Truebox Code Removal for Past TLPs

Just a thought, and I'm curious how the TLP community would feel about this.

Once a new TLP (or set of TLPs) launch, the population on the server(s) before them take a big hit. Guilds lose a lot of members, and it gets harder to find groups.

Even though I currently play on multiple PCs, if I'm actively doing something on a couple of them at the same time, it'll sometimes kick me off the server and I have to log in all over again. This gets somewhat annoying and problematic during raids or LDoN dungeons where there is a timer.

So, I was thinking... When a new set of TLP servers launch, could we get the Truebox code dropped from the previous TLP? It didn't stop the box armies from running around on Mangler anyway, and with Aradune and Rizlona out now, I don't think Mangler needs the Truebox code anymore.

Even though I will continue to use multiple machines, it would be nice to not be kicked off of the server periodically because the system thinks I'm not for some reason. I think it would also help older TLP servers keep somewhat of a population if more people that only have 1 PC can start boxing when they can't find groups as quickly.

TLDR; Can the Truebox code be removed from previous TLP servers once new ones launch? Or can the Truebox code be removed once a server hits a certain expansion?

So another thread about having tlps without truebox. You just got one. play on it. box to your hearts content.

Do people like you get off to telling people no or that they're wrong? I'm seeing a pattern with the 10 replies you just dropped.

I don't want another server. I want to continue on the one I've been playing on for the last year, but remove the annoying code that no longer serves a purpose. Most of the people that care about not boxing are on Aradune now, I would think, and those of us that are left on Mangler would like to see people stick around... And possibly new people that don't want to start in Classic. Removing Truebox from Mangler now could breathe new life into the server.

I desperately wish they would have done this with the release of Rizlona. It's so frustrating to see a brand new server given something for which we have been advocating for years.

What am I going to do, abandon my guild and all the people who rely on me just so I can play EverQuest the way it was originally designed? I don't think so.

So instead I will continue on my "truebox" server, where mass box armies are selling Plane of Time loot for 20 krono a clip, but oh yeah thank goodness for that truebox code that prevents that from happening.

I won't go digging for a link to prove it but it has been stated before that changing a rule like truebox is not something DPG would likely do. They do not want to completely flip on people who played on a server under the impression it would be truebox and then completely abandon that rule on them. You make a good point imo but the odds of it happening seem very slim.

I think that it should just become the norm that when new TLPs launch, the Truebox code is removed from the previous ones. Or that a certain expansion hits and the Truebox code is removed. Literally, there is no one left on Mangler in the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion that would be negatively impacted if Truebox were removed.

• What's the difference if someone is 6 boxing on one computer or 6? There's still no room for anyone else in that group.
• I get that it reduces the amount of people boxing, and that's great for Classic, Kunark, and Velious. But once you start getting into Luclin, Planes of Power, etc.. it starts to matter less. The population is dropping at that point, and the extra boxes would help keep the server populated. (And make up for missing subs.)
• Players that are dead set on Truebox is the end all be all greatest rule ever implemented are now on Aradune. The players on Mangler want to keep playing on Mangler, and giving more folks the option to box would help keep some of them there.
• The Truebox code is janky and doesn't always tell when you're on multiple computers so well. It's annoying to actually be playing on 6 separate computers, but actively doing things on 2 of them... And it triggers the Truebox code to boot you, kicking all 6 accounts off the server and making you relog all 6 computers.
• As someone who has played on Mangler for a year now, I know very few people who don't at least 2 box. There's one guy in my guild that 9 boxes. I've seen 16 box armies. I doubt anyone on Mangler would be able to tell if someone was multiboxing on one PC. lol

This has been brought up many times in the past year or so. DPG has been silent on the subject.

I think they should do this, but I think it should be tied to an expansion and not to whenever they decide to release a new TLP since that is random and arbitrary. Somewhere around DoN feels like the right place to remove truebox.

This would be an incredible bounty to all the players that stay on Truebox servers when the rest have abandoned it for the next rush. GoD is the first major content (excluding LDoN since I have been told that most people don't share my absurd love for it) where you can level-cap exclusively in instances if you so choose, that's the earliest they should probably consider it. OoW or DoN would not be bad choices. Preferably before PoR - that entire level block is one of the larger population killers.

Yeah OoW/DoN seems like the right spot for it, most people have bailed, almost all content including group/leveling content is instanced.

According to dozens of people EverQuest is only important up to PoP anyway, so removing Truebox once GoD unlocks would not offend those dozens of people.

Jokes aside, by the time Mercs are available in SoD the Truebox code is just not doing much anyway, servers are a lot lower in people by then so at latest should remove truebox by then.

Yes, I logged into Rizlona this weekend, and the main effect it had on me was wish that Selos, Phinny etc would get rid of true-box. The convenience and power savings of a non-truebox server is great, but the monotony of doing classic content again is not what I'm looking for. I want to continue to see new content, but using 1 PC and not get booted randomly for hitting too many buttons.

how does this get more bag sales? i dont understand???

It's almost as if Daybreak doesn't want us to play or experience beyond LDoN with an actual strong server community. They always launch another TLP that completely turns the last one into a ghost town right around then. The "buff pile" in PoK is about 1/3 the size it was before Aradune and Rizlona launched... And LFG has been done to 1 person multiple times now. It's very sad to see that fate befall the 20th anniversary server. I wish they'd drop it to every 2 years at least, so we could get beyond LDoN and still have players all over the place.

Because each and every time they launch a new set of TLP servers, they also get rid of the last bag pack and introduce another one. And because of the nature of "Classic EQ" everyone buys the 40 slot bag(s) so that they can loot a ton of stuff without needing to sell constantly. (And they won't become encumbered, because they are weight reduction bags.)

I've been for this change since playing selo and the middle expacs make it so abundantly clear that eq was never a solo game.

But flipping the switch at ldon also feels very premature. I am certain that mangler still has a decent population, but also the entire game isnt as instanced as its about to be around level 70.

Gates has some really good content that is also group friendly or boxing unfriendly.

The PuG crowd leave? The casuals leave? The krono farmers leave? Your five or less buddies leave?

No TLP has lost a majority of raiding guilds after PoP/LDoN, though all of the TLP have steadily declined post-launch there really haven't been any massive die offs on any of the TLP's after Ragefire (Phinigel did hit that one hard) they still had many of their raiding guilds active after the following year's TLP, so that's why I am trying to understand why you say ghost-town & what you really mean by it.

As I see it the majority of Raiders stick around for a while.

The big exodus is of players who annually cycle through TLP's and at most do pop-classic they are the people who wouldn't stick around no matter what anyway so shouldn't really even be considered the main server population, they are far too transitory, TLP Gypsies.

It's more than the general recruitment pool devolves when LDoN hits. This coincides with the TLP repeat cycle, but it's also just a function of guild recruitment + time. Moreover, nearly fully-instanced raid content (seriously Darkpaw, why must you ALWAYS leave something to open world competition, it seriously sucks) make it so that you have a larger amount of raid guilds further diluting the recruitment pool.

The best-case scenario for most guilds is to either overrecruit and mass split, or underrecruit and rely on boxes while seeking out new recruits for specific raid slots.

Truebox is a penalty on every person that sticks with a server past the launch of the next one.

I personally think recruiting is a major crap-shoot on TLP's right from the start & it goes downhill right from the start too.

Guilds with the best starting chance are those who can bring a community of their own to the server (from one or multiple former guilds that enjoyed more than fleeting success elsewhere).
So long as they are bringing a solid & experienced leader/officers/raid-leaders plus some key-classes as a "core" with them to begin with.
Even starting with a great core if you are unlucky with early recruitment you will fill up on seasonal or fickle players who will disappear as soon as the sun is out or drop the guild like a hot-potato the minute they smell a hint of trouble on the breeze - or worst case scenario you get both of those & almost none who stick around. Guild collapses are often brutally rapid on TLP's as a result.

This part of your post is a bit confusingly worded, do you want open world content or not?

I think that the "open World" raid content that pretty much dies after Planes of Power (though it does re-appear somewhat in PoR & SoF) is something that should have stayed for the competition-minded players, so long as it also has AoC instances for it too then the server gets the best of both worlds.

Along with the above the game begins to move away from the more "sandboxy" feel EQ used to have around Seeds of Destruction with the advent of the group-progression model that is rooted in the achievement system's Mercenary/Partisan/Heroic Group quests and this is probably what has lost the later game a lot of EQ veterans who either quit entirely or now prefer to stay in the Pre-Seeds content or even to stay in the Classic to PoP eras & recycle themselves through those on each new TLP server.

I personally hope that once we move past the current "Nostalgia Era" that the game keeps at least some of the group & raid progression systems but tries to get back to its roots as a more "sandboxy" open world game with more open-world raid targets and a reduced amount of instances, named mobs sharing some loot tables with rare named that have multiple spawn locations far & wide throughout a zone so that they don't get monopolized so damn easily.
Another big hope is they don't continue to make levelling all but force you to do progression for XP as they took almost all the XP away from old-fashioned mob-killing.
I do really enjoy doing progression once, but I am not going to do it on alts all over again because that gets old fast and you want a bit of play variety on alts not having to suffer recurring deja vu by redoing all that progression over & over.

You always need to over-recruit on TLP, if you run lean you will die fast, better to zerg or split-raid & take as many players with you as deep as you can go so that at least some of them grow to like the opportunity your guild provides.
It is far easier to hold players in a big guild & when summer hits still have enough to raid to keep the guild ticking over until those seasonal & casuals return, far easier to cover all the key role bases too.
Small numbers guilds are always going to struggle hard and they are way more vulnerable to people taking breaks making them no longer viable. Boxing on raids gets very difficult at times after Omens & very few players are capable of it without 3rd party software help.

I mostly agree with that, unless its some oddball TLP like Miragul was.

I despise forced open world content of any kind, because there are too many people looking to exercise a feeling of power over other people on these TLP servers. Any kind of progression should be competitive-optional on these servers, there is no good reason why forced player interference should form even the smallest part of accessing progression content - period. Leave in the open world stuff sure, just stop forcing people to compete and provide fully instanced progression for the people that want it. Flags, keys, ground spawns, it's ludicrous that players are forced into competing over anything related to progression when we have instanced raids that begin in Classic. The content should be the barrier to more content, not the motivations of other players. I cannot fully express how disgusting I find it that a player might be forced into competition for Ancient Jarsath by another player simply looking to make a few krono. I loathe this vile and insidious practice.

For the rest of what I was trying to say:

By the time LDoN hits on progression servers, it isn't just that variable_X crowds have left the server. Back on live, you had a few major in-era guilds on a server. If you wanted to raid content in-era, you had to be part of those guilds. But on TLP servers, that isn't the case, and so what once was a plentiful pool of possible recruits - those players that wanted to see in-era content but could not - simply does not exist here in the same fashion.

So it's really a double whammy. You have the players leaving the server, but you have a far narrower pool of possible recruits because those players that want to raid in-era content can find many capable guilds to provide that experience. Circling back then to your comments about the potential sudden and rapid downfall of a TLP raiding guild, I believe this is a significant contributing factor. You have many different raiding guilds that are all being impacted by the same population exoduses (whichever particular exodus is relevant for the given moment in time (new TLP? new MMO? whatever is the external attraction in that moment). And because there are so many more raiding guilds, those exoduses are spread across a greater number of guilds rather than a small number of mega guilds. So what you might expect to happen, does - the sudden and rapid onset of downfall of some of those TLP raiding guilds.

Meanwhile, the remaining players in those raiding guilds are spread too thinly. Rather than having just a two or three in-era guilds trying to recruit from the pool of possible recruits, you have ten or more in-era guilds trying to hold things together. Each of those guilds tries to recruit to replenish their ranks, which further diminishes the pool of possible recruits while simultaneously "locking in" the remaining raiders of those different raiding guilds (in other words, the remaining players don't want to just abandon ship, so they will fight to survive and, in so doing, they will "withhold" their players from filtering back into the pool of possible recruits).

This is especially damaging on truebox servers, because they have a much higher barrier to entry for boxing and raid boxing. In the situation I just described, there just aren't many people out there, and the longer that the failing guilds cling to life, the more of its players will simply stop logging in. Maybe those players start feeling the attraction of whatever exodus began the current downward spiral. Maybe they can't motivate themselves to lose their investment in their current guild and simply can't see themselves anywhere else. But there is very little hope in remaining where they are, and in large part because of the truebox server rules, both recruitment or supplementation with boxes is not as realistic as it should be. There won't be enough time to get new boxes up to speed to staunch the flow. The recruitment prospects become worse over time. And so the rapid and sudden downfall of a TLP raiding guild or two gradually becomes downfall of the TLP recruitment population.

And for what reason? So that the mega boxers will still circumvent the rules with VMs, remote desktops, cloud computers/Azure/AWS, and custom-compiled emque builds, and in so doing can run Plane of Time twice a week and sell the loot for 20 krono a shot? So that the people that have already left the server could have forced their disdain of boxes on the rest of the population that remained?

Darkpaw. Do you even care that the mega boxers on truebox servers have completely circumvented your code and are playing purely to monetize the game for their own profit? Do you even care that the players left behind have to struggle to box a few characters while the mega boxers can do it with impunity?

Remove the failed truebox code for TLP servers that have reached the point where instanced group content essentially removed the majority of any possible disturbance that boxing can cause for the non-boxer.