TrueWatch. Devs actually monitor and watch their game and stop/prevent cheating before it reaches the rate where we currently have it on Mangler.
the funny thing is they used to test afk players in various ways even on Agnarr. Sometime around Velious on Agnarr this stopped completely. The new hidden policy is ask them if they are afk and anything else goes. Keywords: This is a Hidden Policy. It's deliberate. As a legit boxer, they used to do the following to me to **** test me on a regular basis on Agnarr: 1) boot all my toons off the server to see if I auto relog. I believe the purpose of this was to see if players auto relog in. it would also probably reveal if any afk scripts had been running that would stop running when auto relogged in? Honestly was never even sure. I just called it GM harassment. 2) kill my pets to see if I auto resummoned them. Yes GMs did this to me plenty. 3) strip buffs off my pets to see if I auto recast them. Seeing a trend here? GMs have the power to do all kinds of things to test these cheaters, and they deliberately do nothing these days. Deliberately. 4) summon toons to see how they behaved. See if they even notice they were summoned. If they are still targeting stuff half way across zones. Not sure again. Another form of GM harassment, but I'm sure it had some purpose. 5) the point is these guys used all this and MORE to test me when I was a LEGIT 6 boxer on Agnarr, and now they just let these clowns run around destroying their game and do nothing. It's insane to watch tbh. Thx for the memo daybreak. Cheating encouraged. Face it guys. games going down the crapper faster than a deuce.
Yeah. GM's used to do a lot of different things (we had more GMs once upon a time). But, the first and foremost thing, is they'd watch you with GM invis on. Then they might do various things, such as send tells, summon characters. I've heard of them doing weird things on live servers, such as boot to character select and summon a single character from the group. I've never heard of it being done on TLPs, though. I remember one day when me and a few of friends were running a dungeon for several hours one weekend. We were all at my house chilling all weekend, drinking and running this one same dungeon over and over. Somewhere in 2006-2007 when I was younger and childfree haha, but those days are all blurred and a little hazy lol. Either way, I guess after like 12 hours of us doing this same dungeon someone reported us or something. Anyhow, a GM starts sending us tells at random. We explained what we were doing and why and he went on to "warn" us about using automation programs to run dungeons. We weren't... but if we had been? Basically would have gotten away with it because all he did was send us tells and tell us if we're using hacks to "stop". We went on to do another 5 hours that night before passing out. I don't know if GMs can pop into instanced dungeons, but had he bothered, he'd have seen 6 characters controlled by 4 very drunk people making a total blunder of the instance, although we somehow managed to beat it every time. Hahaha. Anyhow, I've never had much faith in GMs ability to really catch automation because of this single instance where I had interactions with a GM over perceived automation. He didn't bother us outside of sending tells. But, it's my understanding that, for the most part, GMs are limited in how they can prove someone is using programs or not anyhow, and they have to be able to prove it otherwise they can inadvertently ban innocent people. Unattended gameplay versus attended (with the use of programs), as long as the person can react and respond to a GM bothering them in a timely manner, typically means they won't get into trouble. Unlike some things people used to us (and some still being used) such as; no-delay, warping, summoning, etc because they are server-side and can be seen in the game logs on the server itself.
Experienced pretty much everything that trollmind mentioned on Phinigel, minus the killing of the pet. I was always sad the GM/Guide never responded or dropped GM Invis when I started talking to them in /say and /shout.
I remember on The Rathe, where we had a very active GM crew, if there was an issue the GM would frequently summon the player to a special room for interview. As I remember, the GM's frequently just used a "God" mode where they could do virtually anything.
