TenTonHammer: Everquest Hacking

[Tarathiel]

arguing on a gm created thread? ya'll are dumber than i thought

[DoucLangur]

Originally Posted by Kevlar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Warping takes advantage of the same commands that make zoning, gating, and stuff like shadowstep and call of the hero possible. Speed hacks take advantage of bard speed or other speed buff powers. No way you could take the ability out of the client and still play the game.

Maybe I am overlooking something here, but I doubt it in this particular situation. If - for speed reasons - a shadowstep needs to be performed by the client - what hurt is done if - at the same time, the client needs to submit the info "player casted shadowstep at time t" to the server, and the server makes sure that a) the shadowstep is among the abilities of the player, and b) the effects are the same (cast time was taken into account, mana is lowered, etc)? Gating would work the same. The best cheat that could be achieved by shadowstep, if for playability reasons it is not possible to let the server determine the random destination location, would be to shadowstep in a direction of choice, repeatedly.

I already explained how bard speed could not be abused: The server would perform it's plausibility checks against the serverknown current max movement speed of the toon. I do not see how zoning mechanisms could be exploited to gain speed with such settings. Maybe you can explain that. Any Call of the Hero would go through the server anyways, to tell client A that its player is CotHed by client B. No way to exploit that with proper server coding from what I see.

So what am I overlooking?

[Connador]

Originally Posted by DoucLangur [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So what am I overlooking?

They're not allowed to make some changes the client for legal reasons.

[Gwence]

ever since they had compiles for MQ for windows sony really hasn't policed that shit too much as long as you weren't ghost killing frontier raid mobs, why would they?

the cheaters pay subscription fees same as the non cheaters, and it's an addictive game so as much as people talk about quitting because of cheaters it rarely happens. Sony might be terrible at making video games but they're not stupid when it comes to understanding their product and the market.

sony also incorporated quite a few different command lines that originated with macroquest such as /melody, cross zone inviting, tradeskill ui etc etc..

Im not defending cheaters just pointing out it's not always clear cut when a company makes their decisions.

[DoucLangur]

Originally Posted by Connador [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

They're not allowed to make some changes the client for legal reasons.

I was explaining my point that cheating is only possible due to poor task sharing between the client and the server in the original EQ. I was not talking about means to apply anti-cheating patches here. Although some of the stuff could be implemented serverwise without modifications to the client.

[Shiftin]

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[Aenor]

Originally Posted by DoucLangur [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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.

It's absurd for SOE to cry poverty, that the resources to address hacking are not available. Red99 does it by way of volunteer efforts. At any point, SOE could have formed a committee of active players and given them access to logs to prove who was cheating... not give them power to take any action but allow them to do the grunt work of CONFIRMING what suspicious character actions were the result of hacking. This might have happened if SOE cared about anything but getting their next transaction (i.e. expansion). But this shows why SOE are really bad business people. Because they're chasing chump change whereas making their game legit would attract far more paying customers, and thus more long term revenue than their next expansion bought by a handful of players who still care.

[Autotune]

Originally Posted by Shiftin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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lol

[SyanideGas]

P99 team does a lot better than sony with this shit in my opinion lol.

[Kevlar]

Originally Posted by Aenor [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It's absurd for SOE to cry poverty, that the resources to address hacking are not available. Red99 does it by way of volunteer efforts. At any point, SOE could have formed a committee of active players and given them access to logs to prove who was cheating... not give them power to take any action but allow them to do the grunt work of CONFIRMING what suspicious character actions were the result of hacking. This might have happened if SOE cared about anything but getting their next transaction (i.e. expansion). But this shows why SOE are really bad business people. Because they're chasing chump change whereas making their game legit would attract far more paying customers, and thus more long term revenue than their next expansion bought by a handful of players who still care.

The problem is on live the only people left are the cheaters. WOW polices their shit, if you want to cheat play EQ.

Don't bitch too much about live allowing cheaters, P99 did the same thing when a large portion of their player base was caught hacking. Looked the other way.