Back on-topic: I find the Ten Ton Hammer articles, especially the introductory first article about the Chardok raid, highly naive at best. Not to expect cheaters on an EQ server, and to try to "communicate" with a group that is clearly warping, is just stupid and a waste of time.
Failing that, I gotta say the major flaw allowing stuff like MQ to work in this game is the distribution of tasks between client and server that Verant/SOE chose to implement. For instance:
Quote:
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"Warping has always been a problem in EverQuest. There are so many ways that a client can legitimately get across a zone. The server cannot assume all cases of fast travel are automatically hacks. What if the client lagged out where the player lost internet connection for a few seconds? It would look like a warp or a speed hack to the server."
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If the client only submitted an action to the server (i.e. start running in direction xy, cast gate) and the server told the client with each network packet "your character is positioned at XY, facing in direction D and moving at speed S", then it would not be possible to warp. Because the client could display the character anywhere in the zone, nevertheless, the client could not *tell* the server where the character is, because the server would do it's own math on that.
However, that would become very inconvenient with high latency (ping) between client and server. But the least that the server could do is track the average client speed by looking at the current maximum movement rate of the character (speed affecting buffs, encumbrance) and comparing that to the actual difference between two positions over time. There should be short-time plausibility checks (for short distance warping and checking there is an unobstructed path in between) and long-time average speed checks (to prevent speedhacks warping in small steps within the tolerance of the short-time checks).
Then - regardless what the client does, speedhacks and warping could not be effected anymore. I never understood why that wasn't implemented by SOE except due to the "don't care" attitude that we have learned to love so much.
Kind Regards,
Slozem