Non Truebox Server

Are you prepared??

Heals. Who needs em?

He's got a shaman, up there in the top right corner. Those silver and F2P accounts are going to need to be dealt with though.

Only 12?

Haha, I thought he only had 9 boxes on screen, when I opened it I didn't scroll to the sides. Oddly, even though the sentence was cut short, it still made sense for the most part. I'd have gone with a cleric though somewhere in there. Shaman for DPS group, Cleric for the tank group!

Anything more than 12 is overkill for this games content anymore

And yet on RF & LJ I encountered a 12 to 40 boxer on an hourly basis.
I'm guessing overkill is in some people's DNA to just abuse things like boxing.

I will lose my if they make Selo's non truebox (in a good way).

I only 3 box but so does my brother so a little team of 6 is really fun to play...

Honestly its the most fun I have had playing this game to date tbh, our little 6 man team each 3 boxing, pushing the limits as far as we could.

You can do that on any live server or test.

You are correct. However we cant do it in era.

I know we can "put our own restrictions on ourselves" etc etc, but doing it on a fresh server is fun.

With pickzones and AoC's I really dont see why truebox is such a hot topic still.

Also try to make a real argument... The you can do this on live/test is so date. We still raid with our "main" toon in era, we still join a guild. We would even drop boxes for guildies. Its not like we just only play our 6 man team and do nothing else, which would make you argument maybe 3% valid.

Stop making so much sense. The anti-boxer pitchfork and torch crew doesn't read or comprehend what you are saying anyway. It's more a jealousy thing than anything else imo. Of course boxers socialize, add others to their group, don't always box, etc. But the jealous haters just want to keep their blinders on and pretend we are some scourge and we all play 40 accounts and never group.

No we don't!
We are all anti-social because we don't include them.

I wonder how many dps wouldnt have gotten any exp during their session if we didnt invite them to our 2x2 box on truebox servers

Filthy boxers

This is JUST my opinion. But if they open a non truebox TLP, nobody would play there BUT the boxers. The *bleeding edge* raid guilds would perhaps only have 5 or 6 real people in it and the krono farmers couldn't make any profit there because everybody can already get everything. (The epic train wars would commence)

Any new players that decide to play, would either leave or make their own box groups because nobody would ever group.

Some possible problems a player might have with 6+ man box groups:

1. Box groups are mostly farmers and as such they seem to have, on many occasion, stolen a camp from a group of players. often the average group can not out damage a mage bot army. This for most players is a negative
2. Box groups are mostly farmers and as such they seem have ,in many a zone, perma farmed the spawns that many players would like like to get. For some crazy reason some players would rather just hunt and camp that gear themselves instead of buying it from a bot group, This for some players is a negative
3. Box groups have on many occasion disrupted entire zones, across all picks with AoE pulls. As if their bot army is somehow entitled to do they want despite the disruption it causes other players. Granted this is not just bot groups that do this, but it applies and this for most players is a negative
4. In my experience (and this may not be true for all) a representable number BOT players are rude, kill stealing, train pulling , for the lack of a better term .. general bullys to other players. Not all of them for sure.

Clearly not every Bot army fits the stereo typical image, but the reason there is a stereo type is that enough of them in the past, across multi servers, do fit it. This gives bot parties a overly negative image and may have been a deciding factor as to why truebox servers were instituted.

Anyway you asked.

I don't think "most" boxers are farmers, perma-camping, disruptive players. These are more likely, the few. I'm going to say I fall into a more typical definition of a boxer. I play 2-3 accounts. My husband and one of our friends does the same. We play together. We HAVE been pacing ourselves to era-driven content and opening expansions up to ourselves on live... but we want a true classic TLP that we can play on together, and still box.

I think if a non-Truebox TLP were to open, those of us who do box are more than willing to take the risk with the bot armies. I know we are.

You have a group or community of individuals. Say there is 100 of them. And then 2 or three of those people are loud, obnoxious, jerks who treat everyone like crap. But only 2 or 3 of them do this. Yet, they all wear, say, a blue shirt that says "Happy Fun Guys" on it. So, now, every time you see a person wearing a blue shirt that says, "Happy Fun Guys", you think of those 2-3 people and just assume that these guys are jerks, too. Suddenly, "every person wearing that blue "Happy Fun Guys" shirt is a jerk and there is no telling me otherwise!"

That is how the boxing community is. There are some really obnoxious a-holes who box. They train, camp steal, multi-pick spawn hog, farm kronos for days making it hard to get that focus item or quest piece or legs you want.

But a good deal of boxers are not like that. Sadly, those 2-3 guys are "speaking" for the total 100 of them.

The funny thing is, if you are not one of those 2-3 guys but are still in that community and someone that has dealt with one of those guys sees you... guess what happens quite often? You get trained, camps stolen, people talking crap and stealing mobs, trying to out DPS you on a mob you've spent 2 hours camping. Heck, it even happens to people that are just wearing a blue shirt, but aren't part of the "Happy Fun Guys" group, merely because people assumed they were.

I was 2 boxing, with a full group of legit players, my enchanter out of group just to give C, and someone assumed we were all just a group of boxers and trained us over and over with. So what did we do? Started training them back.

Then, there were times where I was 4 boxing and groups would walk right past me while waving or saying "Just heading to Suchandsuch Camp", or ask for a C, or a rez, or ask to join my group. I was happy to. They did not know or care that I controlled all 4.

Point is. It's about the individual. Not how many accounts they do or do not play. I mean, I've had solo monks, bards, clerics and necros train me. Should those classes just be banned, too? Or, what about banning people who don't box at all because a selective few are jerks? That's how silly this sounds to the majority of boxers.

I am not sure when you played last, but I can only think of 3 or 4 people that actively box 7+ boxes on Ragefire currently. If they are doing it now, I haven't noticed them for a very long time.

No idea on RF or LJ after I fled to Phinny when it was new.

It occurs to me that Fippy launched 8 years ago now. RF was 4 years ago. So I suppose it's actually possible that people have forgotten what it was like.

Back in the Pleistocene (that is, Fippy), Mage armies roamed the land like packs of wild raptors. They were perfectly coordinated, their tiny, identical gnome heads bobbing in that predatory lilt as they synchronously one-shotted every valuable mob within their sight lines. They would pile up on top of each other, their models flickering in and out as they all moved together like a hive mind, turning on a dime and zeroing in whenever they perceived a threat to their ill-defined territory from a non-box.

No team could keep up with them, because real humans can't communicate at the speed of thought and computer input technology. No real people, no matter how well coordinated, could stop them from dominating whole zones, training everyone who got too close, and /picking between instances like clockwork to snipe and kill spawns from groups who were powerless to stop them. Oh, the trains would kill them, but to what end? They didn't fear death! Even if a few of them died, the rest would just congeal together around them as soon as the deceased reentered the zone.

Now you may think I'm exaggerating, that all this is hyperbole cobbled out of the half-formed memories of a cynical old-timer, but let me tell you, this is how it was. All jokes aside, I personally experienced the mess of trying to play on TLPs before Truebox, AOC, MOTM, and every other quality of life improvement came along. If you look back through the old threads from then, it's an education in why accessibility made EQ's descendants so profitable. People don't like being griefed. We don't like being griefed, and we don't like other people gaining an advantage by automating the game (and that's exactly why people say that using third party software to relay keypresses is cheating--and please spare me the horseshit that anyone's actually running ten laptops at a time). Not only is it unfun, it's contrary to the spirit of community that made the game attractive in the first place.

The idea that it doesn't impact anyone else on the server is perhaps the most pernicious lie about multi-boxing--and I'm not talking about the guy running a SK/Shaman duo on his two monitors. We all know who I'm talking about--this is the mage pack guy, literally the reason MOTM, etc. is in the game. Even if the person behind the computer is a nice person, his actions are necessarily damaging to the server's health: he's by definition monopolizing content (by consuming it at 1+x times the rate of an individual non-box player, where x is the number of boxes), and because of the inherent efficiency in running a perfectly coordinated team, he's damaging the server's economy (although let's not kid ourselves--this is usually intentional and for profit).

I'm willing to make a distinction between the friendly two-boxer and the six-to-twelve mage train machine, but I'm not sure DBG is able technologically to do the same. And in that case, I have and will continue to cheerfully give up my ability to box a second character for the confidence of being able to take it for granted that every character I see in game has a real human at the wheel behind it.

To Elyani's point: I don't think you're a member of the "Happy Fun Guys." --but I don't want that guy on the server turning everything upside down, and that's more important to me than being able to run a second character if I want to. I'm sympathetic that good-meaning boxers are caught in the crossfire, but right now I'm aware of no more elegant solution. Maybe we'll see an announcement soon that one of the anniversary servers will be box-friendly--I'm not systemically opposed to that--but given the choice between truebox and otherwise, I take the truebox rule every time.

That is a great example of why a lot of folks think non-truebox = mass issues with boxers.

Help DBG find a way to stop the mass boxer that's better than true-box and I'll happily support it as well.