Project Quarm - 1 Box Planes of Power

[Seducio]

Presentism is seeing the past through the lens of today. Not realizing these very conversations are one of the feedback mechanisms devs use to get in touch and create a better experience over time. P99 has had 15 years to become what it is.

In that time P99 has created a moat around its model compared with other Emu via its enforcement of one box and Anti Cheat. Which is business parlance for a barrier to entry. Other Emu have struggled to compete because of Multi-Boxing choices or poor CSR commitments.

As p99 evolved the p99 player bases expectation also evolved. Quarm is up against quite a bit since p99 has created a high end Old school EQ experience. Satisfying perfectionists might not be the best use of dev time. If the Quarm experience keeps improving over time it'll be much more popular in year 2 and year 3 then at the beginning. Almost like a You Tube channel that grows slow.

[Lune]

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

Presentism is seeing the past through the lens of today. Not realizing these very conversations are one of the feedback mechanisms devs use to get in touch and create a better experience over time. P99 has had 15 years to become what it is.

In that time P99 has created a moat around its model compared with other Emu via its enforcement of one box and Anti Cheat. Which is business parlance for a barrier to entry. Other Emu have struggled to compete because of Multi-Boxing choices or poor CSR commitments.

As p99 evolved the p99 player bases expectation also evolved. Quarm is up against quite a bit since p99 has created a high end Old school EQ experience. Satisfying perfectionists might not be the best use of dev time. If the Quarm experience keeps improving over time it'll be much more popular in year 2 and year 3 then at the beginning. Almost like a You Tube channel that grows slow.

I'd say this is similar to Secrets' point in the other thread with the added conclusion that in total people on P99 have been tolerant of a lot of ups and downs and kept playing. Few if any of those 'downs' had anything to do with Rogean, Nirgon & crew... rather their underlings.

Look how many people play on TLP's where you can pay real money for experience potions and shit, and buy items with krono. Quarm could do a lot worse. With Oakwynd not being the world's most popular TLP sometimes I wonder what's going to happen if Quarm is 'the' new EQ box. iirc there is a PoP-locked TLP, but that particular server has the burden of yearly TLP releases chipping away at its player base, in addition to the microtransactions and monthly fee. An emu is forever

Look what happened to Nostalrius and every other blockbuster wow pserver

[Trexller]

Yeah you never hear anyone going, "Man I miss depths of darkhollow" or "The new kurns tower is better than the old one" or "It was great killing a level 95 Fippy Darkpaw"

don't even get me started on the Freeport revamp...

PoP was like the last expansion that people get nostalgic about.

[Seducio]

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

Few if any of those 'downs' had anything to do with Rogean, Nirgon & crew... rather their underlings.

You get it. I think you may be referring to Nilbog though.

[Lune]

Yes lol. typo

[Ekco]

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

Yeah you never hear anyone going, "Man I miss depths of darkhollow"

dodh was one of the better xpacs, big bad was mayong and the talking items with level progression was kewl.

[tristantio]

Anti-cheat only catches the true boneheads, as it's a technical problem to reliably catch it.

From the project itself:

"ShowEQ or SEQ for short is a program designed to decode the EverQuest data stream and display that information on another computer running the Linux OS in real time. "

No amount of anti-cheat running on a Windows machine (or eqgame.dll host) is going to be able to tell a Linux machine on the same network is running ShowEQ if the network is properly setup - if ShowEQ was listening on a port as a server (I don't think it is) - MAYBE an anti-cheat could do extremely intrusive network port scanning to see if someone's network had this open - but again, a simple firewall rule would totally shut that down.

From what I understand, the anti-cheat's in the past (across various services) are pretty rudimentary (yet very privacy invading) - looking at running process names, scanning browser tab names, scanning file names (maybe the arms-race between anti-cheat and cheaters had a gap closed if they ever scanned for md5sums instead of names, since the bonehead+1 cheaters will at least rename the program).

It's like the p99 box rule - 1 box is the rule, and there are client side measures (sending your PC hostname to p99), server side measures (checking IP), and GM/manual measures (reporting) - yet all 3 are trivially circumvented if someone wants to box by running multiple machines on VPNs (virtual or otherwise) and never having the boxed characters in the same zones as each other.

I agree with Secrets - being overly focused on it is not really productive - infinitely so on the client side checks - that's why on the other thread, I suggest only analysis of behavior in an automated fashion, would catch this - it'd also be capable of catching boxers based on overlapping play time frames. If the server recorded all start/end activity periods for all characters, and noticed tight correlations like "these 3 characters are ALWAYS online at the same time windows for months straight - 3x ban" - vs the simpler checks of only catching IP exemptions that are stupid enough to do the same hostname+same IP at the same time.

Any measure to stop something like SEQ which is FOSS anyways is only temporary - billion dollar companies create DRM that gets circumvented by a 14 year old in their free time - no server to client encryption p99/Quarm/other p-servers push out there is anything more than a temporary blocker.

[Rager and Quitter]

I definitely see where Loramin is coming from. I'm not a cheater, never been a cheater, and never will cheat on anything, as for me it kills the fun (only thing I ever cheated on was D2 solo games with the game editor, and Starcraft 1 with built in codes).

The thing that sucks is that people will cheat. It's inevitable because some people are trash and they'll just do it, and I think you just can't avoid it or prevent it past reasonable measures. Not to mention Secrets, et al have a finite amount of time to spend developing the server, and making sure it works with as few bugs as possible, server stability, etc takes priority over more stringent anti-cheat than already exists. It would be nice if we could do all the things all the time, but alas.

I appreciate the effort on the server as it takes me no more effort than to simply log in and play. I often feel guilty for having such a good time reliving old EQ days for free (although I have donated to the server in the past) without any effort on my part, so I try to give as much grace as I can, and I'm super excited to play again.

If only we could burn cheaters characters in the middle of PoK before their bans.

[aussenseiter]

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

I often feel guilty for having such a good time reliving old EQ days for free

If only we could burn cheaters characters in the middle of PoK before their bans.

Party on their corpse as the rot timer expires when they get banned. 🥳🎉

[Trexller]

Why not keep a public list of players who are perma-banned for cheating or whatever reason

so that the community can name and shame