7day trial a good idea?

Back when I first started to be interested in multi-boxing - I did some research and found that there are tons of free hacks, bots, cheats and mods available online. I didnt try any of them because they were designed to cheat the game systems - they were designed to be illegal and I was not interested in cheating, hacking, botting or chancing a ban in my game of choice: LOTRO

A little more research and i found a few programs like ISBoxer that cost money to use, but they specifically advertised that they didnt support bots, modding or hacking and were designed to work with game TOS and EULA and were permitted in games.

This was very attractive to me and I focused my attention on ISBoxer and researched it and decided I wanted to try it. Back then the seven day trial was a request and i put one in but was not granted one for whatever reason. That was ok with me and I took the chance and subbed for 3-months at $9.99 anyways - of course i fell in love with ISBoxer and it was like a breath of fresh air to me - it brought back the luster and wonder of my MMO that had been missing for sometime - I havent looked back and will continue to multi-box with ISBoxer as long as I play MMOs.

recently - in my game a small group of people are causing a lot of problems in LOTROs PvMP area by doing what is called "Freaver Farming" - basically LOTRO is F2P so what happens is a subbing player (you have to sub to be a regular player (called Freeps - as in free people - LOTROs player class heros) in the PvMP area - but Monster play is open to F2P accounts) the subbing player will make a bunch of F2P creeps (what they call monster players - i know Freeps and creeps - very cute eh?) called reavers (orcs) and since they are free - they have been coined freavers - (slang is fun huh?) and then let their freep kill all the freavers over and over to gain rank and reknown - which makes them stronger. This is call freaver farming.

Although this can be done by a group of willing people with out multi-boxing or multi-logging - the community mistakenly blames boxing as the problem and are calling for an out right banning of Multi-boxing in LOTRO - i know that that probably is not going to happen - but multi-boxing software certainly makes it easy for one bad egg to create a team of freavers and farm away.

and i find that the general misconception of the LOTRO community and the stigma of multi-boxing is hard to over come and most people i meet thinks i am cheating or botting and they also believe that every boxer is farming freavers or somehow gather more than my share of resources of gold or what ever. I dont even try to reason with a lot of them anymore and just asks them to either report me or leave me alone - but to the point

Some people are suggesting that turbine removes the games ability to follow and assist the target assist leader to make multi-boxing harder if not impossible - i doubt that that will happen as many player who do not box use these tools and there would be a big outlash if they did.

I guess what Im saying is that now that the 7 day trial is a download to anyone who wants it (instead of a requests that may or may not be granted) some people (small - but very visible) are using it to gain a week of Freaver Farming - that they dont really care about multi-boxing and are complicating the bad name that boxing already carries...

Anybody have any thoughts about this? I think it is a concerned and im not sure if a 7 day trail is a good idea for the software - the legitimate boxers - and our reputation.

discussion please:

[Ualaa]

I think the trial is an excellent idea, as it gives people the ability to investigate the software and see what it can do, prior to actually investing in a piece of software.
I don't see Lax changing that.

If the software is getting big enough that manual approval is not a valid method anymore, automatic approvals are the way to go.
Not sure if that is the case or not, but Lax will go with what is best for Inner Space and IS Boxer.





In each given game, players like or dislike boxers.
Generally more are curious than hostile.

But hostile or not, it doesn't really matter.

I don't see Turbine changing the follow/assist system in their game, which would make the game far harder to play for everyone.
With the side effect of being even harder, or possibly impossible to box...

The haters can hate, but they're either paying customers or not.
If they're paying/subscribing, then despite their vocalization/hate of boxing, they continue to pay for the game.
If they're not a paying customer, they're still playing in that environment.

If you could demonstrate a large percentage of the player base is quitting, because others are boxing...
That's about the only way player dislike of boxing would even have a chance of impacting a game designer.

Yeah - I know I am probably over reacting and multi-boxing is not in danger of being banned in LOTRO - trial versions are a good thing for any software for reasons stated - and the truth is it isnt Lax's responsibility for what users do with the software - and was probably only a secondary after thought I had while venting my concerns - he urges users to be good citizens and me suggesting that he should respond to this ordeal by altering his business model is ridiculous - Its just that this Freaver Farming has generated more hate and vocal criticism toward Multi-boxing then I have seen in my 2 years of boxing LOTRO and the LOTRO forum chatter has gone from mild annoyance towards MB's to very specific hatred towards us and calls for punishment.

It kind of freaks me out - in the game world I went from being harassed 25% of the time by people i run into , to nearly half of the time. It used to be "im reporting you for cheating" or "Botting" ( which can quickly be proved to be false) - to "Im reporting you for Farming [Freavers]" - and I never stepped foot in the PvP area - I only PvE.

Now abundance of resources of gold, crafting components, barter tokens etc. kind of goes with the territory, while boxing: I went from one toon having 25 GPs to 20 toons having 25 GPs each, just from casual leveling, and I do have teams on other servers whose sole purpose is to grind me account wide Turbine points that i use to help unlock content (its better than a coupon and sometime its as good as a gift certificate) and I sometimes bend my teams full effort toward the enhancement of one toon ( for ex. farming skirms for medallions and marks that I use on a alt for better armour, weps and gear) that i then use as an edge to beat the next Instance or boss.

What I do isnt much different than farming freavers - the big difference is I use the advantage against the environment - the freaver farmer uses the advantage towards other PVP 'ers.
if the haters are successful in getting turbine to clamp down on freaver farming in anyway - does that not set a precedence against "farming" in general?

It just seems like a slippery slope and a step backwards for the legitimacy of multi-boxing in general.

I guess my hope in posting here is to send a appeal to anybody that may be using this software for farming freavers in LOTRO and are reading this to understand that what you are doing is at least making it harder for other boxers (or at least me) to go about our game with out extra harassment and to at least be discreet about your activities - leaderboards with the top 10 spots filled by level 85 freavers named "Orc-one, Orc-two, Orc-three, etc" is at best a big middle finger pointed towards non-boxing PvP'ers and at worse a blatant disregard for Lax's own suggestions to "be a good citizen" with his software.