Everquest Mangler Server - DOING IT ALL AGAIN, AGAIN!

Getting dumped in to Luclin naked and trying to do raid content was great. It's unfortunate that on a regular TLP you have most or all of what you need to clear a new expansion already farmed up from the previous. You're just establishing momentum and then maintaining it. Selo was a fresh take.

Getting another TLP where the twist is that true-boxing is going to be enforced for real (yawn) paired with two month unlocks instead of three and then another server that's 100% Mangler with boxing is going to be a complete snooze fest. I'd like to see something fancy again but there's zero indication that is going to be the case. If they had Beastlords and Berzerkers enabled day one of Classic that would be at least a tiny bit interesting but still I think too much to hope for.

Yea zerkers dont exist on TLP which is sad.. everyone quits before they are playable.

Why do people give a shit about MQ on live servers anymore? I don't play live and I NEVER used MQ on live. If I were to play on live again I'd DEFINITELY want at least a 6 box with MQ.

I played on Eqtitan for years and had my own crew of 36 plus a few dozen of my friends toons I could play also. I mostly boxed alone all the way up to Quarm doing almost every event solo save a handful. It was extremely fun and there was PLENTY of loot for everyone. I used to invite other actual people along and if they played 6 or 26 we all took equal turns on loot because there was so much loot when you clear VT or Time or Fear or almost any end game raid zone with just a few boxers.

Obviously if boxers are cocksuckers taking up all the spawns then that fucking sucks and they're assholes. I manually 6boxed my first group to 65 while the rest of the people on EQtitan chided me for not using MQ. Once I finally started using it I was like holy shit... most of what I'm doing is sending toons to attack so why not 3 groups instead of 1 or 2?

Clearly there has to be a balance and I wouldn't use MQ on a live server that was 100% intended for no boxing. They should have a server that allows MQ though - it'd make more money for them...

After running up to 48 toons of my own EQ is fucking easy up through PoP and even after that people that can write code can beat most raids or put 3 or 4 actual humans with great boxing/code skills together and they can still beat most raids much easier than actual humans. Nothing beats a solid healing bot, or multiple healing bots set to heal at different health % or how reliable they are in a ch rot.

Don't go so hard on MQers if they aren't taking content from anyone else.

Cathan said:

Why do people give a shit about MQ on live servers anymore? I don't play live and I NEVER used MQ on live. If I were to play on live again I'd DEFINITELY want at least a 6 box with MQ.

I played on Eqtitan for years and had my own crew of 36 plus a few dozen of my friends toons I could play also. I mostly boxed alone all the way up to Quarm doing almost every event solo save a handful. It was extremely fun and there was PLENTY of loot for everyone. I used to invite other actual people along and if they played 6 or 26 we all took equal turns on loot because there was so much loot when you clear VT or Time or Fear or almost any end game raid zone with just a few boxers.

Obviously if boxers are cocksuckers taking up all the spawns then that fucking sucks and they're assholes. I manually 6boxed my first group to 65 while the rest of the people on EQtitan chided me for not using MQ. Once I finally started using it I was like holy shit... most of what I'm doing is sending toons to attack so why not 3 groups instead of 1 or 2?

Clearly there has to be a balance and I wouldn't use MQ on a live server that was 100% intended for no boxing. They should have a server that allows MQ though - it'd make more money for them...

After running up to 48 toons of my own EQ is fucking easy up through PoP and even after that people that can write code can beat most raids or put 3 or 4 actual humans with great boxing/code skills together and they can still beat most raids much easier than actual humans. Nothing beats a solid healing bot, or multiple healing bots set to heal at different health % or how reliable they are in a ch rot.

Don't go so hard on MQers if they aren't taking content from anyone else.

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I bet Arbitrary has a good take on this

Cathan said:

Why do people give a shit about MQ on live servers anymore? I don't play live and I NEVER used MQ on live. If I were to play on live again I'd DEFINITELY want at least a 6 box with MQ.

I played on Eqtitan for years and had my own crew of 36 plus a few dozen of my friends toons I could play also. I mostly boxed alone all the way up to Quarm doing almost every event solo save a handful. It was extremely fun and there was PLENTY of loot for everyone. I used to invite other actual people along and if they played 6 or 26 we all took equal turns on loot because there was so much loot when you clear VT or Time or Fear or almost any end game raid zone with just a few boxers.

Obviously if boxers are cocksuckers taking up all the spawns then that fucking sucks and they're assholes. I manually 6boxed my first group to 65 while the rest of the people on EQtitan chided me for not using MQ. Once I finally started using it I was like holy shit... most of what I'm doing is sending toons to attack so why not 3 groups instead of 1 or 2?

Clearly there has to be a balance and I wouldn't use MQ on a live server that was 100% intended for no boxing. They should have a server that allows MQ though - it'd make more money for them...

After running up to 48 toons of my own EQ is fucking easy up through PoP and even after that people that can write code can beat most raids or put 3 or 4 actual humans with great boxing/code skills together and they can still beat most raids much easier than actual humans. Nothing beats a solid healing bot, or multiple healing bots set to heal at different health % or how reliable they are in a ch rot.

Don't go so hard on MQers if they aren't taking content from anyone else.

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Live servers you can use third party software to automate. They made an agreement with the MQ author to not attempt to block it on live in exchange for him not making it work on tlp. You still aren't allowed to monopolize spawns or afk automate though. I think it's still more of a "we'll look away in most cases" agreement then totally out there, though.

Of course, now there's other programs that work in TLPs...

DickTrickle said:

Live servers you can use third party software to automate. They made an agreement with the MQ author to not attempt to block it on live in exchange for him not making it work on tlp. You still aren't allowed to monopolize spawns or afk automate though. I think it's still more of a "we'll look away in most cases" agreement then totally out there, though.

Of course, now there's other programs that work in TLPs...

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Cool, on Eqtitan the rule was no afk macros, no warping, no ridiculous game breaking but automating every character's functionality was cool. I ran my whole crew from my warrior's box (screen) on everything but setup for bosses and executing functions the macro can't do like choose who to loot what loot off a boss.

I think that adding a TLP with full boxing enabled is long overdue and will be quite popular. The instancing/boxing combination is something we haven't seen yet and should drag in a lot of folks. It's not for me though. The competitive nature of these servers has pushed every element EverQuest gameplay. Back in the day Charm was a fringe strategy seldom seen in the wild and now it's the gold standard. Repeatable quests went from a nice way to skip some early levels to a way of skipping all the levels. Factory farming of quest items was such a problem that it had to be nerfed multiple times on multiple servers. Boxing is no different. People have gotten a whole hell of a lot better at it and at using it. We're well past the tank bringing along an extra healer or even the guy that likes playing his own self-contained group. The TLP meta with unrestricted boxing is to have many, many Magicians as out of group DPS. Each is kept solo so you or your group need only do more damage than a single Magician to get exp. It's simple and it scales. It also warps the entire game.

Anything you want to do in EQ is improved through the use of dozens of Magician boxes. Are you leveling an alt? Take some Mages with you. Clearing Plane of Fear to get to Cazic? Grinding Sisters in Sky? Goes a lot faster with an extra seventy Mages. Doing your Kunark grind? That's a couple hours work if you've got the juice. AA? Mages. Farming? Mass Mages let you monopolize entire zones. Hell, do the raid content yourself. It's a little more work to add in a tank and some healers but not a lot more and leveling them is a snap. Krono is a big part of the problem in all of this. Almost no one would be willing to actually pay every month for 10/20/30/72 accounts but with Krono you can turn your extra output in to subscription time without needing to do a single shady thing. Instanced raiding is going to segregate many of the super boxers but many more are going to be out there fighting for open world targets and selling the drops.

The Mass Mage strategy is so much better than traditional play that it's almost a different game. Sit in one group for a couple hours doing a normal camp and then sit in another group that has a guy with twenty pocket Mages out of group helping to DPS. It's like taking one hour of your time and getting five or six hours worth of effort out of it. It's objectively better to such a degree that not getting on board means you're handicapping yourself. You are choosing to waste your own time when when you knowingly make sub-optimal choices in an environment you want to be competitive in. I am not willing to make the best decisions and implement the best strategies available so I will not be playing on Rizlona or any other open box server.

Free-range boxing also complicates guild management. With just a true-box rule set you find yourself with people wanting to get their boxes keyed/flagged, bring them to raids, get them geared and such. Who is allowed to do what and how? How does loot work? Even at the best of times it's a bunch of squabbling, salt and a ton of work for officers to keep running smoothly and it never, ever stops. Imagine this though - you are a raid leader in a good guild on Rizlona. Your guild contests and secures open world targets and it's got a big roster. Tonight is a raid split night and you're doing Vox, Nagafen and Yael. You've got 90 human beings piloting 400 total characters and your goal is to set up as many raids as possible that can take down their targets to get the maximum amount of loot. It's early and you don't know who is good and who is a liability. Construct those raids and good luck to whoever tries to do that job week one. Even on a normal true-box server that shit is tough and you get to juggle all the regular shit on top. The obvious answer is smaller guilds but the incentives to be bigger are going to be tough to overcome.

The final issue I will bring up is one of identity. I like the Magician class. I don't like a billion of them used as brute labor. There's won't be any reason to play one but all the reason in the world to play fifty. It's messed up. Tons of people with tons of boxes makes any particular player on any particular character a triviality. I have zero problems with people that like boxing their whole group and a lot of my objections to boxing a full raid disappear with instancing. It's the meta that I don't like.

Damn it, baited by Zaide again.

The boxing server is going to have an awful economy. The krono farmers are going to still play on the true box server because that's where the kroners will be.

Mass boxing is a can of worms for sure. Sometimes you pick up guys who box huge numbers, I'm talking guys with 80-120 boxes. You get these guys in your guild and they can have a weird impact because they pollute the power dynamics. Ideally every member has one vote and weighs in more or less equally on guild decisions (some people are retards, some people are clerics etc so there is some variance) but over time as your guild numbers get a bit lower you rely on the boxers more and more and you find yourself in a position where you Mass Boxer 01 and Outstanding Guild Member 01 are butting heads, you need to weigh in and resolve a major conflict and doing so will cause one of these people to leave, do you take the one talented player who brings one class and plays exceptionally, or do you take the guy who brings 90 characters?

Everyone likes to think they choose the single player, but EQ isn't hard especially in the first like 15 expansions. The skill ceiling is high, and talented players can do amazing things but you never really need them to. One amazing player doesn't win a dps race, 40 wizards/monks might though.

Every time you face this decision, you probably lose a good player. Before long your ability to field raids basically depends on one or two huge boxers, and everyone sees it. It can get ugly and destroy guilds.

Then you have the fact that in the early eras Bob and his 90 boxes in your guild can notice an OW mob spawn at 4am and you maybe don't want to wake your guild up at 4am for Vox raid + 80 where shes going to drop two crystalline spears so you'd prefer to wait until like 6-11am, but Bob knows he can just kill Vox right now. Maybe you can convince Bob that doing that is not in his best interest, but there are only certain kinds of people boxing mass crews if you know what I mean, and eventually Bob is going to move on an OW mob that you'd prefer your guild to kill for dkp etc. The only way to prevent it is to always batphone OW mobs the moment they pop every time. You may think that this is just what hardcore guilds do but on modern TLP's Trak / VS spawn like every 16-20 hours. By the end of 3 months you're real fucking tired of killing Trak at 4am every night so this sort of thing tends to come up.

When it comes to other facets of MQ2 use, it would be arguably acceptable if there were no active hacks, but there are. EQ is often a zero sum game, and when one party is warping, far taunting etc it's just retarded. If you play on TLP servers you need to go in understanding that there will be people who have access to active hacks on your server and they are exactly the type of people most likely to abuse those capabilities in a way which impacts other players.

I'm never going to recover from have needing to give a secret handshake to a level one gnome that just warped in or else he's going to ruin my evening and have that be the environment for like the whole first week. Open world raid targets? Good joke sir.

Things did calm down though.

Zaide you misspelled Spears of Grosk, bro.

Bruuce said:

Yeah, Hobby did the same shit to me. When kunark first dropped on p1999 like 2 days in, a mage in IR was trying to afk hold Rotgus/locket camp during off hours like 5am. He eventually died and I took the camp over. Held the camp solo for like 4 hours. Eventually some IR people woke up and a bunch of them came to my camp to take it back. They petitioned and Hobby gave it back to them, ported me out of the zone. I posted /logs and vods that confirmed that it was my camp per their FTE/camp rules on their website and they banned my IP from the website and suspended my p1999 account. Never played there again



Right, but 'dealing with it' involves the GM using their personal discretion on how to handle the situation. And there have been numerous people on this forum alone who have been slighted in various ways from being removed from a camp, zone, or even suspended or banned based on some of these biased decisions. I would much rather dps race someone or call in some friends to help me with a camp/someone trying to steal my camp, rather having to petition these GMs that play on emu who think theyre an omnipotent god and, at least in the past, have been proven to show bias towards their friends that play

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fuck Hobby he was one of the most corrupt. I remember one of his friends wanted archmage camp in guk and this guy rolled in and said, give me this camp. We told him to fuck off. All of the sudden Hobby shows up and says we trained this guy and stole his camp and he’s been watching us. Of course we told him he’s full of shit so he booted us from the zone and suspended us.

Even on EQtitan's emulator server there was code that would catch people warping and send them to a sort of jail. It was no zone, had no bars, it was just some limbo place where if the served picked up a character warped then it warped them to that limbo jail and they weren't let out until a server dev let them out. A lot of the other major hacks can be tracked like that I would think with smart coding.

I forgot show eq was even a thing lol. I played with a view of every live spawn in the zone on my map for years on Titan. It helps a ton just seeing what's where and with empty zones there's no exploit to just running over and capping whatever spawns. Generally there's nothing up in zones because people run through and snipe namers. No big deal though, roll into a zone you want to xp in and wipe stuff out with your box crew until things respawn...

Once I had 18 65s it was extremely easy to level new groups up to 65 and then aa the shit out of them. Sometimes Titan would have double xp weekends. I'd take my crew to Plane of Fire, put 5 toons with my warrior in a group and everyone else out of group. Hit Lesson and knock out 30 aas in half an hour with 36 toons destroying fire mobs with quadruple xp going. Cycle in the next 5, repeat for hours and hours with lesson and double xp potions from events.

Rangers were all the rage on Titan. Everyone has 10 rangers or so because they could bow mobs down from a distance without taking the AEs. I had 24 at the time and was struggling to kill elemental mobs so I made 2 more groups, 10 rangers (already had 1) 2 more clerics and a shaman. Then I saw some other guys I think were smarter that ran 4 or 5 groups each (less than I was running with 10 rangers) brute forcing everything with a bard in every group to manage the AEs.

Foler said:

Honestly wtf are they doing everyone is stuck at home. I'd even play eq in their shitty servers. Has anyone talked to DBG or Holly?

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DBG no longer runs EQ, the EQ team was split off to a subsidiary studio I believe called Darkpaw Games or DPG. Like two weeks after that happened Holly left DBG/DPG to work for Blizzardon WoW.

Now Jchan, one of the former tech folks is filling the Holly role.

Foler said:

Totally missed that.. Was this recent?

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They talked about the upcoming Darkpaw move like 14 months ago but only actually did it like 2 months ago. Holly left within the first month after that. Just spitballing because I am too lazy to look up all the dates but this should all be pretty close.