the answer to LFG issues without doing servermerges which ALWAYS result in killing half the population (thereby negating any immediate population benefit)

True box, if I am not mistaken, is one active account per computer, not one account only allowed on a computer. Without true box, you can log in multiple accounts on the same computer with independent launchers (i.e. have to start the launcher again to select the 2nd, 3rd, etc. account) and tab between them vs needing 2 computers to play 2 accounts simultaneously. Thus, unless you have more than one family member playing on the same computer at the same time, if they're playing together, they would be doing the same as true boxing. If they're using the same computer to play at different times, only one account would be active.

It doesnt tho. It encourages playing solo classes or boxing (as allowed by truebox). The only thing that encourages grouping is having a very high population.

I dont know how hard this is for people to understand. Boxing and mercs (and overseer) do not take people away from groups. They just allow people to play on their own. You are making a crazy leap that the person who wants to molo or box would still be on your server, just LFG. Chances are, they wouldnt exist on your server. You would strictly have less people to group with.

To add to this, boxing and mercs also allow players to play on their own some of the time and group at other times. Restricting boxing and removing mercs would potentially reduce even the number of people who do like to group but who cannot do so all of the time (time zones, families, work, etc.).

This wouldn't be a bad idea at least for instance zones. Back in the day there were so few zones that you didn't need a ton of people to fill them all up but with so many expansions and zones these days the population you need today to fill all the zones from level 1-120 would be massive.

Funny, I would recommend the exact REVERSE! I recommend a new server that has the experience of Test server and allows for the use of multiple mercs at one time!! There could be a limit such as three max and eliminate the boxing. In addition, I would have all items being tradable and loot being randomized and droppable in zones that would normally be found in other zones in order to make all zones equally desirable.