Originally Posted by fadetree
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Yeah, it's an interesting point. Part of the issue I think is that there's been kind of a sea of emulators out there. I never seriously played any of them besides P99 and TAKP, but from what I gather they were all pretty heavily modified and/or were from an era after PoP when many people, myself included, stopped liking the easymode direction that EQ had gone.
So, there was a lot of built up desire to experience EQ as it actually was during the era when most of us thought it was at it's greatest. I actually tried Dalaya and like 1 other one for a brief time, and they were unrecognizable as EQ beyond the superficial setting, and I did not enjoy them.
So when P99 started up it's goal matched a whole lot of people's desires, and its brilliant execution and attention to detail really made a name for itself. People could log on and really feel like they just logged into live in 1999. I personally think that it was not so much the 'no boxing!' that made P99 so popular (although it helped) as just that it was done extremely well and appeared at the right time. So a population built up, and developed it's own cultural views on many things, including boxing.
I think that if P99 had started with limited boxing at that same time, it would not have prevented the player base growth in any significant way. That's just an opinion. But now there's a really strong cultural bias against boxing on P99, and that's fine. I like P99 a lot. But I also think there's a lot of people who liked PoP a lot, and who liked boxing as a fallback to standing around LFG on a short play time frame. A lot of us are much older now and don't have hours and hours to play.
I guess the 'bot armies' thing was a problem in live, although I never noticed it much, but that was supported with ShowEQ, external macros, and no limit to the number of boxes. If Live discouraged boxing, it was in word only, I never saw anyone I knew get in trouble for boxing.
So I guess to look at the emu landscape and say 'wow, boxing kills servers' based on the 1 example of P99 is not a completely convincing argument. P99 has many other things going for it, including the time at which it got started, era accuracy, and excellent devs and regulation, which are also missing from a lot of the other emus both past and present. You could as well say "wow, not sticking to accuracy and not running a tight ship kills servers'. Also keep in mind there's a limited number of people who are even interested in EQ compared to the general population, and P99 has a large part of them already invested in it.
I think that once TAKP drops luclin and starts working on PoP, the population will slowly ramp up, especially as more people start to confirm the things about TAKP that attracted and keep me playing there.
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