If you’ve been around the EQ community this week you’ve probably seen the RedGuides announcement. They’re going emu-first, and MacroQuest’s future on live and test servers is suddenly a lot less certain than it was. A lot of people are brushing this off as a niche community thing that doesn’t really matter. Those people are wrong, and Daybreak’s finance team should probably be paying very close attention right now.
Let’s Talk About What EverQuest Actually Looks Like in 2026
Log into most live servers on a weekday afternoon and open general chat. You might sit there for an hour and see nothing. The game was built in 1999 around the idea that there’d always be people around to group with. That hasn’t been true on most servers for years now.
Mercs were supposed to fix that. They didn’t. What actually filled the gap was people running box crews, almost a third of them using some form of MacroQuest — not because they wanted to cheat, but because it was the only realistic way to actually play the game when your server has forty people on it and you’ve got ninety minutes before the kids go to bed. For a lot of live players MQ isn’t a hack. It’s the whole reason they’re still subscribed.
Here’s the Part That Should Worry Daybreak
A MacroQuest boxer isn’t one subscription. They’re three to six. Someone running a full six-box crew is paying close to $1,080 a year. When they cancel, Daybreak doesn’t lose one account — they lose six at once.
And before anyone jumps in with the free-to-play argument — boxers are almost universally All-Access subscribers. FTP restrictions make running multiple accounts a nightmare. The people on free accounts aren’t the ones farming Time or running six-box LDoN missions. The boxing community is paying full price, for multiple accounts, every single month. By conservative estimates they represent somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of EverQuest’s real subscription revenue. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a significant chunk of the game’s financial foundation walking out the door with no replacement plan in sight.
They’re Also the Ones Stocking Your Bazaar
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough. Boxers aren’t just subscribers — they’re the backbone of the player economy. The stuff that moves through the bazaar — tradeable drops, tradeskill materials, rare camp items — a huge share of that exists because a six-box crew with MQ could efficiently clear content a solo player never realistically could.
When they leave, that supply dries up. Prices spike. Things that used to be accessible through the bazaar just aren’t there anymore. The solo players who sometimes complained about boxers hogging camps were also shopping the bazaar those same boxers were stocking. You don’t get the camps back when the boxers leave. You just get emptier camps and a worse economy for everybody who sticks around.
Truebox Already Showed Us How This Goes
We actually don’t have to guess at what happens when MQ gets restricted. Truebox servers already ran this experiment for us.
When MQ got locked down on servers like Teek, the legitimate community boxers — people running transparent six-box crews at keyboard, the RedGuides crowd — largely stopped. The RMT operations farming Kronos for real money didn’t. They had too much financial incentive to just find workarounds, and they did. So the result wasn’t less automation on those servers. It was less community boxing, with the profit-driven botting outfits still flooding the bazaar like nothing changed.
That same pattern is about to play out on live servers. The hobbyist boxers will quit or migrate. The bots farming for profit will adapt and keep going. Daybreak will technically have less visible MQ usage and a much worse game for it.
So Where Do the Boxers Actually Go?
Most of them are just done with live EQ. When the tool that made the game playable for your schedule and your server population goes away, there’s not really a compelling reason to keep paying for multiple accounts to stare at empty zones.
A solid chunk will land on emu servers. RedGuides is already pointing their community toward places like Project Lazarus, which is MQ-friendly and honestly about to have a very good few months in terms of new arrivals. A smaller group will try to make manual boxing work through ISBoxer. And a very small number will consolidate down to one character and stay subscribed. That last group is smaller than Daybreak is probably hoping.
What Could Daybreak Actually Do?
Realistically there are three options. They could officially sanction some kind of multiboxing tooling and acknowledge what everyone already knows about how their game gets played. They could finally invest seriously in mercenary AI so solo and small-group play is actually viable. Or they could do nothing, say nothing, and watch the attrition happen quietly over the next year or so while the game drifts further into maintenance mode.
If you’ve watched Daybreak’s response to EQ population concerns over the last several years you already know which one they’re going to pick.
One Thing That Could Change All of This
MacroQuest is open source. It’s been around since 2002 and has outlived multiple dev teams already. MMOBugs still had an active live compile with 169 plugins running as of mid-March. Someone new could absolutely pick this up and keep live support going, and if that happens a lot of this analysis changes pretty quickly.
The problem is that uncertainty alone is already doing damage. Players who aren’t sure MQ is going to work six months from now are already thinking about which accounts to cut. You don’t have to wait for the support to actually end for the cancellations to start. If you’ve got reverse engineering or C++ experience and you actually care about this game, now would be a really good time to show up.
The Bottom Line
Daybreak has looked the other way on MacroQuest for years because going after their most active paying subscribers would hurt them more than tolerating a gray zone. That’s ending now — not because Daybreak made a call, but because the people doing the volunteer work of keeping MQ running on live have decided to move on.
What fills that gap isn’t going to be people rediscovering the joy of LFG on a half-empty server. It’s going to be emptier zones, a thinner economy, and the RMT botting operations that were never going to stop no matter what. The people leaving are the ones who were quietly keeping this game’s lights on. The people staying are the ones Daybreak actually wanted gone years ago.
If you’re a live EQ boxer, share this around. If anyone from Daybreak happens to read it — genuinely, read it twice.
Great article!
At this point in EQ’s life it appears wise for DBG to embrace multi-boxing. Honestly, fixing mercs would be a bad business decision for DBG since they can derive more revenue from individuals subbing for 3-6-12 accounts. MQ and it’s plug-ins are so mature now DBG could literally take them and make it a part of the game. Since they are a business and need money from every angle they can get, I think they should add a “perk” cost to allow you to bind owned accounts for grouping. Once, you pay the cost you get access to a plugin that you can configure for the character logged in.
Hands down the best experience playing EQ is running 6 accounts yourself or even raiding with a few others doing the same. I haven’t found another game with such an unique feature albeit cheating by current ToS.
What Daybreak could do is actually pretty simple: create a live server where MQ is allowed, without suspensions or bans, and let players transfer there if they choose.
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.
I don’t disagree with anything you said, but just wanted to also point another issue. Guilds, especially live guilds, heavily rely on subsets of their roster to fill their roster holes with bots. When those bots disappear, there will undoubtedly be repercussions for the guild members that do not delve into that world.
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.
Actually daybreak hasnt been looking the other way the last few years. there has been multiple waves of suspensions and bans every year, and they have actually ramped up their fight against MQ, which is why MQ devs have decided to sundown the live/test updates. This is dpg taking a stance to kill their own game.
Wow they finally found a way to kill the game that’s been around since 1999. Incredible new management accomplishes what none before could do!
I have been playing ever Quest from the very start, and it breaks my heart to think of not playing but several years ago I had a life changing accident and could not play Eq well enough to get groups anymore or not let down who I was with But thanks to the RG team I was not only able to play again but mulitibox I 7 subbed accounts and my wife has 4 DBG is going to lose all of our money without MQ I wont be able to play again why would i keep playing
I is smart ogre. I does fixit.
> not because Daybreak made a call, but because the people doing the volunteer work of keeping MQ running on live have decided to move on.
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.
I box 5 characters. . All gold accounts. I’ve never used MQ and never will. You don’t need it to box.
This article is a crock of shit because it starts from a false premise: that EverQuest’s health depends on people running armies of automated boxes. That’s backwards.
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.
The person boxing on a server with a peak hours population of 200, especially on TLP servers into later expansions or live that are almost exclusively instanced content, is causing no one any harm. I agree with this article that those folks are likely somewhat helping their server economies. More people playing means more rotting chase loot as people are leveling through a new xpac, more items for the bazaar, etc.
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