TLP Server Ruleset Suggestion

TLP server Ruleset suggestion:

Boxing: Allow people to box two or three characters per computer. This will give more casual people the chance to more easily start up groups or experience content on their own, without wasting electricity for no good reason. The people who are multi-boxing more than a group, will find a way to do so, regardless of any limitations anyway. This change wont affect these people, but will make the game more entertaining for "the average player".
This should assist players in starting and forming groups and help with the inevitable server attrition down the line.

Alternatively, if it is possible, implement an IP lock like they use on P99. Make people able to play 3 accounts from the same IP. This should satisfy the people who enjoy having a pocket healer or porter around, even for instances with a husband and wife with a communal box. And who knows, maybe this will even cut down a bit on the box armies?

Mitigation of the Mighty: Complete remove this. The only real thing it does, is preventing smaller, casual guilds the ability to actually enjoy raid content. The big raid guilds will not be stopped by this and does it really matter if they can split their raids and do more instances of it? Not really. Let the little people get some fun too, this debuff has been a guild killer since it was introduced and i personally know of many many people who decided that this addition had to be removed, for them to play again. Considering there are considerably more casual players and accounts, than hardcore raiders, it seems fair that they can get their moneys worth as well.

Random Loot with Free trade: Keep this addition, its both fun and it prevents boxers from locking down camps that drop the "best in slot" things like Golden Efreeti Boots and similar. No drop items from raid zones, imo, should be kept no drop, to encourage people to experience the raid zones again.

Unlock Timer: Start the game with both Classic and Kunark unlocked right off the bat. Kunark offers a full 1-60 level experience and will provide experience spots to make other zones less contested. The first unlock timer should be 3 months and then 2 months per expansion after that. Group up some of the smaller expansions like LoY and LDoN with other expansions, they do not warrant any additional lock timer.

Classes: Start the game with Berserkers and Beast Lords available. They won't have the ability to obtain their epic weapon, until those zones are released, but im sure the people who love these classes wont mind, because they can play them right away.

Zones: Enable Plane of Knowledge from the get go as well. Get people more easily together to have fun together. We all ran across these lands for years, lets stop that. Keep the spell vendors as well, to serve as an easy location to obtain all your spells. No reason to run off to Lfay or OoT and making specific aligned mules to buy spells. Its outdated.

Spells: Enable all spells up to Luclin. This will enable a whole lot of Quality of life spells as well as making Paladins able to actually tank. Consider removing Spell Research, it really just serves to bottleneck for the sake of bottlenecking and the amount of people who think it is super annoying that they cant get the spells they need as they level, FAR outweight the select few who use spell research to generate plat and krono. They'll make money some other way.

Feel free to comment on these ideas, input is always interesting to hear - And keep in mind, these are my personal ideas and things i feel could make the next TLP more interesting and entertaining than some of the previous ones

I'm all for removing True Box completely. I used to be all for it, but it's as much a hindrance to some, as it is beneficial for others. And of course, I love the random loot and free trade rules. I think by combining some of your suggestions into starting the game with PoP/LOY/LDON, it would solve a lot of your concerns. No need to remove spell research at this point, and they could still implement both beastlords, and berserkers, as all their epic zones would be in the game. Of course, then there would be no reason not to unlock the hybrid race/class combos, to include wood elf beastlord.

They have shown the ability to activate GMs and class vendors out of era, no reason not to activate berserker GMs and vendors, both in PoK as well as the cities those classes would also start. I know they repeatedly have said none of this is possible, citing this reason or that, yet amateurs running p99 servers have done it, to include opening up all race/class combos. So in reality it's not because it can't be done, it's because they don't want to do it. Whether that's because they are too pinche to hire more people for the task (and any others they can be assigned) or they don't know how because they have a track record of laying off the only people that know how to do specific things (looking at you, account to account transfers) it doesn't change the fact that professionals are being outdone by amateurs.

Without mitigation of the mighty naggy and vox can killed by mages spamming level 20-30 pets at them. It only take a group of level 50's to kill them with it. The game has also had a power creep over time making the older content much easier then it was originally.

A certain 2002 project had beastlords available in classic, think they had set shar vahl up to direct conenct to nexus and 'blocked' all the other exits with 'cave-ins'. Not hard to do. Give us bst/ber at start. free trade and increased loot has been nice, but im not entirely sold on random. Increased rare spawns and mobs dropping 2-3x more items with free trade would, imo, work great without the randomization. Killing Truebox or at least defuncting it after Gates would make it all tie in together perfectly.

On P2002 we started with PoK. So you could TP to Shadeweavers then Shar Vahl. But the other Luclin zones were locked. And yes you could tri-box and Beastlords were in game.. from classic day one. It was fun being in Guk as a beastie

removing true box is fine for a 2nd server, but I and everyone I know would never play on it

"true box", half the people I knew on Aradune were boxing 3+ toons, was never enforced.

I really like the original posters ideas, just wish they would have made it a March release. May is bloody ages away.

How far do you and your friends go? Do you play past PoP?

Is there no middle ground between Truebox and the box armies of Ragefire? Is it a technical problem?

I'd like to be able to alt-tab box on TLPs. I had a lot of fun doing that before Truebox. And I understand that we can't even box more than one other toon now?

I was actually not aware that the MotM also made pet spamming impossible, it has been a while since i played TLPs and those things were implemented, i am naturally against that. Perhaps keep the part where pets can't tank and transfer aggro to the caster - Would that fix this issue?

MotM reduces the damage of mage and necro pets so as to prevent a single group from killing Naggy or Vox. We actually finished Naggy with 2 necros and 3 mages once before those changes.
The true box rule came about in response to mage armies of up to 36 toons taking over whole zones. If players could be actually be limited to 3 toons, that would be great. But the cheaters are still running full or even multiple groups.
The pet aggro shift has the effect of punishing single toon mage players, not the desired effect, but it did. Just ask any epic mage in Kunark how many times they have died in raids.

The existing players who return for these servers over and over again seem to fall into two camps, so I'd love to see them just cater to both with two very different server options this May. One can have boxing and Mischief loot rules for that crowd that wants that experience. It would be rife with box armies and a flood of loot, but for some players that's exactly what they like. For those who want a more 'traditional' TLP experience, offer a true box server with standard loot rules and if a tweak must be made, do something that we haven't seen yet, like all class/race combos at launch. I'd love to be able to do an Iksar monk or a Beastlord on day one, but not have to contend with 20+ toon box armies or getting fully planar gear in a week at level 20.

Is "The Regime" back???

Sadly, as we have seen on every single "truebox" server, the cheaters will play their armies anywhere, especially on the strictest truebox server, because thats where they can do most RMT'ing. Also, if you actually read my suggestion to completion, you would know that you can't get full planar get at level 20.

But if you remove it then all the people you know will be boxing 6 toons.

Keeping raid drops no drop basically completely defeats the purpose of free trade. Is there really a ton of no drop group gear floating around out there? Other than a few one off items everything is pretty much tradeable already. Trading raid gear is 100% the point of free trade. And no one needs "encouragement" to do the old raids. Pretty much everyone one these TLPs raids.

The emphasis was on the randomized loot aspect, so box crews cant sit and camp all Efreeti camps all day long, monopolizing GEB's and Djarn's Rings - As an example. The "free trade" aspect i can take or leave, it was more of an after-thought, but there are a few no drop items like the DE mask outside of raids.

Despite the vocal minority that has been coming out every single year prior to a TLP release spamming about truebox removal, I still think the most popular server is always going to be the one with truebox on it. At least starting out.

However, I don't think many would care if truebox was turned off way later down the line.

Personally, I think the next 2 TLPs should be the last for awhile or have rulesets to feed and bolster Aradune and Rizlona as they push to live, because all these yearly TLPs are just a saturation at this point.

To say it was, 'never enforced' is just not true.

Upon launch, people that tried boxing 2+ on Aradune eventually faced a suspension. That's not to say that some didn't get away with it, but after LDoN's launch the GM versus boxing intervention was obviously more relaxed.

Random loot without free trade would be a nightmare. RNG can be much more fickle on a random loot server. Being able to trade for what you want when the RNG gods are mocking your desires is what makes it playable.