Ok, so you do have a problem with boxing. That's fine. I think however that your putting to much into this issue. Hypothetically, lets say Server A has 700 players 400 of those players box 3 accounts for a total of 1500 logged in Toons on the server, you still have 700 players you could potentially group with if you joined that server. Boxing in and of itself is not limiting the number of people you can group with, the age of the game, age of the players, server population density, and others are the limiting factors. There are only so many people playing this game and I have not heard of any server becoming locked because of too many people being logged in at one time. Perhaps a non boxing server would induce more to group or perhaps more people would just solo/molo on that server. That is not taking into account how you would enforce no boxing or why a company would want to limit a player to only one account, especially a game that is as old as Eq.
To say that boxing limits opportunities for grouping is a fallacy. Most of us 2-box, thereby leaving up to 4 party slots available. I think that boxing opens up a new level of challenge for a lot of us, and it fits into our limited play time as most of us are working adults. It gives us a chance to log on and instantly do something. Without that, EQ would be dead. When I box and I am not planning to log off soon or take an extended break away from the keyboard, I am constantly searching for other players to fill the group. Playing alone in an MMO misses the point entirely, unless you're doing it simply for the dexterity challenge. The real problem is the overwhelmingly negative social attitudes that 80% of EQ players have formed against newcomers to their social groups. If any war has been declared, it was declared on pickup groups. Want to get more groups? Get people to change their inter-personal behavior.
I do not box, and prefer to fill the group with live players. That said, I'll prefer a box over a merc any day of the week (hate to see the group gear rot).
the same could be said about a lot of things. Insert: raiding, or pettaking, or using attunables, etc, into your first sentence here. If more people raided and were in raid gear, groupgeared players would find even fewer groups for tasks etc, because they'd be considered sub-par. if more people pet-tanked, the less grouping(and raiding) opportunities for tank classes. The more people using attunable gear (like t1 rof) the fewer opportunities for people to group to farm the dropped gear of same stature (voa t4) etc. This argument means nothing because one could insert anything into the equation and provee taht it hurts the player base by lowering opportunities for others. At the same time the reverse is ALSO true. The more people box the more money comes into SOE and hte more attention EQ is given in teh development area, as well as the more time people spend doing things rather than LFG. The more people raid the better the pool is for raiding guilds to succeed. The more people use attunables the more access there is to decent gear for the less fortunate in droprates and groups. Moot point in either direction on any of those subjects because it can be argued both ways. As a side note, the more people box the esier it is to fill a group and get something done rather than sit around lfg. Also the easier it is for people to get things done that need done quickly (like progression to get spells or to request raids etc for their friends nd aguildmates). I know many boxers, and i know very few that will not drop 1 2 3 toons even or play them oog, to bring others with them that wish to or need to do what they're doing. What this accomplishes is more groups if you ahve friends or guildmates and arent a total ****, as well as more generosity. Pugroups tend to have the major issues of dishonest self-representation (gat a tank to come tank and find out they have defiant gear and 100aas and waste whole group's time,) ninjalooting (if you're in a group with people you don't know some find it easier to act like weasels and loot and scoot, or hop groups soon as they ahve waht they need while not staying to make sure everyone gets theirs too) etc. Boxing isnt the problem. pickupgrouops are. "Cliques", fellowships, guilds, and boxed toons, all offer alternatives to pickup-groups, and given the choice 99% of the playerbase would prefer ANY of those even people they don't get along with (because tehre's still accountability within guilds etc) than some random joe schmo from general chat that could end up wasting their entire night.
The problem is soe views a server with 2000 players healthy and not to be merged with another server, but if half of them are boxed the reality is only 1000 players, meaning the server is really due to be merged with another 2000 player server from the view of total characters online.
don't mention server merges, please. Server merges do nothing but LOWER the player base. didnt take 2 months for hte populations to seemingly be cut in half after the last server merge. Over crowding leads to frustration, over-competitiveness leads to poaching and later death of guilds, etc. Server merges are the last thing people should ask for "for the health of the game" They also remove the unique identities of servers, before Saryrn and Bertox merged, you would be hard-pressed to find soemone buying or selling taskadds on Saryrn, wehreas it was prevalent on Bertox, after the emrger it was everywhere. Unique sociologic attributes of the servers had been lost, longstanding guilds died out, and many many players quit playing or left the servers for greener pastures. There have been some nice things since then, like knowing people one normally wouldn't because of being on different servers, but overall server merges are bad, not good, unless the population is SO low that your shard's landing protal is still at 1 stone of 12 at this point for example, then maybe i'd think about it.
No, it would just annoy everyone and a 3rd party tool would be written to take care of pressing those keys automagically. Everyone with a brain would use it, especially the non-boxers. Your desire doesn't magically make it possible or practical to restrict boxing. And I rather suspect your evaluation of other MMO games of a similar genre is incorrect...likely a lot more boxing going on than you realize. I don't know Vindicus, so that means nothing to me other than it's probably nothing like EQ so not relevant. I do know people that box in WoW, if you want to compare something closer to EQ.
No it wouldn't, you would only need to check the people who are in a group with a similar IP-address range, and since every packet is already IP-defined, doing this check is ridiculously easy to implement. Nope, even simple captcha systems are hard to break because programs that can identify patterns are one of the hardest to make. Seriously, no one is writing code for EQ anymore, no one gives a **** at this point More proof you don't know what you're talking about or have any experience with other MMO, many current MMO do not allow you to box because they require continuous input and repositioning. I guess you never played monster hunter as a kid or you wouldn't make the ridiculous assmumption that you can box in every MMO. Actually I have a hard time coming up with names of current-gen MMO where boxing would be beneficial at all. If boxing is possible it means your gameplay has failed. WoW is an older game and even though you can box in WoW, it's far less beneficial than in EQ. I personally feel WoW's combat is idiotic. Boxing in EQ happens because the gameplay is static and input is slow, no other reason. EQ is too easy, in the sense that it allows horrible control of an AFK character to still offer benefits. The fact boxing is hugely unpopular in many other MMO, to the point no one does it, means, if one wanted, you could detect or stop boxing really easily. EQ has allowd multiboxing to take over the game by choice, not because it wasn't preventable, slight adjustements in gameplay would have made boxing very unpopular, but there was never a desire to stop boxing. I don't have anything against people who box, most do it out of necessity, not because they like it, but it has been detrimental to EQ and it's playerbase. I don't expect or ask them to stop it since it is now part of their revenue, but it went at the cost of other single-account players.
so you want to make this something that discourages families and roommates from playing the game together? One would also have to be monitoring IP addresses within the game to know who is "similar" and who isn't. This whole concept is justa bad idea, period. It also adds a tool for people to be (((( in the middle of soemthing, like a raid or anything outside of medding and doing nothing, wehre attention needs to be paid to waht's going on around you not filling in some stupid security coade on demand. If you don't want to play with boxers, don't. It's really not htat hard to tell when someone's playing more than one character at a time, even with macros. They'll use autofollow when you move, or wont ever move at the same time for example, they'll also talk alike when asked questions. If you don't want to play with boxed toons, when you'rem oving to camp watch for autofollow (toons also generally get stuck in tunnels and/or take longer to all move to position) and ask taht they drop 1 of the 2 toons. Simple as that. The game itself has zero need to discourage boxing further than it already does with the current mechanics. if the game wanted to stop boxing (but not hydraing) they could jsut put a line in the exe code that checks for already running versions, and refuses to start, there are many programs, and some games, out there that do this and to "box" you have to use multiple computers.
VMware circumvents that in seconds and it's free to use. I believe some games don't want multiple clients running for other reasons than multiboxing, since many games that disallow this offer not benefits to muliboxers, I think it has to do with preventing hacking.
and if the game put in such a mechanic taht prevented playing multiples on the same computer, this program would be considered a violation of the EULA and most boxers are NOT hackers and don't do things that could get them banned simply because it's available.
I think one major factor that affects the group game is simply age demographics. Those who started EQ 13 years ago were younger. Younger people are more likely to add strangers to their social groups and more confortable with playing with strangers. As we get older we get more set in our ways and less accepting of strangers into our social groups. At least I suspect this is a factor in things. No hard data to back it up but I do see younger members of my guild interacting far more with strangers then the older members of my guild.
No the OP did not make any statements regarding his own personal ability to box any missions in ROF or any other expansion.
This can be easily avoided. IP isn't some mystical static number that defies all things. I could box as many accounts as I wanted while avoiding this "check" you speak of. True, but all you would need to do is avoid having similar IP addresses. Boxing is hugely unpopular in some games, but in just as many if not more it is still popular. You mention a lot of newer games, but most newer games really aren't that good to people who enjoy EQ. They are small distractions that end quickly. There are many games where it is difficult to box, but I've never heard of one where it is impossible. EQ has allowed boxing because without it, they would have been dead years ago. I would hazard a guess that a minimum of 40% of the current active accounts are secondary ones. If you suddenly saw a 40%+ drop in population it would disrupt the whole game. Changing it now would do nothing except speed up its demise. You keep saying that, but your other comments point to the contrary.
Want boxers to get annoyed and quit because of mechanics that prevent them from boxing successfully? Start looking for a new game. This one will die quickly without the revenue stream we bring in. That's the bottom line. Nothing else said will change that fact.
Its not my responsibility to group with you. I don't want to group with you. So don't expect them to tailor the game to force me to group with you. There are plenty of grouping opportunities in this game. It is the fastest way to get experience and augs and gear. The fact that so many players are simply terrible at everquest and expect the decent players to hand hold them and them through content is those players' grouping problem, not someone's tendency to log in and play with boxed alts. Most people play with boxed alts because of the convenience, and the simple fact that they can. If the content was developed that encouraged random grouping encounters (a la LDoN, centralized pick up group locations, no real class need restrictions on the group, relatively quick missions with rewards for the whole group, chest and named drops desirable for many of the group members, repeatable content, etc) then players would go back to grouping. When the content requires people to pay attention, know what they are doing, do things in certain ways with certain classes, then people either make a set static group of players they do 99% of their grouping with, or they box the content so they don't have to worry about spending 2 hours trying to find one person of the right class, level, gear, skill, and play time who is willing to do the one mission they want to do.
LOL at boxing somehow taking away from group opportunities. Person1 tells General, 'Running Murdunks, 4 slots available 85+' Person2 tells General, 'Anyone wanna help me get my T5 merc' I see some variation of both of these every day. Boxers are not the problem here.
It's no coincidence that the high point of grouping in EQ was during the LDoN era - as you say, it offered the perfect setup for random grouping. And by adding something of value to raiders as well as non-raiders, it meant everybody had something to aim for. The points system also meant that even if you didn't get a drop during your mission, at least you'd earned points towards something of use. It's no coincidence that WoW basically copied the LDoN system for their group dungeon instances; they award points per "boss" that's killed as well as extra points if you complete the mission. Plus there are random drops from trash as well. Indeed, WoW then kicked it up a notch by offering "scenarios" - 20 minute, 3-man instances which feature NPCs that cast healing spells, fight along side you etc - meaning that any 3 classes can do them (3 tanks, or 3 healers - not a problem). Again, they award points which eventually means you can get some high-end group gear even if you don't get anything during the mission. The one thing that WoW did that EQ never has done is introduce cross-server grouping: thanks to that the queue time for the scenarios is less than a minute. It's a pity EQ didn't do that a few years back, really...
