boxing from one machine?

Not that I'm going to do this..but wondering about it.

I have 1 powerful machine. 32gb ram, ssd drives, a pretty good internet connection.

In regards to running multiple accounts. can I do this from just 1 machine, by spawning multiple instances of the game?

Absolutely and I think most boxers run on a single machine.

I recommend that people amenable to multi-boxing consider running three characters. With mercs this gives you a full group and depending on your skill you can do almost all the groupable content in the game with it.

Which characters you chose are up to you, and should support your main of choice. My main is a warrior and I support him with a bard and mage. There's other choices out there, but I'm happy with it. Bard gives track, pulling, super speed, mana/end regen and ADPS. Mage gives CoH (very handy for multi-boxing because you can move around quickly by just running the mage somewhere and then CoHing your other two.), a secondary tank, a good DS (good for generating aggro on multiple mobs) and of course DPS.

I use three monitors for ease of use.

The exceptions are the Quarm and Phinigel servers. Those two servers have the "true box" code, which restricts one connected account per computer.

I was even able to 2 box on an older mass merchandised machine. But last year I had one built with ssd and wow, I need to stop. I now have 11 free accounts in addition to my paying accounts and sometimes box up to 4 guys at a time.

I prefer to have a separate icon on my desk for each of the 4 copies of EQ. I run in window mode so all the ones I am using show the icon in the bottom bar on windows and I can just flip between them. Warning - if you start you might not stop like me

I can run 4 on my machine without too much a problem. Some people seem to run a lot more (like more than a dozen) without an issue. Not sure if they are running an SSD or from multiple directories and stuff.

I have a 7 year old PC, quad CPU, with only 8GB of RAM. No SSD. I can run 3 instances of EQ with no trouble at all.

i7-4930K with 64GB RAM will run 11 accounts without a hitch.

Excuse the minor derailing but this is my config and things get sluggish at 4+. I'm on the East Coast and my pings are literally twice as high (~90-120ms) as when I visited San Diego a couple of weeks ago. (Not surprised.) I play at 2560x1600 on one monitor and have a second monitor for web browsing. No third party software. (It also pushes the GPU to 75 C and the coil whine starts to piss me off.) I'm on an SSD, of course, but everything runs out of one game directory. I know that this conversation has come up many times over the years, but is it better for performance to have multiple installations?

One game installation is fine.

Most likely it something in your options moogs

4930k with 64GB should be able to handle 11 accounts with zero problems assuming your Graphics Card is at least something like 750Ti.

In game check Everquest -> Options->Display->Advanced->Max Background FPS
Set it to Min. CPU

You might want to turn off extra shading, clip plane etc for the secondary boxes, if things still feel sluggish.

Possibly some external program is messing things up like 50 open tabs in Chrome

Open up Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Esc and see what is eating your CPU resources. EQ really does not eat that much unless misconfigured.

Yeah, I did all of those things years ago. No external app issues. It's a GTX 780 and recently nvidia nuked the Kepler series firmware to run much hotter than it used to, partly to force customers to purchase the latest hardware. I can't describe my level of anger over this, so I'll stop.

The next question is... 11 accounts? Really?

Duplicated some how

Farming?

It's always seem to run better for me using separate installs but i think that's probably debatable. The main reason i did it was to maintain different multibind configurations for each install.

WinEQ2 is your friend. It's free and gives you virtual eqclient.ini files for all your characters.

Yeah, i used to use it, can't remember why i stopped.

Same here, no other programs to mess with

Not farming. Hah I wish I had that much plat. I would have more than 2 pay accounts if I were farming. Since you can only have 2 char on a free account one tends to make each class its own account. There are 17 classes in EQ. 17 minus 2(mains)= 15 minus the 4 classes I don't like = 11. After all the wizard cannot port you if he is on the same account nor can the mage coh or the ranger track. At least for me, not sure why others have that many but suspect its something like this.

I was just wondering what the difference is between having a gold account, a silver account and a bronze account. I know they aren't making silver accounts anymore and I made a bronze account recently and you can only get level 1 mercs.

Also, what are your progression in terms of AAs / Levels are you limited to on the free bronze account? Does it make a huge difference in 3-boxing then if you don't have gold accounts?

Should you make the tank / healer on the gold / silver accounts and the bard / enchanter on the bronze account.

Preferably is it better to just pay for gold on all three accounts?

What do people do to box?

I really want to try boxing but I still need to learn a lot about EQ and how it works.

Come on now, the day is early (for me) and EQ is locked out.

Make a character, probably beast, mage or necro is best. Get them to some where around 60ish. Go park them in the pathing lanes in Rath Mtns were the Hill Giants are. just kind of stand there AFK and mind your own business.

I am pretty sure you can see this in action on every server.