Why not just have a no box and a regular box TLP?

GMs should do occasional patrols and skim through submitted evidence. Once it's clear that someone is multiboxing, they should take action. It's ok if enforcement is delayed as long we know the work is being done.

It would also reduce their workload to either first start reintroducing play-nice policies or to put in a more sincere effort into enforcing current rules. People need to see that the rules are taken seriously. (This is also a way to attract some lost customers.)

Laws have changed since 1999, guides are very very limited in what they can legally do. Running the occasional mini event and handing out cookies, sure, they can volunteer to do that. Policing the servers for boxers, even if just finding them and pointing them out to the CS staff is work, for that they must be paid, DPG is not a non-profit company. It is not worth the legal liability for DPG to recruit volunteers.

If they could effectively police a server for boxers/botters with the staff and policies they would. They can't, hence why they are trying to hard code things.

What makes it clear someone is boxing?

You want them to reduce their CS workload by... re-implementing policies they didn't have the CS manpower to support so they changed...

Household: Man and Wife playing EQ together is it someone boxing or two people?

Household: Two kids that play EQ together...same question.

There is NO POSSIBLE WAY to even attempt to enforce a no boxing rule set....just can not be done.

The only way to suspect it is two people playing from a singular IP Address which can be spoofed quite easily....lol

In general boxed characters move or take actions one at a time or all at once. The most obvious sign is /follow. Boxers use /follow all the time, while real players use it rarely. If you see 5 characters /following another, it's probably a 6-boxer. And if you see the same characters doing it again and again, it becomes a certainty. One thing I saw a lot on Aradune was 5 guys /following to a zone entry and then painstakingly walking them all through one at a time.

There are other ways to spot boxing, but in general most of them can be identified by looking for /follow and otherwise lack of simultaneous movement.

I think CS is more capable than you think, not that I am a fan of them.

2-boxers will be the most likely to get away with it but will also have the least negative impact on other players. CS should prioritize the bigger, obvious boxers, and the company should encourage a more considerate community. Or start with a 2-box server again before going to no-box.

I use follow all the time in groups. Easier to let my friend run me through the zone then for me to miss which turn he took and lose sight of him and then I am opening the map and trying to find him again. Also, when I am boxing I rarely do things one at a time or all at once. My box is on another computer, I control it with a wired 9 key numberpad, it is basically an extension of my main. I can manage healer with just 9 hotkeys same as if it was a different player.

So you would have them ban me, and my friend, for using follow because I get lost easily, but I would be just fine with my druid box parked behind me while I duo things. You can toss out another dozen "how to tell a boxer" methods, and I can counter every one with a scenario where isn't a boxer. False positive, false negatives, it is a recipe for CS misery. I am sure they will jump right on that.

I think your group would stop looking like a multiboxer once the /follow stopped. It also makes a difference if you group with other people sometimes.

You could get away with 2-boxing if you really wanted to, as you said you have done.

So you agree that no boxing is completely unenforceable, that trying will only result in people being more sneaky about it. In a kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king, the benefits of boxing are just too high for people not to try to do it. Making rules you can't enforce is a terrible business decision.

Play on P99 if you want to not see people boxing. Not saying that to be mean or "if you don't like it go away". It is just reality. It won't happen on TLPs. It is a pipe dream.

Daybreak could sufficiently enforce a no-box rule if it wanted to.

They probably could. But to what benefit? A no box server isn't drawing any more players than your average server brings in. It's not bringing in the P99ers, they are happy playing on P99 for free. TLP rerollers will play there boxing or no. There may be a small community that is truly so no boxing hardcore that they don't play on the servers because of boxing, but it's probably not enough to make up for getting rid of all the boxes. I literally don't know anyone who doesn't box at least one character. I would say a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the accounts on any given server are boxes. If I hide alts on my current guild there are 25 people online. If I show alts there are 59. That is a lot of numbers for hardcore no-boxers to make up. I just don't think the community exists. So they would be reducing their income from the server and increasing their expenses. How does that make financial sense?

Not to mention that the overlap on the venn diagram of no box supporters and krono/Marketplace haters is pretty big, so instead of folks who are happy to throw some money their way to make life a little easier they are making a server for people who dislike their primary source of income. Cause that's a recipe for a server that will pay the bills.

It's enforceable , people will not like the outcome .

There able to ensure a static ip one account period , that means no your brother can't play with you or wife etc ... 1 account period.

They can change the eula to allow them to scan hard drives for 3rd party applications and VPN software. It can be done , but highly unlikely to happen due to privacy concerns and the fallout that would happen.

What I fail to understand is why are you posting for it to be done here while using P99 and others as your example. Go there? Sounds like there is a crowd there that is exactly what you want. Did I miss something? Or is this.. .I really want P99 (add whatever ) to do this.. since they don't I want it here?

Attempting to recapture a more casual audience would be a profitable course of action for the company, and a no-box server is one way to pursue that goal. Ordinary gamers tend to play 1 character and value fairness. I'm not sure what a typical casual thinks about krono, though I doubt it's a significant problem.

As for P99... it's an unofficial, buggy, dead-end server with missing features. Neither of us stayed there for long. I think in general people would rather pay for an official server as long as it's a decent fit. That's what all the boxers currently paying for real EQ over a free-to-play boxing server are doing.

Lets see, as a company: Shall I make it harder on the players who play longer, have more accounts and thus give us our revenue or shall I listen to squeaky wheels who pontificate about servers and their "greatness" out of one side of their mouth and their "failure" on the other who aren't putting in the same money as my dedicated. Let me think long and hard about that.

If you really do play EQ and have played anything past pop, you would realize there is a great world of lore any casual can enjoy at their pace without interruption most of the time. Being behind the curve gets you one hell of an oyster for gear and opportunity. Oh but there aren't enough players there. You realize your argument just collapsed on yourself. If there really was this great big group of people who wanted it that way, they would wait and play behind the power curve and enjoy the game at their pace and have oodles of people waiting to join with them. We have NEVER seen that occur.

If I am wrong, I strongly encourage you to knuckle up, get the mighty swath of people that want it the way you say and PICK about any TLP (vaniki is a great choice, mischief, or even Oakwynd for your FTE so no one can race you to a mob death) and play behind the curve 2, 3, 4 expansions back and enjoy the game with all the QoL perks.

Are there really thousands of casuals who aren't playing the game because of boxers? That is a big sell. You would lose thousands of accounts by blocking boxers. Lots of people won't play on a server if they can't at least two box.

The company should also target casuals, not abandon boxer/hardcore players. Like the OP said (paraphrasing), "why not both?".

I think a lot of casuals aren't playing the game because of unfairness, fast progression, lack of play-nice policy, and unreliable enforcement. It's not just because of boxers. I don't know how many more customers the company could potentially recruit, but the population counts of P99 servers make it seem significant.

The problem is the game DOES target casuals 100%.

Play behind the curve. Play a couple expansions back. Your fight for mobs becomes non existent. Every now and then you may have a person or person go through and do whatever (part of gaming in an mmo at this point). The non casuals move so fast to the new expansion there is an entire series of zones that are near ghost towns that would love for you to populate them. By doing this the casual and the non casual are served. This is not a boxing issue. This is a player type issue and both want to be right. Throw in FTE and your unfairness goes away. If your unfairness is a mob or a raid you and casuals want to down, simply do it at a slower/later pace and the world is again your oyster. But you can't have it both ways.. .you typically (almost always) cannot be "first" and be a casual.

Two ways of playing already exist in the EQ world. Its actually why we are here. Lets be honest with ourselves, there isn't a big draw for old graphics and grind (why the hell so many only ever live in eq to pop, man you are missing out) in the general gaming community where your character easily looks like everyone else and the first couple of expansions have models that only minecraft is jealous of.

This is kinda the tip of the iceberg of the story... not really the full picture

Sure, Aradune had the bigger queue for the first few months, but Rizlona was absolutely CRUSHING it after launch hype all the way until the repeated ban waves.

I don't think you can sufficiently separate a group of people within a server from the rest of the people on the server or the economy, and I don't think you could recruit enough people to try.