"Boxing" question

[Danth]

Originally Posted by Dural_Levant [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It was never really made clear, to my satisfaction, if this might it be misconstrued as boxing. I wasn't sure how to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

There are things you can do to make it more obvious to everyone the other character is indeed a second person.

a) You'll reduce the number of others who think you're boxing simply by NOT having the same surnames. I encountered this personally. My paladin and my wife's cleric have the same surname and some players assumed it was boxing for that reason alone. These self-appointed internet sleuths aren't exactly Sherlock Holmes! Lo and behold, on our shadow knight/shaman duo, which have different surnames, nobody ever accuses us of boxing.

b) Never use auto-follow

c) See to it that both characters are active at the same time. If a cleric sits there and does nothing at all but stand up and cast complete heal once in awhile, folks are going to think you're boxing. If that same cleric is actively helping out with stuff, maybe pulling itself, tossing out stuns, etc, folks will notice that.

d) If your partner is AFK and something like a train happens, don't run across the room to the other computer to try to move it, let it die. Not only will folks notice the afk person dying to the train as the afk person should, but saving it in that manner actually DOES violate the boxing policy.

e) If the other person isn't on, she isn't on. If she has a druid but isn't on, she doesn't log on just to port you, you find someone else or hire a Dial just like everyone else does. I know it's annoying because it's trivial for a person to stop what they're doing for a few minutes for something like that, but in this type of case appearances go a long way.

Note that the staff, if they suspect a boxer, will normally hang out in GM-invisible mode and watch you for awhile before they make their presence known and do their little anti-boxing test. If it's obvious enough you're separate people they won't even do it. They're not looking to pick on you. I've played P99 along with my wife since P99 opened, over 12 years now, and in that time we've never once been subjected to the "boxing test." Simply put, if you don't want to look like you're boxing, then don't do stuff that looks like boxing.

Danth