Hackers on P99
 

Its been a while since last time I logged in, and always loved the idea of classic EQ. However, when you guys first launched there was quite a few hackers running MQ2 with speed hacks and the such. Did you guys ban and figure out a way to stop them? I know SoE never has cared to ban these users, but if you guys are actively hunting them down, and watching for this, I would love to play in a true classic EQ environment.

Thanks for the response,
Zeak

You will find these servers pretty heavily policed. You fart and they will hear it. They are quick to drop the ban hammer on turds cheating or causing problems.

Asher

Good to hear, the one reason I don't play on EQ's progression servers is because of all the hacking and boxing.

Neither boxing nor hacking are tolerated here.

I wont question you on the boxing on the progression severs but what are you talking about with hacking? I played on the Fippy server day one till shutdown and there was no hacking going on. Exploits, sure but I recall no hacking.

Macroquest 2 users are rampant on EQ Live servers, thats no secret. As far as "active" hacking (warping, zoning, speed hacks, etc...) there is less but i'd say a good 20%+ of the population using this. Now using "passive" out of the box MQ2 there is quite a bit more of that going on, probably around 40% of the population.

From my understanding project1999 looks for both types of hackers and has even caught quite a few, which is a lot more than I can say for the incompetient SoE team.

Hacking; how to ruin the fun of any game.

Amelinda doesn't like farts...

Nagash/Petitpas

Has less to do with their competency and more to do with priorities. Finding ways to ban their paying subscribers is not on the top of that list.

In fact, back in June of 2006 (or was it 2007?), one of the coders on EQLive put a system into the client to track calls to certain functions that were also hooked into by macroquest. By incrementing a variable once right before every call to that function, and also incrementing a second variable inside of that function, and comparing those variables, one could tell if those variables ever differed that an external hook was in place. This then triggered the client to send a special packet to the server which flagged your account (but didn't take any action) for third party programs.

Due to the overwhelming number of accounts that were flagged by this, SOE decided not to take any action against the flagged accounts.

That double variable thing is an interesting way to try to catch ackers, but if you know about it it wouldn't be too hard to find the offsets and keep them the same and/or block the packet from being sent or something.

Flagged accounts got even shittier customer service. I know a friend of a friend of a friend (jk I just read somewhere) that someone who got their account stolen or something like that received no help from the GMs for having the acking soul mark.


edit: is that ackin packet sent to eqemu worldserver on SoF+ etc clients?