When will the next Progressionserver start? :)

I don't really think the family member thing was a primary motivation. There were a TON of complaints after ragefire/lockjaw with all the boxed mage armies, etc. On the other hand, DBG makes a huge amount of money from boxing. Truebox was a compromise that let them say "Hey look guys, we did something about it" while also letting them still take in a significant extra amount of $$ from boxed accounts.

Krono may not be hard to come by but 18 a month? On the normal servers they are free to play yet you don't see people boxing more than a group.

But the point is, any student or out of hours office worker could 18 box thing right now, and it would be fully within the rules. Which is ridiculous. Also you can't control more than 6 characters without using automation or key cloning software which is easily detectable.

P99 does it yet their server is bigger than any official server and they have no subscriptions. Blocking IPs can be very easy to do and it can be done by the client itself with no CS required. And using your phone as a hotspot would only give you 1 more IP.

What makes you think you are smarter than me? You just tried to justify this and totally failed at it. The normal servers have no boxing rules at all, but are they full of box armies blocking people? No. If anything they are better because most people only play 1-3 characters because they aren't as competitive and desperate to hoard items and kronos.

Truebox is a lazy half baked idea that doesn't work. It does nothing to prevent the worst types of players who want to block other people or hoard items selfishly at the expense of everyone else, and yet it hinders ordinary players. That is the definition of a bad rule. This is the war on drugs equivalent in gaming and SOE/DB should know better and should do better.

If anything, True Box rules encourages boxing, because it gives you an advantage if you can pull it off. The average law abiding player wont box at all, or will box maybe twice with their gaming PC and a spare laptop or something. But the point is average players will be limited. The person inclined to box an army is now at a far bigger advantage because they will be one of a small elite group of people with 6 individual PCs or similar. The rules themselves make it more tempting, and give a bigger advantage to these people. There are already servers people could play with 24 boxes and it could all be automated. But nobody wants to play there because if everyone can do it, there is no fun or advantage to it.

That is not evidence at all. All the progression servers have been successful and there is a lot more to the success of a server than the boxing rules. Agnarr is the only locked in time server ever made, and it is something many people have wanted for over a decade. And Phini is also unique and attractive in its own way. You can't attribute that to truebox rules, you should have thought of this already with your superior intellect. You should also look at P99, how big it really is, and how they achieve their rules.

You guys have released so many now, you're getting good at it. The next one should go from inception to launch pretty quick, I would hope.

I got the solution: "pay to ban". Some box army annoys you enough, so you buy a CS token from the store and an employee checks him out. Works for all other kinds of harassment too.

Bring out the red server!! It's time for war!!!!

They don't want to play on dead servers. They wanted to play on new servers on launch day. Your "they could play on a different server" is a short-sighted position. Let's agree to disagree. I've tired of this discussion already.

Big boxers on a fresh TLP can and did easily get more than 18 Krono a month on RF/LJ.

Anyone could 18 box. I don't really see what someone's employment status has to do with it. You may not be able to control more than 6 characters at once without automation software but that doesn't mean someone else can't. I mean, how hard is it to control 1 tank, 1 cleric, 1 enchanter and 15 wizards (or mages or necros)? Not that much harder than a group of 6, with the proper desk setup. You assume that because you can't think of a way to streamline the process that it can't be done. It can.

P99 is not bigger than Phinny, it is not even bigger than Agnarr. DBG doesn't go around randomly blocking IPs without some sort of CS response when people complain. Infact DBG doesn't ban IPs, just accounts. That's because people pay for their service, and when you have to make money you can't go around banning people without some sort of appeal process, or other way of making sure your programs are randomly banned innocent people. Because unlike P99 they have to make money, because they have to pay people, so they can't go around upsetting customers whilly-nilly. P99 doesn't have that restriction, they can ban as they see fit, they aren't going to have to fire people when they can't afford to keep the lights on. Surely you can see the difference.

To answer your first question, I have an IQ of 142 so I am smarter than 99% of the population. Statistically, it's highly likely that I am smarter than you, but I could be wrong, I find gaming does draw in a slightly smarter than average crowd.

Back on topic. It doesn't matter what happens on live, because TLP's aren't live. I don't presume to know why folks don't mass box on live, probably because Krono are so expensive that mass boxing isn't worth the time. Or maybe because everything, including group content, is instanced so there is no monopoly potential. I do know that it is worth the time on TLPs, and getting rid of Truebox on new TLPs will lead to mass boxers monopolizing content and upsetting other paying customers. Did you play on RF or LJ? Did you see how miserable it was.

It does exactly what they wanted it to do, it reduces boxing to a reasonable level. I play with a lot of ordinary players, they don't seem hindered. People left RF/LJ in droves long before Phinny was announced because of the toxic environment mass boxing created. It wasn't the only reason people left, but it was a big reason.

DBG's never wanted to eliminate boxing. The average law abiding player can box to, since boxing isn't against the rules. Yes, you are correct, those few folks who can box a full group are at an advantage, but there are only a handful of those folks. On RF/LJ you couldn't enter a zone without tripping over them. It became an arms race and everyone felt they had to box a group to be successful. As I said, that drove people away from the server in droves before Phinny was announced. Truebox was never about stopping boxing, just limiting it to a point where it wasn't detrimental to the server health. They did that, they limited boxing and the plan they put in place wasn't so horrible that it prevented Phinny from being the most populated server ever.

I never said Phinny/Agnarr were successful because of truebox, I said they were successful inspite of it. You are correct again in that there were other aspect of those servers that drew people to them, that wasn't my point. My point was Truebox wasn't so big a downside that it prevented these servers from being successful. People are more than willing to put up with the limitations and "disadvantage" of truebox inorder to have access to content. So it's doing it's job in limiting people's access to large box groups, and it's not so harsh as to drive folks away from the server, and it doesn't cost a ton of money to operate. Sounds like it does the job they want it to do just fine.

You don't like it, you are one of the few folks who is upset by it. Most folks aren't nearly so bothered by it, and can see that it does more good than harm. If more folks felt like you do the servers wouldn't be successful. You are an outlier on the bell curve. No company makes it's policies based on outliers. They just accept that there are outliers their policy will alienate and find themselves a nice happy medium where they can still make money. You can argue till you are blue in the face, they aren't going to change it. DBGs is happy with truebox, since developing the truebox code they have opened 3 servers with it, (Phinny, Quarm, Agnarr) and one without (Brekt, and does that even really count?)

Not really in DBG's best interest to allow customers to eliminate other customers. Or anyone else's really. Given that this is a competitive game in some ways, and players would look to use any such system to eliminate their competition.

Hi Porydas,

CS Rep AgentofChange here. Thank you for your submission against AmazingBoxer67. We have looked into his play, and found it to be within the rules of the server.

If you would like us to look into this some more, please purchase another CS coin for $25, and we will be happy to take some more money - er - help you with your problem.

Have a great day.

I am talking about with True Box rules, nobody has 18 computers sitting around at home. But if you work in an office or are a student you likely can use all of the ones on the network after hours.

I have 24 boxed and been playing with many different numbers of boxes in many different games for almost 20 years. I don't need you trying to tell me what can and can't be done. I already know. The fact is, there are no boxing rules on normal servers and they are not full of people boxing entire raids by themselves. Your argument is wrong.

Why are you telling me this? It has nothing to do with what I'm saying. I am saying P99 sets up the game so that you can only log in with 1 account per IP. It is just the standard rules on that server and it doesn't require any extra work by anyone because it polices itself. If you want a single box experience, P99 is still the best option, which is as stupid as the "True Box" rule.

It isn't about banning people. Why are you arguing this if you don't even understand the basics of it? IP restrictions don't ban anyone. They prevent mass boxing.

Online IQ tests give drastically inflated scores, you don't have an IQ of 142, sorry.

Says who? Tell that to the people who try to camp an item and it is being blocked by 1 person boxing a whole group. There are endless posts about it on this forum.

I am talking about ordinary people who want to box. The rule stops them from doing it unless they run multiple PCs. So it hinders ordinary people, yet the people who treat it like a job can have several PCs or more and key broadcasting setup so that they can do anything. It makes boxing better for the worst type of people.

But you can do that any number of ways and most of them would be better than True Box.

And my point isn't that Truebox is going to ruin servers. P99 has the strictest boxing rules of any server, yet it has thousands of players, every day, year after year after year. My point is that True Box is "stupid". A bad idea. Does more harm than good. Disadvantages the wrong people, is barely an inconvenience to the people who it should be stopping. Could all be done in other ways that would be better.

It doesn't upset me, I don't play on any of the progression servers. I just think it is a bad idea and it would stop me playing on one of those servers so I play real EQ.

None of those things can be backed up, at all.

You can't back that up either. Maybe they chose True Box because they were in a hurry and didn't know what else to do. Maybe they had a more air tight plan but it required some dev time they couldn't afford at the time while pushing out an expansion and multiple new servers while setting up a new company. Maybe they chose it because the players are don't even understand these things so True Box is a placebo that pretends to solve a problem when really it doesn't and it creates other problems.

Just how much do you think it costs to buy a computer that will run Everquest?

There are people who do, in fact, have 18 computers sitting around at home.

Exactly same as petition system in fact.

*grumbles* what a ripoff.

*reaches for wallet*

Yea but they don't count as people.

I love the progression server concept. It is why I cam back to EQ. But, it does seem to have a flaw in that if you keep diluting a population that isn't growing by adding more and more servers you will dilute server populations in general. I think it would be cool to have a few progression servers going of different flavors that had a finite life of a year or three. When a progression server dies or resets a new one is born of a different flavor and all characters from the old progression server get dumped into some kind of combined catch-all live/legacy type server. I think most people enjoy a fresh restart on a frequent basis. But, how can they do this without having a bloat of servers?

Choosing to restart is one thing. Being forced to restart when you are happy playing on your server and want to continue on is another thing. DBG shouldn't get into the game of deciding a server has sufficiently run its course and shutting it down after a fixed time period. That works for a short term server like Quarm. For a long term server, if I knew the server were going away in 2-3 years, I wouldn't start playing on it in the first place.

Eh they should've shut down Vulak before they did and they probably should shut down Fippy sooner rather than later. However that may have been preventable had they split the servers. I do hope they merge up Lockjaw and Ragefire at some point to prevent that situation from occuring again.

Sorry to break it to you, but non-raiders are a tiny minority, and your wants and needs won't be met based in the fact that you don't raid.

What do you care so much if they move your characters to a better server? It's not like they spread them all over so you can't group with friends anymore, or transfer them somewhere with less other players.

I think they should have instancing on all servers to handle the load, then pack everyone on a very small number of them. mmorpg servers should be chock full of other people to interact with.

So, you suggested that this should take place 2-3 years into a progression server. Phinny is at 2 years right now, we are at level 70 and on expansion 9 out of 24. A year from now we'll be at level 75 and expansion 13 out of 24. Ragefire and Lockjaw are coming up on 3 years shortly, and won't be nearly as far along at the 3 year point.

If you were to close any of these servers at 2 years or 3 years in, and dump all our characters onto live, very few of the current guilds would continue on there, and little to no community would survive. People are not going to think, "Oh great! Look at all these people to play with!" All the other people on the server are going to be level 110 and have nothing in common with you.

If we wanted to play level 70 toons on a live server, it takes about a day to level a toon up to that level on live.

Anyone who doesn't want to play through expansions 9-24 is welcome to restart on their own at any time. No need to cancel servers people are enjoying midway through.