Are there some who give boxers a bad reputation? Yep, there are people who run huge box crews that also use hacking tools to detect spawns, warp to them, fly along the skybox to do stuff like cheese raids, etc. In my experience, these are the professional RMT crews. They are here to extract wealth from the game. The unfortunate truth is that they have been and will always be here, no matter what DBG or the devs over at RedGuides choose to do. They will simply find a loophole, change software, etc., as they have always done.

What many don’t realize is that these folks work for companies that service literally every MMO. They just work in the EQ1 division. I think what many don’t also realize is that boxers holding down camps is no different than real people holding down a camp. It was common in early EQ that the high end raiders on your server were often played by multiple people so that it was possible to keep a camp locked down. That’s against the TOS but literally has never been enforced in the history of EQ. PLing evolved from people logging into your account to play for you to joining a box group that AoEs some shit.

As someone that has returned on and off to this game so many times since 1999, I have been equally surprised by how common “professional” boxing has become with people offering AoE PL services & such but also at the same time that I’ve never had the feeling that it affected my gameplay. Playing on Fangbreaker, the only real interaction with them is that they advertise PLing in Plane of Innovation. They’re always off in their own pick and who goes to PoI anyways? It doesn’t affect me grouping with guildies in Bastion of Thunder

Boxers didn’t “keep EQ alive.” They adapted to a game whose population declined, grouping opportunities thinned out, and systems were never modernized enough to support solo players or small-group accessibility. There is a major difference between responding to design problems and being the reason the game survives.

The author also conveniently blurs the line between legitimate multiboxing and automation culture. One person manually two-boxing to cover a healer slot is not the same as six-character scripted crews vacuuming content, monopolizing camps, distorting the economy, and making the world feel empty. Pretending those are the same thing is intellectually dishonest.

What keeps an MMO alive is community, trust, fairness, and players wanting to log in. When regular players feel boxed out by armies of characters controlled by one person, that does long-term damage no matter how many subscriptions are attached to it.

EverQuest does not need fake bodies to survive. It needs real players who actually want to play.

It actually *is* because Daybreak made a call. They’ve been making it harder and harder for people to patch mq every update and most recently added new detection methods that nobody yet has a solution to.

Guilds will end up folding at worst or consolidating at best, on a server that will be much weaker overall.

This is really a dog caught the car moment.

A lot of players don’t want to play with people who use MQ. That’s fine. Then separate the communities. Give MQ users their own live server with clear rules, no warping, no ghost killing, no abusive behavior and let people play a 20+ year old game in the way that works for them. If it succeeds, everyone wins, including Daybreak.

My husband and I were exactly the kind of players this article is talking about. At our peak, we kept 12 to 24 accounts on paid Gold subscriptions every month not through Krono, but through actual recurring subscriptions. We weren’t boxing to ruin anyone’s experience. We boxed because we loved the game, loved trying different classes, maxing them out, doing epics, completing achievements, and building the strongest groups we could. That was fun for us.

We both work full time and have kids. Raiding on someone else’s schedule stopped being realistic years ago. Boxing gave us a way to keep playing EverQuest on our own time, when it fit our lives, without sitting around LFG on low population servers. At first, I had three characters and he had three, and we grouped together. Later, we each built out full groups of our own. It let us keep enjoying the game we grew up with.

For me personally, MQ also made EQ physically easier to play. One of the reasons I chose EQ over other games like WoW was because MQ helped reduce the hand strain and carpal tunnel symptoms that come with long play sessions. We did not use MQ to “cheat.” We used it to make the game playable, comfortable, and actually possible to enjoy long term.

And if Daybreak thinks players like us are going to give up MQ and happily consolidate down to one character each, I think they are badly mistaken. We won’t be doing that. We’ll be canceling all of our accounts.

I’ve been playing EverQuest since 2004, and while we didn’t start boxing full groups until around 2016, it became the reason we were able to keep playing at all. It genuinely makes me sad that Daybreak and the MQ community can’t find a way to coexist, because I think Daybreak is underestimating how many long time, paying players they are about to lose.

I really hope the people at the top understand the financial hit this could cause. More than that, I hope they realize there was a workable middle ground solution here one that could have served different parts of the player base and kept the game healthier, both for the community and financially.

And honestly, if Daybreak wants better ideas from management, they should start listening to the people who actually kept this game alive.