Wed Jul 29, 2015 8:07 pm by flec
It has a lot to do with the culture of the people on the current TLP servers.
There are a few types...
1) Normal people - hold 1 account and go LFG when they want to level up/do a dungeon.
2) Small scale boxers - 1 to 3 accounts, used for doing content they might otherwise miss. Example, monk + shaman + enchanter, cleric + sk + enchanter, 3 mages etc. This is so you don't have to sit and LFG for hours to level up your characters or get level appropriate loot. I am one of these people. I run a monk, shaman, and enchanter and am able to do essentially any level appropriate dungeon and also bring guild mates along to benefit from my hard work setting up a balanced group and a ton of keybinds so I can pull, mez, slow, and heal.
3) Large scale boxers - 4+ (people go up to 18, 24, and so on). These guys are doing some pretty awful things. There is no instancing in old school EQ save for a special load balancing system they created for crowded dungeons. All world bosses are on long timers, though they recently upped how often they spawn. Daybreak has taken an extreme approach up to last week or so, saying everything is a DPS race to see who gets the loot. Elements on the server have taken advantage of this, essentially warping in mage armies and kill stealing gods. As a result, they've not only had to buff the raid encounters to deal with the number of 18+ mage boxers that chain summon pets, they've had to react to coordinated mass unsubscribes from the other guilds trying to do it the old fashioned way. They recently introduced a forced raid rotation. The result is the top guild who is the main offender splintering into many different guilds so they can take up rotation slots, some literally ONLY filled with boxing mages (1 - 2 people in actuality), all for greed over god loot. See, if that was the end of it, maybe it would be okay. But these same boxers will take their 20 x level 50 mages and sit on spawn points in low end dungeons (Runnyeye comes to mind) and essentially prevent any level appropriate group from actually being able to do the content, all so they can farm the rare items for plat so they can buy Krono (currency for game time) to actually fund their 20 accounts. This is on a server where the population is so large (reportedly 3500+ at prime time) that essentially every valuable named camp above a certain level is essentially perma camped. They don't respond to tells. They don't respond to camp checks. They are so small in number, because they outlevel the content, that it doesn't spawn another instance of the zone either.
You'd think they could solve this with policy, but I don't think they saw the issue soon enough in planning stages. You can't really implement a policy to limit the number of accounts someone has or force people to somehow play nice now that the damage is already done. If I could make a unilateral decision, I would just forcibly limit the number of accounts you can have, make it a bannable offense, and then implement a play nice policy to stop people from being huge dicks.
Instead, they start fresh with a no-boxing policy. Which to me is honestly not a particularly appealing idea, as their are classes in classic everquest that literally just can't solo. So you'd be logging on every day traveling around hours trying to find a group. Ramp up time in EQ is hours in this system, and your commitment goes up even further due to travel time, occupied camps etc.
I'd say most people don't have a problem with small scale boxing. Hell, it was pretty common even in the old days. Not sure why we can't come up with a policy system that works properly while making an experience that doesn't crush people's ability to play the game so that the few hundred who have 18 mage boxes and those that benefit from them can monopolize content.