Why do no emulators use mercenaries?
 

I thought that mercenaries were hard coded into the client. Thus, using them seems to be a no brainer over use of bots or even multiboxing. However, no emu server seems to use mercenaries. I am just wondering why? I am asking because I HATE having to box since it always seems like more work than play. Bots don't work well enough . Thus, if mercs are available, it would seem the much better approach to making the game more solo friendly.

Plenty of server do. Ours does, Karana. And we have bot enabled as well.

And to answer the question, bots have gotten a lot smarter and you can control a lot of aspects of them, melee distance, spell choice, etc.. so they are more versatile now. Mercs after 70 get kinda useless...

ish

Adding mercs to a server requires more effort than meets the eye. First, the various tables are not in the database by default. You need to locate the thread that has the script to create them. You also need to run a version of the server that supports them. Mercs are broken in some releases, including some recent ones.

I'll check out Karanah. What other servers have mercs working? I think Retroquest (no, I think it was Chosenquest) did at one time, but later removed them.

Bastion has mercs and bots. Bots are limited to 71 per account but will be lowered if player volume picks up and impacts the server. Mercs are game limited to 1 active at a time. AFK playing is permitted, and right now the server is pretty much wide open as far as rules go. Bastion is running on it's own dedicated server, but due to location weather can impact it's uptime. There is also a bandwidth cap because of service cost, I have yet to hit that so far. I try to only bring it down on Mondays to make sure it remains stable and to do updates and fixes if any.

Give it a try,

Nameless