Will there ever be a non-box, non-instance TLP?

I'm not against boxed players by any means. I group with them all of the time. But as someone who played on P99 because of the fact that it felt challenging, I feel like boxes ruin the entire atmosphere of a TLP (to re-live the nostalgia of a truly difficult and challenging game).

Ever since Kunark launched, it's like any group I've joined has multiple OOG Clerics, Enchanters outside of it, and most picks are perma camped by box groups. This is legal, and if people enjoy it, then I feel it is okay for them to do this.

But I think some of us would actually enjoy playing on a traditional server where you had way less boxed players, and way less picks/instances, as a result? Mischief / Thornblade don't really feel like EverQuest to me, and I find myself desperately longing for a new P99 server to launch since I can't get that feeling on any of the Daybreak servers.

*edit: Just want to add that despite what I say below, I agree that a good challenge is nice and somewhat missing. I think PLing and buying pre-leveled characters should be eliminated and I'm not a fan of OOG stuff either. Part of the reason I like the idea of a level locked server with all expansion open is that I see there being some seriously crazy challenges to be had there. End edit*

Lack of instances is part of what killed EQ (relatively speaking) when WoW came out imo. I played both games from beta on and off to present day and that's my take. It hurts the game to this day in TLPs. Well, not so much just a lack of instances but no play nice policy and a plethora of jerks combined with a lack of instances. Who wants to wait in line to play where you want and then have someone come along and kill the named you wanted anyway, or, wait, no, the new style is to train you, kill your group and then take your camp. Full open world doesn't work in MMOs, EQ was just in the early days where that was still being established. EQ needs more instancing, not less. I would like to see every zone have a dozen picks at all times so you don't have to wait for a pick to pop to get the camp you want, that's in the flavor of Runescape (a hugely successful game).
As for TLP without picks or instances, what's wrong with just playing on P99? No offense, I sometimes go back to P99 for a bit, they even have the queue system for some named now so maybe they have a good balance for that style with the enforcement the community provides there. Beyond just casually popping in on occasion, though, that OW batphone no instance stuff is for days gone by for me. Never again. Would probably pop on for a while if they dropped a new green server, not sure, depends on the direction EQ goes.
As for a company that has to make money, I think people vastly underestimate how many players are lost because of jerks that EQ gives all the jerk tools to i.e. lack of instances, trains, KSing etc. I've personally seen probably a dozen people quit because of it and have quit myself a couple times because of that kind of toxicity.

So to sum up what might be most peoples concerns. P99 actually = very low population... TLP = SUPER BUSY. We need instances to allow TLP to be scalable from launch and through the first few expansions when volumes are highest and then drop after ~PoP. TLP would be unplayable if we didn't have instances, it's already rough enough on launch day when everyone wants to join at once.

It kind of sounds like you want a low population classic era TLP, the problem is of course those servers are popular.

The issue with this is, policing it.
Example, A user has 2 laptops, they will play on the nonbox server (ruleset is usually can't box on one machine). They have 2 laptops so they box.
Also, EQ restricts to only 1 connection from the IP, you'll have people who play with their wife wont be able to play.

The people who box on TLP are, people are really good at talking out of things.
TLP server start = really easy kronos, jboots krono farming. There will be boxers. They'll find a way to box and get away with it.

"Will there ever be a non-box, non-instance TLP? "

Hopefully not.

I don't really agree that EQ has ever been a truly difficult and challenging game. It feels like its more of having an understanding the game's content and how the game's mechanics work. For some people, boxing more characters makes the game more challenging and interesting to them due to performing multiple/all the roles of a group.

no box? - Highly unlikely, far too expensive to enforce.

no instances? - Again, highly unlikely, a great deal of EQ content is instanced needed to be & while there will always be a small hardcore who love the drama of competing with other guilds for targets that is so easily wrecked by the common appearance of one or two TLP mega-zerg guild(s) which tend to monopolize that content meaning any form of competition is utterly obliterated anyway as they can dominate it 24/7 with batphones & huge rosters of players from around the world & across every time zone.
Without AoC most guilds simply would not get to see many targets, let alone get to kill them.

Big Difference with EQ TLP & P99 is density & % of players who are raiders.
TLP are often over-subscribed, they can comfortably host around 4,000 players yet even with that end up with large queues - two identical servers just about provided enough room for everyone who wanted to jump onto the TLP last year though as with every TLP launch the numbers dropped off after a month or so.
As for % I'd say upwards of 90% of players on TLP are regular raiders, a vastly greater percentage than ever existed on Live servers.

You should stick with P99. There are so many reasons you will never see a "no-box" server or another non-AOC server. Adding AOCs to live pretty much cements them as a permanent feature going forward.

I kind of agree, but also disagree at the same time.

There's some truth to that, particularly when it comes to raiding. I know that raiding on P99 is not a fun experience because it feels like only a small % of the population are even legally allowed to raid or camp certain items due to the lack of instances.

But at the same time, the term "World of Instancecraft" has become commonly used phrase in the WoW community, with a large portion of the community, including famous YouTubers pointing out that the over abundance of instances killed WoW (which I happen to agree with). I get the same feeling when I play on TLP, and that's something I never experienced on P99.

On P99 Green most of us already knew where the best experience in the game was, but we also realized that most of the time, those camps wouldn't have an opening unless you were an Enchanter or playing during weird hours. This encouraged more traveling and adventure.

I genuinely never knew what I was going to be doing when I logged into the game. Am I going to be in Cazic Thule? Collecting Goblin Ears in High Keep? Maybe I'll head over to Mistmoore, Unrest Basement, or Split Paw? It changed every day because I was actually forced to travel to find experience. I can still remember the time I was traveling to Split Paw and discovered that the Treant Camp was open. It really felt like I had won the lottery or something.

On TLP when Mischief launched you couldn't force people to leave Unrest, Guk or Sol B.

But that was another thing about the more original EverQuest, or the general experience you have on P99. Being able to solo was a huge part of the game. Yeah, Cazic Thule pyramid group may be the fastest experience in the game, but you could make a lot more money and wouldn't have to worry about getting a group if you simply went out into the world and explored around until you found a camp that you could solo.

Nothing is wrong with playing on P99, but it suffers from the same problem that TLP suffers from.

The long release between new servers feels bad. When I discovered P99 (during the pandemic), I had no clue TLP was a thing, and after a couple of years on Green, I longed for something different, which is why I got super excited about Mischief. And it was a nice and refreshing change. It's different enough from TLP that you could probably play both simultaneously and have a fun time. I just feel like if there was a "Classic EverQuest" server that focused more on the experience you have on P99, there would likely be a big audience for it, and I think Daybreak Games would handle said server a lot better than the way the P99 staff handle theirs.

It is true, it would be difficult to enforce unless they took a similar approach to that of P99.

This requires context because you can't really compare TLP to P99 or original EverQuest.

People longed for WoW classic and to this day, most people would agree that WoW classic is much harder to play than retail. My girlfriend is actually a good example of this. She loves retail WoW. She only got to level 14 on WoW classic before she couldn't take it anymore. She was getting increasingly frustrated with the fact that she was dying repeatedly while trying to do quests, and after 2 days of playing she was only level 14, but on Retail she would already be max level and have a mount.

Now as hard as most normies think WoW classic is, imagine quadrupling that experience and that is what playing on P99 is like. I had to buy a 24 pack of beer on every single character to get through level 45 (hell level). It was the only way to do it, quite literally, without going completely insane. Now you can argue that that isn't hard or challenging, but for anyone working a normal job, most will agree that simply leveling a character on P99 or traditional EverQuest is much more difficult than any other MMO.

I agree with you that having in-game knowledge helps a lot. I leveled two Clerics on P99. The first time around, I had a lot of issues because most groups never have room for a 2nd Cleric. There was entire days where I would wander around begging to join a group and getting no experience. The second time around?

I solo'd to 50 and made a ton of platinum in the process because I knew all of the camps that a Cleric could solo and simultaneously make a ton of money. It was still a huge time sink, but because they were solo camps, you could virtually AFK in-between spawns. But again, the amount of time and luck required to do this (luck meaning, these niche camps had to actually be open), would be considered an insane under-taking for your average gamer.

This is actually extremely misleading? P99 Green is several years old now, but it had a real population of about 2,000 players online at any given time (since there's only one server, and a ton of non-American players play the game, it's actually as busy at 3AM EST as it is 3PM EST). It maintained this population for years too (content comes out much slower, and you could play for years and still not be max level or BIS).

A majority of the characters on TLP are boxed, which is pretty misleading when someone tries to use it as an example of an active player-base.

This is not an attack on TLP either, or even me trying to say that P99 is better (the two versions of the game are different enough to where they almost shouldn't be compared), but anyone who thinks that P99 has a small player-base is misinformed. To put it into perspective this would be akin to a P99 player logging onto Mangler and stating that TLPs are dead, while completely ignoring the age of the server.

My casual raid guild has something like 60-70 individual raiders - not including F&F status players. There are currently something like 19 active raiding guilds. If you take the number of my guild, which is fairly low in comparison to most, you're looking at 1200-1300 individual players on a server that's 1.5 years old.

This number has literally no casual player guilds or casual players within raid guilds. The population of the server is probably around 2,000-3,000 users with ease and these is just 1 of many TLP servers.

To say a majority of characters on a TLP are boxed is extremely misleading to borderline lying. Maybe Mischief has different demographics, but that's the furthest thing from the truth on Aradune.

You not agreeing with a statement doesn't make it "misleading", it just means it's a critical hole in your argument.

1) You're stance is dependent upon refusing to acknowledge that we've had box restricted servers in the past, I highly doubt that all out banning boxing will reduce the population enough to eliminate instancing, especially since true-box & Mangler's two box rule didn't. Financially, it wouldn't be sustainable anyway as boxing is a good chunk of EQ's revenue.

2) The fact you had to stretch into past tense (a whole three years) kind of supports my point... So by your own admission, P99 now has relatively low pop compared to a TLP in comparable period (Classic-Velious)

But since you brought it up, let's do a launch to launch comparison like you'd like. To recap... P99 Green launched, their plan didn't work in that the overcrowding created enough community uproar that the project had to launch a temporary (Teal) sister server because the zone crowding often made Green unplayable at peak unless you wanted to sit on a list for trash mobs, and the wait was even longer than real Classic period list times long. So that style of launch didn't work well in P99 either...

Are you saying you want heavily contested zone spawns (or ridiculous list waits) like in P99 green, but for 6-12 months? I can't imagine people playing to DPS race over trash mobs.

I agree servers with less boxing feels more organic & enjoyable, it's just unrealistic to limit instances/picks because the hit to quality of life (& even playability) is just to great for most.

You do realize you can start a TLP guild and you & your guildies could just play together in a lighter pop. pickd & your own raid instances, right? Inevitably you'll run into a bot army cycling picks, but botters will pop up on any server type DBG pursues, even the one you want.

EQ is very challenging.. people still get lost to get to raid targets with freaking MAPS on.. This is a water down version of the original game and people still complain how tedious and hard it is.. I think people sometimes have amnesia how the game used to be.

Boxing is indeed not challenging, when free hidden automation makes everything trivial... I love the original poster idea..and I would back it up 100 %

I love your idea; I also long for a more hardcore slower pace server. Phiningel leveling speed was amazing; Think about it: The longer it takes you to complete something, the longer you have the game to play it. I think Zaide said it in one of his stream videos.

I would also love a longer expansion server 4-5months time frames, in which you could enjoy normal/rare loot instead of just BiS mentality due to:
Smaller DZ size, with limited DZ amounts // Longer lock-out durations // Harder MoTM environments // Corpse runs..
-'' but Hirbow, no one wants that '' Then go to your other 8 TLP servers and play there?

Probably not no. The best you can hope for us Truebox. Even the 2 box limit on Aradune seems to not be very popular.

And no instance, again probably not. The content is current for only a short amount of time and without having the ability to pull up a raid instance means that one guild can easily lock the entire server out of the raid content.

Most new TLPs generally have over 2 thousand people at launch, with some around double that. Are you saying that you would like hundreds of people squished into a single pick of Unrest or Guk? That doesn't sound fun to me at all even if lag wasn't an issue. /shrug

Compared to grouping, sure, though not so much versus soloing the same mob without boxes, say. But it still makes the game easier in the sense that people join groups because advancing without grouping is hard/impossible. Which is kind of the central vision of EQ (....until mercs come along).

Also the truebox rules have a uneven effect on class balance. People are drawn to the boxes that give the most benefits for the least hassle (cleric and bards on every street corner now). So it does change the game.

Having said that, I don't really see how they can prevent it without blocking multiple humans at the same address. Apart from minor things like removing autofollow, which won't stop boxes sitting at camps.