True Box

Boxers pay the bills. Casuals leave after they get their fix.

Yep if they stayed on top of these broadcasting programs and VMs it wouldnt be as big of a problem. I do agree phinigel had very little boxers, I know because I was one of the only 6 boxers in classic, and now you see them everywhere. Just a learning curve plus DBGs lack of action

Having VM installed on your machine is pretty much an instant ban without any manual intervention from Daybreak. They are on top of it.

I strongly doubt that.

82% of malware is unable to detect they are being run in a VM.

VM are increasinly undetectable.

VM are specifically designed to make them undetectable to programs running inside the VM, otherwise they would serve little to no point.

https://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/does-malware-still-detect-virtual-machines

"For the last two years, the percentage of malware that detects VMware hovered around 18 percent with a short spike at the beginning of 2014 where it reached 28 percent. On average, one in five malware samples will detect virtual machines and abort execution. This means that malware still detects if it is running on a VM, but only in some minor cases."

Which one? VMWare? Oracle VirtualBox? All of them?

Daybreak creates the problem with boxing themselves.

You have classic with tons of tradeable items and static loot camps, and you allow users to trade krono, this is a magnet for box army campers making $ from this.

Daybreak makes money from Krono being part of the EQ economy, yet they know very well this creates tons of problems.

(Then again, EQ players themselves seem to want all these problems.

If you introduced newbee guildmaster gear from the start, and opened up LDON faster, players would have gear progression alternatives rather than trading krono for gear with these shady farmers.

But the moment someone suggests that maybe classic isn't 'perfect' and has plenty of flaws, people seem to lose it.

The only way to stop krono box armies is to give people an alternative gear path, one that doesn't involve a static classic spawn camp which attracts krono farmers.)

Once upon a time there was a problem. Less than noble Norrathians were trading in-game resources for real live money. This was called Real Money Trading. Krono were implemented to address this problem, so that people could RMT without being able to easily make real live money. While it's still possible to realize real world gains, it's much harder now.

If you get rid of Krono, things will go back to the way they were. At least this way DBG makes more money and the trades can happen in game where people are less likely to get scammed. Please understand what Krono do before saying they are the problem. The problem has existed since the early days. Removing Krono solves nothing and brings in more problems.

This message is brought to you by the "How do people still not know this?" Foundation and the "People who have never bought a Krono, but understand why they exist" Foundation.

Do they, though? Perhaps they created exactly what they intended to.

I don't get it, if you hate the game so much or disapprove of how they run it, don't play. There are alternative servers that align more closely with what you want, or go play something else. For such an older gaming population, the EQ community can sure act like a bunch of entitled millennials sometimes.

That's not why Krono exists.

Krono wasn't invented by EQ. It existed before in other MMO (under other names), it came from other MMO with monthly subs.

The reason it exists is because you have 2 groups of MMO players:
-players who want to pay for a sub
-players who refuse to pay for a sub

MMO companies wanted to get subs from both groups. So they made it possible that one group paid for the other.

Krono (and all the alternatives), were introduced to sell more monthly subs. The idea is that people who can't afford a monthly sub, grinded, and bought the krono from people who can. This increases revenue for the MMO company, twice as many people are paying for subs now.

The fact Krono is now traded on the black market, attracts box armies, and completely destroys any sense of meaningul economy on TLP, was never anticipated by EQ designers.

What do other games do in this regard? Both with regard to boxing itself, and boxing assisted by third party programs? I realize some few specific games won't be a valid comparison since they require too much attention to a specific character.

Also, did the original EQ team have a different stance on these things and did it change later on, or has it always been roughly the same?

It did not. EQ developers have always been radically pro-boxing.

At one point an EQ developer even proposed the idea of combining 2 boxed characters into one, to make it easier for boxers.

You wouldn't have to log on your second character. For example, if you boxed a warrior and a shaman, you could just play the warrior and your warrior would have your shaman slow spell available. The community didn't like the idea and the idea got canned.

It was the EQ developer who moved to 38 studios that suggested it on the (now gone) SoE forums, I forgot his name.

A guy literally just posted on the previous page how to get around that.

Krono serves multiple purposes. EQ stuff was traded on the "black market" long before Krono or the concept of Krono existed anywhere. Now only Krono are traded on the black market, but at least DBG gets a piece of the pie when the Krono comes into existence. CCP Games does the same thing in EVE Online, with paid time cards that can be traded in-game. They do it for the same reasons.

You seem to think it was the Krono that started the "black market" trading, but it was going on long before that.

That sounds a lot like mercs! Which incidentally I like mercs, but the healer at least is far more effective than a real cleric, simply because it doesn't alt tab to look at the internet and tab back just in time to watch you go back to bind.

What about the input cloning programs though? When that first became a thing did they even consider stopping it?

Steve Klug would know, he was responsible for all the EQ code until recently.

I never saw any effort to try to stop broadcasting software, or any hacking tools in general.

The only effort I saw to try to stop hacking was actually bribing the people involved in the hacks, to find out how they did it. Someone figured out how to crash zones in EQ years ago, he could take down any zone he wanted. It allowed him to repopulate the EQ zone with new mobs and named, each time the zone came back up he got new named.

They bribed him with raid gear, until someone figured it out since the idiot updated his magelo profile, and no one on the server had killed the raid mobs yet that dropped the items he was wearing. SoE was pressed about this on one of their Las Vegas gathering by players, but they ignored the question, they quietly removed the gear I believe.

Found the story again.

They basically gave him the best raid gear available for disclosing how he hacked and managed to crash EQ zones.

Only problem was that the idiot updated his magelo profile and it showed gear from mobs that hadn't even been killed on that server. So players started asking questions. How did a guy no one even knew on the server, have top of the line raid gear.

SoE got caught bribing him, the thread got deleted and they refused to talk about it.

http://eqshadowknight.net/showthread.php?t=4154

I'll take that as a rhetorical. I have no idea what other games do.

As a boxer, I'd have to say that's a horrible ******* idea.