VGOEmulator.net

I agree with Dinenon and Shargash. I found that boxing made the game more fun and challenging, but I never met a single boxer that insisted on playing one of their boxed toons over allowing a real person to take that spot. Almost all of them always played the boxed toon as a last resort.

For me, I didn't use any programs to run them, it made the game a lot more fun and opened up more areas for me. VG was very boxing friendly. I really want to keep this option available to people who want to play it.

Very few players overall were capable of running a whole group of boxed toons. That require a lot of dedication, not only time in levelling their toons, but also in equipment that could handle running that many sessions. So I don't really see this being a big deal or a dealbreaker for grouping/community.

Like Dinenon said, having the option of the boxed healer actually saved grouping for me more than once. (It actually saved our raids on MANY occasions where that extra healer was vital). Nearer the end of the game's lifetime, I had to play Main Tank AND Main Healer. This was on major stuff like Shendu. It was a hell of a fun challenge and it made the game so much more fun - but most importantly, it allowed us to raid. Without my tank (Our only raid level pally) and healer (One of our few clerics) in there, we wouldn't have been able to do it.

[quote="Zukan"]I'd be interested in hearing how boxing promotes community though.[/quote]

What I found a lot of times in late, low-population VG was that we could get 2 or 3 people together, but not necessarily have both a healer and a tank, or you'd have 2 healers and a tank, something like that. Because I had pretty much one of everything, I could bring on whatever the group needed (a healer + dps, 2 dps, a tank and a healer) to make a well-balanced group.

Put more simply, if you don't have enough people playing to make a group, with each player playing 1 character, then you're more likely to make a group if some players are playing two characters.

Let me turn the your question around -- how is it that someone playing two characters harms your ability to play at all? How is it that my playing two characters is any different from two people playing two characters?

[quote]
Let me turn the your question around -- how is it that someone playing two characters harms your ability to play at all? How is it that my playing two characters is any different from two people playing two characters?[/quote]

That is an easy one to answer (from a server admin perspective)

As far as harm to game play, there is none..I think the "harm" issue is a red herring. Not having a group at all in a group-centric game is fatal, as such it doesnt matter of its bots, or boxes, its necessary for consistent gameplay.

One also consumes more server hosting resources than an individual player, then multiply that usage time the number of client sessions you are running (since you are going to require a separate account for each box). Resources I might add, the admin has to pay for, and boxers consuming those resources who are not contributing to the hosting costs are not very welcome by most emulator server admins. (its why most have a one account per IP address policy)

Also....when boxing, communication is slower and less consistent with human group members because your attention as a boxer is divided between one's boxes, and when the boxer has technical difficulties, they get multiplied by the #of boxes, and the group can grind to a halt waiting on the boxer to reboot all their machines and otherwise recover whatever issue.

This is pure conjecture on my part, but its not hard to think that boxing may have hastened the end of the live game, given how many people started boxing VG once it went free-to-play and never actually bought anything, or bought a premium account while consuming SOE server and network resources. That would be a money-loser for sure, and at the end I have to wonder how many VG players were simply riding the gravy train into the ground.

I suspect VG was better off financially pre-F2P, I mean look how many kept paying despite SOE not updating anything for 2 years. Maybe the population was half-boxers, but at least they were all PAYING boxers. If you wind up with half the population or more boxing in F2P and not paying, that is the Titanic heading for the iceberg, and the same is true, but worse for emulator admins, as they do not have the padding of a corporate bankroll, or a core subscriber base to absorb that many people leeching service. The model only works if enough people are actually contributing.

I'll be honest, I think you're going a little overboard on the boxing thing. Everyone that I knew that boxed, except one person, paid for all their boxed accounts, even after F2P. I was one of them, I paid for 3 accounts myself. The only people that boxed that didn't pay for it (That I knew) were the people that had buffbots that they otherwise didn't play very often. But anyone that seriously played their boxed toons, paid for them.

Most of them were actually quite attentive as well. I mean, hell, one guy got me through the Vaelion trial and it was just me and 5 boxed toons. That was the smoothest run I've ever been through, it was quite amazing what skill that fellow had.

And given that a lot of what VG offers wasn't very forgiving, I don't really see how a boxed toon is taking up too many resources - when you need that spot filled anyway. There are very few dungeons you can run without a healer, or a tank. (Granted that changed a little as things got easier). But there was still a glut of healers and tanks for a long time. It's not so much "This one individual is taking up too many resources." It's more like "This group needs six players anyway, and this group isn't using up more resources than six players, regardless of the boxing."

Honestly, I believe what killed VG was the Devs not understanding what made VG special - and destroyed that while trying to make it more mainstream. No one's going to leave their established toons in WoW or EQ2 for a game that's woefully trying to emulate them while destroying it's own uniqueness. Boxes didn't do it. Boxes probably kept it going long after the game was obsolete.

[quote="Kinshi"][quote]
Let me turn the your question around -- how is it that someone playing two characters harms your ability to play at all? How is it that my playing two characters is any different from two people playing two characters?[/quote]

That is an easy one to answer (from a server admin perspective)[/quote]
One person playing two accounts consumes, if anything, slightly fewer server resources than two people playing two accounts, as the boxed character moves around less and chats less than the primary.

For the record, I paid for 6 full Vanguard accounts right up to the end, though I almost never played more than three of them at a time. I would break down my playing as 60% single box, 30% dual box, and a little less than 10% three box, with the remainder being mostly unsuccessful attempts at running more than 3. If I couldn't have boxed, I would probably have quit Vanguard before it went end-of-life, and I certainly would not have paid for 6 accounts.

IMO, there is almost no downside to multiboxing and considerable benefits to allowing it. You'll get more paying customers, consuming fewer resources per account, and making grouping, raiding, and other social behavior more flexible, at least on a low-volume server.

It is true that we're not paying anything to play the emulator, but I think it would be a server owner's decision as to whether he wanted to pay for the extra resources. I think it could only be an issue if we had so many players that the server was struggling, but that's a problem I would love to have.

[quote]I'll be honest, I think you're going a little overboard on the boxing thing. Everyone that I knew that boxed, except one person, paid for all their boxed accounts, even after F2P. I was one of them, I paid for 3 accounts myself. The only people that boxed that didn't pay for it (That I knew) were the people that had buffbots that they otherwise didn't play very often. But anyone that seriously played their boxed toons, paid for them.[/quote]

I would say that view may be a bit idealistic. Sure, it would be nice if it were true, but people are like water, flowing the path of least resistance, and if they see a "legit" way to get away w/o paying the majority will take that. If there were so many people actually paying, then we would probably still have a live game. Again, I view this form the server admin side, having actually hosted live, public emulated MMO servers for the longs haul (4 years plus) and measuring and monitoring the server and network activity and seeing who was actually contributing, and who attempted to game the system and try to con me out of extra accounts.

[quote]Most of them were actually quite attentive as well. I mean, hell, one guy got me through the Vaelion trial and it was just me and 5 boxed toons. That was the smoothest run I've ever been through, it was quite amazing what skill that fellow had.[/quote]

Yes, one can have a good experience, but that area is really a non-issue. I classify those as more an annoyance than an actual problem.

[quote]And given that a lot of what VG offers wasn't very forgiving, I don't really see how a boxed toon is taking up too many resource...[/quote]

I explained that earlier..the resources are client sessions, connections to the server, and the bandwidth they collectively consume, along with the server resources (RAM/CPU/storage/drive needed to support larger numbers of concurrent players and maintain performance levels) and someone has to pay for the bandwidth and hardware, given there are not going to be subscriptions. You may be surprised how fast the network and server resource demands scale up once you get beyond 64 concurrent client sessions in an MMO. They can scale pretty big even for FPS dedicated servers.

...where it gets really pointed is when you have players congregating in the same zone..this is why SOE used to have rules about "player gatherings" in EQ, those huge #s of players cramming into a single zone, especially in view distance of each other dramatically increase server and network load. Its why the EQ bazaar was so darn slow at first, and got redesigned, it was 100 players all AFK in the same small room.

For instance if you self-host, you are going to want asynchronous broadband, otherwise your upstream connection can get easily overwhelmed, especially cable connections, as you rarely get sustained rates that are half the maximum advertised). If you are only supporting like 50 concurrent session, its not a big deal, but when you have 1,000 concurrent sessions, and a fixed amount of network/server resources, the boxers can and do prevent single session players from being able to login.

This is why I say for emulated server, boxers who actually, regularly donate toward hosting costs are not a problem at all. Its why you get alot of them who do not contribute at all, but wind up consuming large blocks of available sessions by themselves that they become an issue.

[quote]Honestly, I believe what killed VG was the Devs not understanding what made VG special [/quote]

We could write novels on this topic..but in the end the cash flow was not there to back up all those sentiments of specialness and SOE kept VG going a lot longer most publishers would have under similar circumstances. and all the money needed to PAY to recognize all that specialness had to come from somewhere, and someone had to justify the expense and demonstrate that, yes it was a good investment. Apparently nobody in SOE thought that it was a good investment. Lord only knows how may favors Brad had to call into Smed to sign off on that deal, as it reeked of poor business decisions and doing a personal favor instead.

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Of course the effect of boxers on the final days of VG are conjecture (like I stated previously) but I seriously doubt there were so many paying good Samaritan boxers as one likes to think, certainly not enough to pay to keep things running, let alone turn a profit.

You are correct, boxers did not cause the overall failure, no argument there, but in the end they (non-paying boxers) would have been dead weight in a F2P model and they are certainly dead weight on a emulated server if they are not helping pay for the network and server resources they consume. Again this is why few emulator servers embrace or even permit more than one account login from the same IP address unless one is willing to state they have, actual live players behind those accounts. It has nothing to do with esoteric things like the need for class interaction, and everything to do with the cost of supporting it.

The developers have copious network traces of client connections to Vanguard, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the network bandwidth required for a VG client. However, I know people who played original EverQuest over dialup, so I don't believe network bandwidth has anything to do with, say, Project 99 not allowing boxing, unless they're running that server on a connection that's a LOT slower than my home Internet connection.

In any case, the performance concerns are really irrelevant unless (a) there are so many people logged on that the server is pegged and negatively impacting game play and (b) a significant number of the people who are logged on are multiboxing. I just don't see that happening. On the other hand, I expect the developers to do some performance testing with large numbers of connections somewhere down the road, so we should know eventually what the limits are.

[quote="shargash"]The developers have copious network traces of client connections to Vanguard, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the network bandwidth required for a VG client. However, I know people who played original EverQuest over dialup, so I don't believe network bandwidth has anything to do with, say, Project 99 not allowing boxing, unless they're running that server on a connection that's a LOT slower than my home Internet connection.

In any case, the performance concerns are really irrelevant unless (a) there are so many people logged on that the server is pegged and negatively impacting game play and (b) a significant number of the people who are logged on are multiboxing. I just don't see that happening. On the other hand, I expect the developers to do some performance testing with large numbers of connections somewhere down the road, so we should know eventually what the limits are.[/quote]

Take the login server for instance, on normal operations it may not see a lot of concurrent traffic (why would it), players get authenticated and passed along to a zone server..BUT..say the server was down for maintenance, then you have the ENTIRE player base attempting to login at the same time. In the case of the SWGEmu Star Wars Galaxy Emulator..imagine 1800+ unique client sessions all attempting to login and transfer to the zone server at the same time. That is like facing a DDOS attack.

..and that game also uses SOE Protocol like VG does (not exactly the same but has many similarities).

Also, what many do not appreciate, is how much more network traffic is generated by more players in the same zone, especially when within view distance of each other. You may recall how laggy old EQ got in raids, and it was NOT a matter of graphics capability, but in how much data had to get crammed into the dial-up connection, and re-transmitted to every other player session in the same area, and newer MMOs have even more data being transmitted.

The orginal EQ bazaar was an example of that in action..it did not matter how powerful of a GPU you had, that zone would lag like mad, because it was a networking capacity issue due to player congregation, and SOE wound up totally redesigning that zone and split it up into separate areas not visible to each other.

For me, its not conjecture, I hosted a public SWGEmu server for 4 years with peak concurrency just shy of 200 concurrent client sessions, with a hundred plus on a daily basis, and I used a professional router and firewall, that could measure and log the amount of bandwidth used by each session, and you would be surprised how much a single session can vary, and over time you learn to identify what is actually happening when you see those dips and valleys in a sessions bandwidth consumption. I started out self-hosting but it was clear as the server grew, no amount of cable bandwidth was going to be sufficient to meet the demands I was seeing, and dedicated hosting was a must..and NOT because of CPU or even RAM, it was all about bandwidth needs.

..and the increase in bandwidth was trivial to measure when players congregated. The bandwidth consumption of all session in a congregation scenario increased significantly and kept going up as more players come into the same zone. I again point out this is why SOE had "no public gathering" rules to deter player from congregating in single zones, because such congregation generates much more network traffic, much more than it would if the players were scattered around the game in small groups. Its why Eve Online asks players who know they will be having large fleet battles to let then know 24 hours in advance so they can move the given region to a higher performance node of their server cluster which includes a lot more bandwidth along with computational power.

An easy, at-home way to see this in action is host a server, on a typical cable 55/5 connection, and get just 20 people on at the same time, and measure the impact using a throughput analyzer and see just how fast the 5 MBps upstream gets eaten since realistically its only 2.5 mbs sustained, and goes down because its a shared network medium, and all your neighbors can cut into your capacity.) Then scale up to 40 and measure the difference, then 60, then start congregation scenarios and watch your network become paralyzed. (and all other types of traffic on yor network grind to a halt as well)

...an even easier way is to seed a popular torrent, and adjust the upstream bandwidth allowed to a level similar to the ranges a MMO client would use and measure your overall network performance as the # of peers rises. You learn fast how many sessions you can support before performance is impacted for all.

To put it in perspective, the SWGEmu live server, (just the game server, not the login server) is in its own location on a 1 GBit line with a 5000GB transfer limit..and that is not overkill, its necessity, given the server maintains anywhere between 1200-2300 concurrent sessions daily and has peaked with over 3,000 concurrent sessions....and still has to handle all the come and go traffic as well and maintain consistent levels of performance for ALL sessions...and they maintain a test center as well.

The cost to maintain the levels of performance required to sustain those numbers requires them to pay over $2000 in combined hosting expenses (inc web, as the forums are linked to game account creation) research wiki hosting, and a very large cache of web-based research materials saved from the live SWG forums that the public uses daily, and their gerrit code repository

I would also quite this direct from Project 1999 website...

[quote]... Although the server is provided for free to players, it is not without costs. The infrastructure to run a full Everquest server is significant, requiring high end hardware running in world class data centers utilizing direct internet backbones for bandwidth. Additionally, the servers and it's facility must be able to withstand many of today's malicious cyber attacks that aim to deny service.[/quote]

I guarantee you the resources required to keep P99 afloat are not that different from SWGEmu despite both games being made in the age of dialup connections. There is so much more to it than that.

I promise, Im not whistling Dixie on this topic. If you intend to host a lot of players, and maintain good performance, this is a huge concern.

[quote="John Adams"]I'll put the kabosh on this topic now by saying VGOEmu has no intention of limiting how many clients can connect from a single IP[/quote]

Can we stop banging this pointless drum now.......

Kinshi, what you say would make sense if hardware technology stood still. EQ was released in 1999. I have in my house more processing power, more RAM, more disk space, and more network bandwidth than Sony had for any of its servers in 1999. You point out the issue with your "typical cable 55/5 connection." When I referenced my home Internet connection, I was taking the increase in bandwidth into account. I have 50/50 fiber into my house, and that is really the cheap stuff (a free upgrade from 25/25, which is as low as you can go). I can get up to 500/500 in my house, and I can get that at a price I could afford out of pocket. I don't, because I have no use for it.

I get that congregating people can chew up a lot of bandwidth. Where I was coming from is that the pipes are so much bigger now than they were in 1999 (or 2006), that I can't believe we can't deal with it.

However, I do think this discussion is academic (for now) for two reasons. First, John has said he's going to allow multiboxing on the official emulator. Second, Vanguard was never that big to start with. Despite server consolidations, EQ is still running about as many servers as VG ever did. There are hordes of nostalgic ex-EQers trying to relive their youth on P99. The Vanguard emulator will never have those kinds of numbers. VG rarely had 200 concurrent connections for the last several years of its life (I know because I used to do "segmented" /who commands (/who 1-10, /who 11-20, etc), so unless we're going to have more players than live Vanguard had, I just don't believe it's going to be an issue. IMO, low server population is far more likely to be a problem, and in that case you'd better allow boxing if you want anyone to group or raid.