Originally Posted by Triode (Post 2941070)

Not a defender of RMT by any means, but it is inaccurate to suggest it isn't classic. EQ items were being ebayed from shortly after launch, leading to the various articles and academic papers about how the EQ economy was situated somewhere between Bulgaria and Russia in terms of GDP - e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/1899420.stm Anecdotally, I met a guy at a party at U of M in 2001 who claimed to have made >$100k ebaying fbss' in the early days when he could charge $3k a pop. Probably an empty boast but not impossible...

Then, as I understand it, the plat to dollar conversion plummeted after the whole rog dev/fake banker in befallen scandal. https://www.takproject.net/forums/in...befallen.4337/

Prohibiting RMT is definitely better for the game, but there are those moments when I think about the time I spend farming guards for my fungi as contrasted with my billable rate in the real world. I have to take a second and remind myself that I actually enjoyed smashing guards, or the napkin math would be seriously depressing.

Originally Posted by azxten (Post 2941118)

My one criticism is a certain core membership of certain guilds everyone generally hates here who makes the play style tedious and not fun has openly admitted cheating in their own guild chat and been caught for cheating in the past with lax enforcement for those individuals. It's pretty fucking annoying that I've been banned for using MQ2 for literally 2 seconds to test something at level 1 when I first started here and then banned at level 20+ but this group gets caught and only deleveled because "too many people were cheating." I just tested an exploit to confirm it doesn't work and got banned months later but some of these people are cheating to win raid mobs and their accounts were left intact. Specifically referring to the huge ban wave awhile back where multiple guilds were caught cheating. Every single person should have been banned from that but since it was the "important" players they all essentially got a warning and went on to continue shitting all over the casual players with their accumulated cheat loot spread across dozens of accounts. Oh well, no one is perfect, but to the staff's credit they've done a better than average job.

Originally Posted by azxten (Post 2941118)

Story time about EQ cheats and RMT?

I'm one of the people who regularly contributed to MQ2 and knew all the original EQ cheaters. Lax, dkaa, etc. There was no befallen banker. The plat surge was an exploit that let you buy items from vendors for lower prices. Specifically there was like a 500k plat mount item or something, that was the item used to buy and resell for max profit. The open source eqemulator code has a check for this specific exploit. Live EverQuest had literally zero effort put in to stopping cheaters.

RMT was huge back in classic. As a degenerate kid I even exploited things beyond the game. You used to be able to leave the "change password" form open for an account for as long as you wanted. You could even just save the page and submit the form later to change a password even if the account holder had changed it to something else. As long as you saved a specific verification token from before the password change you could change it back whenever. I'd sell accounts and steal them back and resell them.

Here is a funny story, I once cybered with a guy and convinced him to let me use his account. I stole all his equipment and traded the stripped level 50 for a level 20 warrior. Then moved the equipment I stole to the warrior. His account and my account got banned but not the level 20 warrior. The plat I got from that caused me to meet the girl I lost my virginity to in real life. I was an EQ pimp and even later learned that pimps in real life who don't have a girl will pretend to be a girl to run scams on guys.

That was kind of how I started. By the end of things we had basically had more power than the GMs. I was a top level member in "Forever Hacking." One of my novel cheats was "metal mario" so you could walk underwater.

I used this cheat combined with porting to every mob in the zone and a /circle macro to run in a perfect circle and /twist to twist bard songs to fully automate AE kiting entire zones underwater. People would be asking in chat if the zone was broken and if they should petition because no mobs were around. I could get a Bard from 1-60 in about 36 hours and sell the account for $500.

We could use the GM kill command, warp to any zone, etc. I never once got banned in EQ for any kind of actual cheating of the game client. They were really just not even looking and I believe had zero methods at the time to even determine if cheats were happening like monitoring surges in plat, etc.

Fair warning for everyone here. The EQEmulator code is way beyond what was used in EQ Live. Server admins here have logs of everything like it should have been on live. Logging suspicious activities and "impossible" outcomes is way more effective at catching cheaters than any kind of client side anti-cheat. Things are pretty good here on P99 in terms of cheaters.

My one criticism is a certain core membership of certain guilds everyone generally hates here who makes the play style tedious and not fun has openly admitted cheating in their own guild chat and been caught for cheating in the past with lax enforcement for those individuals. It's pretty fucking annoying that I've been banned for using MQ2 for literally 2 seconds to test something at level 1 when I first started here and then banned at level 20+ but this group gets caught and only deleveled because "too many people were cheating." I just tested an exploit to confirm it doesn't work and got banned months later but some of these people are cheating to win raid mobs and their accounts were left intact. Specifically referring to the huge ban wave awhile back where multiple guilds were caught cheating. Every single person should have been banned from that but since it was the "important" players they all essentially got a warning and went on to continue shitting all over the casual players with their accumulated cheat loot spread across dozens of accounts. Oh well, no one is perfect, but to the staff's credit they've done a better than average job.

Originally Posted by azxten (Post 2941132)

I mean do you really want to start naming names? I still have logs and screenshots of admitting cheat usage in Forsaken which led to Aftermath.

A certain group of players which are like a cancer to everyone else and who stops by to respond to that accusation?

Everyone knows what I'm talking about. It's no secret. How many of the raid capable guild leaders on P99 cheated with MQ2? Pretty much every single one? How often are cheats being used today in raiding?

This topic is Forbidden.

Originally Posted by azxten (Post 2941132)

I mean do you really want to start naming names?