Bots, auto afkers on camps, Rules regarding.

Do they really not have the manpower or do they not have the tools and training?

Because how many times have we heard these autofarmers "respond to tells" but they don't get banned? Absolutely anyone who plays EQ for a year can see that these players are being automated. Yet, when the GM or guide or whatever goes to investigate, their handbook says "Send a tell, do they respond?" And if they respond the GM does nothing.

But the GM did their job as they were told to. That's the problem we have now.

if someone knows they exact mobs they want to target , they can make in game social macro's to keep checking for target. like /tar a chest.... etc.

just hypothetically speaking using in game socials one could do this

line #1 /pause 20, /tar a snake
line #2 /pause 10, /pet attack
line #3 /pause 15, /pet attack off
line #4 /pause 10, /pet regroup
line #5 /pet attack
in theory that social would target a mob , make pet go attack it , turn off attack make the pet run back then attack the mob again at camp

The GM's probably have a backlog of so many tickets they have to go through in a day for all of Daybreak's games. If you have ever worked in customer service and had to deal with a huge amount of tickets you don't spend long on one ticket. They are probably told by management to limit their time investigating these types of issues and are graded on how many tickets they "resolve". Customer service metrics.

Also, these programmers making these hacking tools probably have twice the programming experience than the current young EQ programmers. They also know the game inside and out from a code view point. EQ puts out something to catch them and they figure it out and circumvent detection. It's a cat and mouse game and it has been this way for a long time now. I doubt they'll ever get rid of these hacking tools unless they completely rewrite their server/client architecture where sniffing traffic between the client and the game servers isn't possible and reading the clients memory.

The two are related. There are customer service policies in place based on the manpower they have available. The customer service policies obviously do not allow for time to be spent on thorough investigations, because they would not be able to do so with their current staffing levels and still meet their other customer service goals. Therefore there is no need to train GM staff to do thorough investigations, because even if they had the knowledge, they would not have the time. I guarantee the GM staff is not sitting around with nothing to do twiddling their thumbs, wishing they could investigate cheaters but not knowing how.

If you propose they have the training or need no further training then why did they give out 100k pp for missing spells in kunark?

Not sure how these guys are circumventing the amazing ways GM's catch these guys.

"Hey you afk farming?"

3 minutes later after they are made aware of the GM tell and get back to their computer

"No"

"OK have a nice day"

Apples and oranges. I did not say they have adequate training to appropriately handle any and every issue that might arise on TLP's. In fact, the nature of the game would make that virtually impossible no matter how much training they are given.

It really does feel like this is how it goes. I don't know if the GMs checking have no common sense, a script they are mandated to follow, or just don't care. Something needs to change. I'm just glad I don't play on Selo or Mangler.

This is not what the community wants to hear or acknowledge, but its the honest truth.

I'd like to add that the folks making tools to cheat are probably no more or less experienced than DBG software developers, but please refer back to my post a few weeks ago in this very thread. I'd be willing to bet that at DBG this type of issue is certainly considered 'technical debt'. If it's tech debt, its theoretically last on the list to tackle between quarters and if DBG is like any other software company, then its being pushed between quarterly workloads as the debt continues accumulate. This happens because there just aren't enough hours in the day.

In short, Daybreak would need dedicated developer resources dedicated to fully tackle this technical debt and that's just not monetarily plausible right now for a Time-Locked Progression server.