Project Quarm - 1 Box Planes of Power

[Evia]

Originally Posted by Fireblade7 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Stupid question. As a casual, am I going to care if people use showeq? I can’t see that it would affect my day to day.

And also, do I need to install Everquest again and use one for p99 and one for this project?

Thanks all

ShowEQ in a general sense is a 3rd party app that gives zone information like if a named mob is up ect.
At its best it makes everyone a ranger tracker
At its worst it warps ppl around the map

[loramin]

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

At its best it makes everyone a ranger tracker

Better than a ranger: ShowEQ has infinite range, and tells you what the mob is wielding, so you can zone in and instantly know if it's up, where, and whether it spawned with the sword you want.

As for the warping, I think Secrets' plan is to rely on human GMs and player reporting, ie. how Live EQ dealt with it, but I'm ... skeptical of that plan.

It might have worked with an army of paid live GMs, but P99 has shown the limits of relying on a much smaller, all volunteer GM team, and that's with anti-cheat code!

I suspect the egregious cheaters, like the guy who warps during prime playtime hours to a just-spawned Ancient Cyclops in SRo, will likely get reported and caught. The more subtle cheaters though, like the guy only warps when no one is around to see him, will last a lot longer, and as long as they last they'll keep denying legit players access to items.

And the guy who never warps, he just happens to make a beeline to the best named in random zones? I just don't see the staff having the bandwidth to sit and watch all the players for that sort of behavior, and it'd be almost impossible for players to prove, so I expect that form of cheating to be rampant on Quarm.

[Lune]

You'd have to have some server-side anti-cheat detection code with some level of automation like that suggested by Tristantio in the other thread:

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

Cecily sighting!

For anti-cheat - maybe it has been done, or maybe it wasn't shown to be feasible, but I don't understand why some sort of statistical analysis isn't done server side to detect it.

If you had an eventing system (think Erlang for high throughput) getting a copy of each server event passing through it, and noting anomalies (player x/y all of a sudden jumping to a very different value in a single tick or time window - narrow it based on class, so if a class has shadow step, second checks are done), I think you could have server side warp detection without adding a bunch of side-concerns into the existing server client (it'd run on it's own box).

Similarly, for mob spawns - anytime a named mob spawns, snapshot the loc of all player's in zone (their last packet), then run a check when it gets engaged - if the time between player starting location, mob spawn and mob engagement were all indicative of a "beeline" - flag the account - build up too many flags - enact secondary measures - invisible GM or auto-ban (no player /report ever needed).

Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and try to get a local setup + proof of concept for this (if it hasn't already been done anywhere?)

And at that point, why not just have client-side anti-cheat like P99 does?

[Rager and Quitter]

I didn't realize ShowEQ was a thing until I was running in the middle of Overthere on my druid the one time i decided to try Red99 and a gnome wizard popped right under me and 1 shot me. I asked him how he found me in the middle of nowhere OT, and he said "Oh, I was bound right there." And I didn't know any better until someone mentioned people port around with a program.

What benefit is there to allowing such a program at all? Why not just give every class tracking if such 3rd party programs are allowed? Why not just give all players access to GM commands with the same functionality as ShowEQ?

[Evia]

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

What benefit is there to allowing such a program at all? Why not just give every class tracking if such 3rd party programs are allowed? Why not just give all players access to GM commands with the same functionality as ShowEQ?

and now you've stumbled onto my concern

having something like this running rampant can quickly make a legit server feel like those cheap GM summon item servers.

[Trexller]

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

cheap GM summon item servers.

which servers are those? preferably using titanium client

would be fun to goof around with # commands

[mccraw5]

I'm still confused if this is MAC only or will it be on Windows PC as well?

[Evia]

Originally Posted by mccraw5 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm still confused if this is MAC only or will it be on Windows PC as well?

It was originally Mac only, but takp has made a windows version. So there is both a Mac client and Windows one.

[mccraw5]

Thank you for the response. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Caillou]

Don't see this working out that well unless you can stop MQ from being trivial to use.