Can you box on Phin now?

Maybe for your definition of working out it hasn't. But for the rest of us that played on Ragefire/Lockjaw and experienced the mage box armies, it's worked out great.

It did exactly what they wanted it to do, made it much harder to box a massive amount of toons. Every once in a while I'll see someone boxing a full group of 6 on Phinny, but most of the time it's 2-4. Not 20+ like it was on Ragefire/Lockjaw.

I stopped boxing, but when i tried it, I found software that allowed me to move the mouse between laptops and send keystrokes to each computer. Though I noticed when casting a spell using one keyboard on three characters at the same time I would disconnect on all laptops.
Is this type of software not allowed? Dont plan to box anymore but never found an answer to wether or not this allowed.

This question has never been answered by Daybreak. Key broadcasting (one keystroke to multiple clients) is specifically outlawed, but as you noticed you can't do it anyway without getting disconnected.

It has been broadly answered as it would fall under '3rd party applications.'

What they haven't directly answered is which 3rd party programs specifically, and we will never receive such a response (or list) because you will have folks attempting to use it to circumvent the rules. For example, if a GM tried to ban someone for using a program that wasn't on their list, the accused would make this simple case: 'Well you can't ban me for using <insert random application> because its not on your list!'

Basically, they use '3rd party applications' to cover anything they want. Again, the idea of Phinny is 'old school boxing' aka 'true-boxing,' and as such, external (3rd party applications) used with the intent to make controlling those 'boxes' easier is probably against the rules. (Unless officially stated otherwise by DBG staff.)

That's not why you got disconnected. There have been several threads on this. A small percentage of us get disconnected by the buggy truebox code with absolutely nothing running but EQ on separate computers. No one can explain why we, the cursed, have this problem. DBG doesn't care.

I don't think it's that they don't care, but rather how would they be able to fix it for so few? They would need your exact network setup to reproduce.

I would have accepted, "That's too bad and we're sorry but this occurs rarely and we can't dedicate any resources to it." Instead, I got clueless Customer Support staff and zero response from devs on PMs. If they care, they are definitely not showing it.

I'm going to bump this again as it's become quite relevant with the advent of Ag opening soon.

Ultimately your best bet is to ask if Synergy, or software KVMs are against the TOS. It's incredibly likely the response you'll get is "yes", but mostly because it's somewhat of a gray area.

The fact that people are contesting this and advising other players to not use synergy or another network KVM is ridiculous if only because this is truly not against the letter of the TOS. If it were, things like nostromos or macro keyboards would get you banned. In the end it's completely up to the individual if they want to put them selves in a position to potentially get banned or generally be questioned about what they're doing.

I'll consider advise on how to obscure the use of a network kvm as probably something that shouldn't go on the forums but it's very easy to do. You should be doing this regardless, especially if you're on a shared network, as all of the traffic is plain text. It's a very wide attack vector in general.

Using a network KVM isn't any different from using a hardware KVM in practice. You aren't multiplexing key presses or mouse input. You cannot send a keystroke on one PC two or more PCs with synergy. The use case for synergy is to be able to share input devices across computers, just like a KVM. The key difference is that it's done over a network and not through a physical device. I've been using synergy for years to do this (share a keyboard and mouse between systems) for my day job as well as for gaming. In my case I've shared the keyboard from my workstation to my gaming rig (not to box, but to simply have one keyboard and mouse). I've never been approached by support, never been banned, and never had an advantage over other players because of it.

Again, it's up to DBG as to what they want to do.

Same. It's worth noting that they have Mac and Linux versions. You can (and I have) use Synergy to share the same mouse/keyboard between a PC, a Mac, and a Linux box. This is irrelevant to EQ but some may find it useful.