Macroquest

[Itchybottom]

What sucks about MacroQuest2, despite what Rogean has claimed, is that it isn't really detectable. There are certain behaviors on clients that make MacroQuest2 stand out (depending on what plug-ins are being utilized, actions per minute, all of that jazz), but there isn't some magical process monitoring going on here. Nor does an established connection, or a connection being made from the EverQuest client differ from a regular client for the most part. The exception however is when you start detouring memory addresses, such as run speed and have that locked during a zone event. That's not MacroQuest2 specific though, that can be done with any cheat toolset.

Hackers log entires will be target distance, client initiated zone requests, large movement requests, and sending OP_SpawnAppearance packets. It's pure gut instinct banning someone on an EQEMU server otherwise.

With that said, I really wish I never released my ProjectEQ build and have often times contemplated adding disable checks for various servers. However, more communities have sprung up that provide source code and compiles for EQEMU specifically, and they would in turn just use someone else's compile.

I'm open to ideas on how to prevent MacroQuest2 on EQEMU. I've already stated in another thread what MQ2 can and can't handle buffer wise, that the client is oblivious to. I've been wanting MQ2 gone since late 2007 after people on ProjectEQ started running 24+ characters and causing zone crashes. Third-party injection tools are really the first line of defense against this, but users like me have trust issues without source code available to such a beast, or at least enough time to set break points in a debugger and trace the stack to figure out what the hell said third-party application is doing on my PC. Maybe a binary diff and patch for eqgame.exe could be released, that changes some of the memory regions and behavior in client? That'd knock out nearly 99% of the people that use MacroQuest2, because their offsets would no longer function. That amount of code caves though... Good lord.

And to clarify, I don't mean just changing offsets, I mean changing the way certain aspects of the client function, and changing it server side to reflect the population value of data.