Quote:
Originally Posted by loramin
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If you re-read my post you'll see that "discouraged boxing" was referring to the classic EQ servers, not the TLP servers. Indeed, as you noted:
"True box" protection didn't work ... but the way classic EQ discouraged boxing did.
Classic EQ required $50 to get an account, plus a $10/month subscription, plus a second computer ... at least until EQW came out. Even when it did though single-computer boxing sucked at first: you'd get lag when ALT-TAB-ing between your two EQ windows, and the lag got a lot worse if you tried running three or more.
Flash forward to today: you can run six EQ instances without your computer's fans even turning on, new accounts cost nothing, and if you play on live the subscription fee is the exact same amount as it was back in 2000, except that it's in today's dollars and you can pay it with Kronos. Emulated servers of course cost nothing.
We used to have limited boxing in old school EQ, because of the things I mentioned above, but all those limitations are gone now. Technology is better, emulated servers can't charge, etc. As a result, there is no "limited boxing" option anymore: emulated servers have to chose between "let everyone box" or "let no one box".
If you let everyone box it will, unsurprisingly, result in a server where most people box. But when anyone new plays on such a server their reaction will inevitably be "this isn't what live EQ was like", because it wasn't: back in the day live never had 50+% people boxing.
Now there is nothing wrong with 50 (or however many actual people the next most popular server has) all playing three characters at once, and if they have fun together then great ... but that's not what anyone's original EQ experience was. Project 1999 is the only emulated server which understands this critical fact.
If server A isn't like live EQ, and server B is, B is going to be wildly more successful, even if it makes incredibly unpopular decisions like never going past Velious. Think about that for a sec: the P99 people made a critical decision that has a huge impact on the server, and most of its player base disagrees with that decision, yet P99 is still the most popular emulated server! I can see no better explanation for that than the fact that (in large part because of their boxing policy) P99 resembles live EQ, while all the other emulated servers don't.
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Well, no, that's the function of the 3 box limit, to represent Live, where you could box but it had a cost. I'll grant you that the hardware is immensely more powerful, but if we go down that trail then we'll all have to switch to modems, boxing or not. Live never had people with no lag, live never had people with ability to support insane resolutions, etc.
I still think your assumption that it is the single boxing fact that supports the entirety of P99's success to be not convincing. Did you read my earlier, longer post about that? I mean, you might be right but I don't think the argument has enough sample size and controls for all the other great things about P99 to really stand up.