Seems like you put a lot of effort into this sever so let me give you some hard learned advice from my experience struggling with this on Storm Haven for 5 years.
Boxing is a double edged sword in EMU.
At its core for Everquest boxing is essentially cheating the system. You have a game designed around having one character where your personal progression is based on improving that character to a maximum potential. Allowing the use of additional characters by an individual instantly create inequity in the game world in relation to other players.
This inequity is inherently a long term negative on a server by stratifying your players into 'classes' of those who don't box, those who do box and how many they box. Therefore, your definition of an individual player is no longer the same thing, thus as a developer will eventually need to tune and create content to meet the needs of each of class of individual player. In terms of game design this an extremely inefficient way to manage a game. The higher you set your IP limit the more disastrous this problem becomes.
In commercial games this is less of an impact because there is economic disincentive due to costs of additional accounts incurred on the player, if the player does box the negative to the game is off set by the income generated. In contrast to EMU which you can have unlimited accounts at no cost to the player (donation fee to box is not worth it from a developers stand point).
Ultimately what ends up happening on a server is in order to maintain any integrity/challenge you have to tune your content to whatever the upper limit of your boxing is else content will be trivialized. This of course disenfranchises all those who can not box and essentially pushes out all of those players severely weakening your community. The double edge sword part comes in because high box limits will artificially inflate your population and make your server look more alive then it actually is. Long term though you are better off having more individual players then just handful of boxers because your population and literally rise and fall by the actions of just a few people.
All that said.
Here is how you can avoid the pitfalls of boxing. Embrace it and tune for it intentionally.
Decide what you want to define solo,group and raid content in terms of actual individual players (not characters) and then tune your content to that factoring in boxing.
For example lets take a schema considering realistic population for EMU.
1 person for solo, 2 persons for group and 6 person raid.
Whatever your upper limit of boxing is present and multiply each by and then tune your content for that.
Ie 2 boxing. 2 chara = solo, 4 chara = group 12 chara = raid
Ie 3 boxing. 3 chara = solo, 6 chara = group, 18 chara = raid.
This will allow you to maintain balance in content. However, as mentioned earlier it will create inequity, which is only solved in this case by simply being honest with your population that boxing is a part of the server.
In conclusion.
My recommendation is if you can tune well enough and avoid boxing your server will be better positioned for long term meaningful growth by maintaining player equity, opposed to just boxer inflated population growth.
Kayen
GM Storm Haven
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