Coth Ducking

[forensic]

Anyone who knows anything about the top level raiding scene also can smell the unspoken reality miles away:

The winners of this game are people that know how to macro and automate without getting caught. EverQuest is extremely hackable and extremely automatable. Back in Classic the top guilds were all using all of the cheats, macros, mods, automation they thought they could get away with.

To me it sounds like this server has GMs that are more attentive and interested in catching cheaters, but that just means they're going to catch the obvious ones, and the winners of the game will be people who were subtle enough to make sure their cheating is of the type that can't be caught.

The kinds of "competition" people are talking about here is exactly the kind of competition that is easy to automate while appearing to not be automated.

There are entire suites of software that provide tools to people to allow them to automate gameplay--especially in non-twitch games like EverQuest.

I see these "uber" players going around doing stuff like swarm kiting 40 mobs in tight perfect circles. Like circles with a 12 foot radius. For hours on end. Who the fuck are people kidding? These people are obviously not doing all of this manually. They're using various forms of automation. Whether that automation is technically legal or not is irrelevant. The point is that you have no chance to win unless you also use these techniques, and using these techniques means playing a programming-oriented metagame of plausible deniability and becoming friends with moderators so they start to believe that all your achievements are actually skill.

I've seen it all before.

So anyway my appeal is just to the purists like me who want to play the game with no scripts, no modifications, no programming or macros of any kind. Not because this will make me a better player--in EQ a purist will always be inferior to those willing to do what it takes to win.

You should play this way because it's way more fun, even when you lose.

Now let me tell you a story... I was in a guild of around 50 people and we discovered that it was easier to create software on each players computer that would allow the leadership to control their characters for them than it was to teach each player every raid encounter.

All guilds are made up of a core of 1-5 people who do 90% of the work. The remaining people are more or less bodies filliing up slots. Those remaining people may put in a lot of time, or they may not, but the point is that they are fairly easy to replace and don't bring a lot of key intelligence or competitive spirit to the guild.

In one of my guilds, the core 4-5 people realized that we would be most effective and adaptable by actually writing software that our players would install on their computers that allowed us to just control their characters remotely. Think of it like long distance 50 boxing. We would just map their abilities on to certain triggers--including movement and making heavy use of the /follow command--and this would allow us to puppet string entire raid forces.

This made us way more effective. Imagine having 1 person in control of all the wizards in the raid. The head wizard pushes a button on his software and all the other wizards nuke at exactly the same time. This is just a bad example. The point is that this allowed for tremendous control and flexibility.

Some of our players complained that it was like making them no longer even a player of the game. But even those complainers were quickly silenced because they very much enjoyed being part of a guild that was so dominating.

This was just one little intiative that was dreamed up one day and then implemented 2 weeks later. There were dozens of others, with the most basic being straight up automation of tedious tasks combined with alert mechanisms to bring the player to the computer should a GM send them a tell to test if they were AFK.

The knowledge kept inside uber guilds in MMOs absolutely dwarfs all of the public knowledge available on sites like p99 wiki. Most of the tricks of EQ are still probably NOT known to the general public.

Now by my estimation... the top guilds on p99 are of fairly low calibre worldwide. IB/TMO are not really big fish in a small pond but just little fish in a tiny pond. But the nature of EQ--with it's lack of instances--means that the winners of EQ are going to be people willing to take their competitiveness to the next level. Whatever that level may be.

So my advice to BDA and everyone else who feels wronged by IB/TMO is to stop trying to win at a rigged game. Learn to enjoy EQ as a purist like me and have fun roleplaying and doing low or mid level grouping. You actually don't have to play their game, and you don't need gear from Veeshan's Peak in order to have fun.

Life is way too short to get upset that people are beating you in a videogame. Just realize you'll never win without going into "hardcore" mode and that going into hardcore mode is not worth it.