Horizon Strikes Again

Other than the few who can't find parties because they suck as players or people, this describes every multiboxer I've ever met. They are good players who fill the time with their mules and/or use them to help fill in roles when they can't be filled with real players. I've had some help me complete content with their "army" and seen them repeatedly do so. When I was multiboxing (mainly for Ambu because I suck at multiboxing), I'd routinely bring friends in so they could get points.

Most people in 11 I've met are decent folks and more than happy to help others, including multiboxers. I've never once seen one refuse a real player so they could bring their mule.

sorry my point was you saying "who cares..." in a room where half the people are swing a sign that says "I CARES" seemed weird, if you meant WHY do they care that would be a different statement.

They care because they perceive it to be a threat to the health of the game they play, they perceive it this way because they see it encroaching on spaces where no private server had dared to go before.

there is going to be an official Everquest 2 Classic server soon cant wait to play a real classic server

Really? My favorite part of EQ2 in the early days was how you could die crafting. You'd walk into a crafting guild and see bodies on the floor.

That and fighting fking snakes outside of town for exp.

I was also sad to see they got rid of all the server first awards with that social site, it was really neat seeing those even years later. I had a bunch of first discoveries that are gone now :( RIP.


That's part of it, the other part is the blatant bs that gets spread through the internet about 75-cap and retail.

I often wonder how far many of these folks waxing nostalgic about that era made it, because most players I've met who went to Horizon sucked at retail and listening to them talk about 75 cap made me think they sucked at it then too. The majority of the drum beating I hear about how bad retail is from Horizon players comes from people who were either terrible to play with, terrible players, and/or barely made it into endgame before drawing conclusions. For many, 75-cap is familiar to them, it's what they remember, and learning all this new ***is overwhelming. A major part of the game over the years has been adapting to new systems and new content, but people want what is familiar and what they remember instead of putting the effort forth to learn new things. That's all fine, but it's idiocy to draw conclusions from things they never experienced and for all the crapping on Horizon that goes on, there is just as much from Horizon players doing the same to retail. The difference is we lived that era and the majority of the Horizon players talking ***about retail barely got anywhere in current retail.

At the end of the day, beyond this post, I don't really give a ***either. If SE doesn't care enough to invest in the game any more and they apparently don't care about drawing players back in, it's not worth the energy. I've been watching the db numbers trickle down for the last 3 months and the majority of the people I play with have quit. If SE doesn't care enough to invest in bringing them back then it's not worth much of my energy to bother trying to win people over (which facing reality isn't going to happen anyway). I just think people need to stop pretending they experienced something they didn't and stop drawing conclusions from things they never did or finished.

When all a person has ever seen or done is XP grind up to 75 then the XP grind up to 75 is the entire game to that person.

you are 100% right they suck in both xiv and xi so they find a niche in XI Pserver ( i mean they have all updated Addons for it too LOL) , The problem of XI is Sortie right now, heavily Time Gated and you can not solo/duo or spam, yet if you are still progressing in making / Gear or Weapon, and i honestly would like to be able to solo sortie because lots of people are cheating and expect too much of you. iv done 8 bosses like 2wice and quit recently came back and lil bit *** up on alita boss had disabled the Spell Names by boss could not indicating the boss weakness after the second proc literally made me quit coz of that Corsair retard spaming me RDM does not know how to do this when i celarley do and i forgot to Change the combat log because every 1 is mega zooming and a hurry could not catch a break lol, and the other problem there is not enough EU players around to GRP for sortie everything is really 12 AM my time and more lots of people quit for other reasons too.

i haven't played too much of EQ2 on release i am really excited but did play some TLP i heard its really not the same outside of EXP parties, and the EXP Parties were just roaming in dungeons

Always cracks me up when I see people lamenting the utopia XI could be if only it wasn't for those goddamn multiboxers ruining the game!

I really enjoyed it at release, one of the only other MMOs I put any time into. There are some really annoying things, like guards from opposing factions will attack you (imagine if walking into Bastok from Sandy required sneak) and crafting killing people, but the world is really vast and interesting. Some of the fights against dragons and bigger mobs are really interesting. The lower levels are much more boring than 11, but there is more to do at endgame, at least compared to 75-cap at the time I played. I did the quest to speak draconic in the early days and it took us to some wild places. The downside is that aside from a few quests, you rarely see these, they didn't do a great job of weaving them into the game or quests.

You only have a certain level range where you can get loot from mobs too, if you are above a certain level then they grey out and won't give you anything. This forces you to fight stuff with a group a lot of times and prevents people from leveling up and stomping stuff to get loot. Imagine if TW mobs in 11 didn't give drops, that's effectively what it is. There are some creative ways of leveraging this where you are just high enough to kill the mob, but not high enough to grey them out and get nothing, but it isn't easy. I made a ton of plat and had a bunch of world first discoveries doing this in Stormhold, but once I hit a certain level, they'd grey out and I couldn't do it anymore. IIRC lvl32 was too weak to do it, lvl33 was just strong enough, but lvl34 would grey them out. That sort of thing.

The job mechanics are really different though, your skills end up being replaced and on a shared time with the previous tier, so it's not like 11 where you get a skill and it stays in your hotbar forever. Gear is also attuned so you don't get to use it on multiple jobs (nor is it specced for it anyway).

The aesthetics aren't great. I tried playing it a few months ago and it looks awful but it is an interesting game, it felt more "modern" than 11 did even at release. I understand a lot has changed since then since SoE isn't around anymore. Their attempt at legitimizing RMT was kinda hilarious too.

Its not just multiboxing its the blatant and rampant gil buying thats done in the billions. I also think readily available gil in unlimited supply is what kept/keeps retail a float. If people couldnt swipe their credit cards and keep pumping out rank 15 mythics empys etc the game would have less players.

lmao i thought this was the sole reason of creating a private server?? and it seems like they're only mad because they got caught. I guarantee that every other 'admin' is doing it as well. It's free money, why would they not?

but didn't you know that everyone is paying for 12 separate accounts every month!? it doesn't matter that having that many would be patently stupid in a game that primarily caters to groups of 6, but never let logic get in the way of what people read on Reddit once and took for gospel.

I currently run with a small group and the only time anyone dusts off an alt is when we are missing 1-2 folks so the rest of us can play. it's never a first choice and people do whatever they can to avoid having to multibox, but the p-server crowd spouts to the contrary mindlessly, so it must be true!

Defending private servers on a forum full of retail players is asinine. If we don't like your garbage why do you care what we say here?

I know why you care, you care cause your server has a high churn rate of people quitting. That you defend it so hard here is proof of that, if you were content and stable you would not care what people thought here and you would just spend all your time on your discord.

Collateral damage.

The reason why the game became so popular in the first place was that it forced players to work together to make progress. That forced/fostered community interaction and genuinely made the game stand out.


The strength of any multiplayer game, MMOs in particular, are their communities. Multiboxing is antithetical to community so in that sense, it does 'ruin the game'.

FFXI has always been a niche game and I'd hardly say it was popular even at its peak. The game design didn't make the game stand out enough to get a decent player base compared to other MMOs at the time which as we have seen cause SE to try other things, which paid off.

As for multiboxing lets face it if all the people who were multiboxing cancelled all but one of their characters it would probably cause SE to rethink their stance of keeping the game running or best case scenario cause them to do another server merge.

Agree, but that game died a long time ago. You're trying to hold today's XI to a pre-abyssea XI standard.


The game isn't in its current state because of multiboxers.

There's multiboxers because of the game's current state.

You are either a solo account player buying gil by the truckload or you are multiboxing either way its a far cry from $15 dollar a month to play a game lol.

This, but, it's a circle. More boxes because state, state causes more boxes, more boxes deteriorates the state, the state causes more boxes.

Circling the drain.

But it never reaches zero, everyone that quits, another box is created.

FFXI was the highest grossing title SE had at one point. Niche in it's market maybe, but it was far from obscure.

Server upkeep isn't nearly as expensive as people make it out to be. If all your tools broke and you couldn't bear trying to alt-tab between your entourage, the game would persist.



I'm not holding today's game to any standard. I'm just pointing out what led to this game's peak.


Again, the community is in it's current state because of multiboxing. That has an impact on the overall state of the game.

Sure, I just wanted to point out that the circle didn't start at multiboxing. I'm not going to argue that MBing helps the community in any way, but I'm sure the $100/mo I shell out to SE does something to keep this dumb game alive.

CLINT!

nah there are several things that factor into the community state, multiboxing not even being the top offender. merc culture, lack of alliance content, almost zero influx of new players, inflation with less things to spend gil on, etc. all factor in. and always, things get exaggerated here and aren't as bad in game.

Gonna need you to break this one down for me chronologically then.

It mostly starts with boxes. Most people started 2 boxes not because they couldn't get help , but because2 boxes means double the rewards, and no one to pay back for helping.

That's the beginning. Selfish people broke away from linkshell slavery and bought they're own help in the form of a 2box. The game was "healthy" but unfair.

As 2boxes got popular, cooperation ended. Why rely on a rando when you can be your own healer, your own buffer. People who don't follow that logic quit and boxes go from nice to have, to must have. then you're in the bubble where you don't even see other players and it's not an mmo anymore.

(If you want to go to the VERY begining, all the 2boxes were power levelers. That was long before the state of the game made them needed)

Brother, if it wasn't on XI, it would be spent on steam games I'll never play, MTG cards I'll never sort, or any other number of more expensive hobbies. While SE probably doesn't deserve it, $100/mo is still a cheaper hobby than almost anything else I would be doing.

Lol you really are an idiot aren't you?

STFU Sock account

By that argument, Trusts are antithetical and hurt the game too then, right? Is SE self-sabotaging?

Maybe I missed the window where alts were "nice to haves" and just happened to make one when they were considered "required", but I didn't notice it. AFAIK, alts aren't taking the spot of real players for any serious content that matters. I've never cleared a v25 with someone boxing their alt through that content at the same time. I don't see or hear about 8/9 boss sortie runs with people boxing an alt through it. They might play those accounts for that content, but they're not dual/tri-boxing their way through it.

Paint me a picture of what the game looks like if we waved a magic wand and removed all the boxing. Does Vana'diel heal itself? Do people start flocking back to XI because they have to rely on other players again?

Maybe boxing did cause the decline of the game/community, I still haven't seen any definitive evidence of boxing starting that cycle, but your scenario is completely plausible.

It always seemed to me like Abyssea was the biggest singular event in XI's history that caused (incoming exaggeration) half the players to quit overnight because their E.body and Ridill wasn't the hottest ***anymore. Nothing to do with boxing, but because people would have to continue grinding to flex their elitism over the scrubs once again.

Can't unfuck the sheep, no coming back.

But in a different timeline, who knows. No boxes forces people to ya know, play an mmo like an mmo, or the games closes servers. Instead of this zombie bastardization.

Trust magic scales up the more real players you have in the group, but they're much weaker than even moderately geared real players when you're solo. This makes more of a case for filling in gaps with trusts if your friends/static couldn't make it or you couldn't find someone else to fill in.


I'd argue the exodus started even earlier in WotG. It had almost no endgame, the zones were all reskins and the story bled out over the course of several years. XIV had been teased by that point and the writing was on the wall for XI. Honestly, the failure of XIV probably had more to do with the second wind FFXI got in Abyssea.