The Elephant in the room

I wonder which server will be next. Pass the popcorn please.

And if they were cheating I am grateful they are gone. If they weren't cheating there is a process for them to appeal the action.

If they've tested it and it works without false positives, hopefully all of them.

I know I've run into my share of cheaters on Bristle. Tossing them a rez now and then to help them out was fun.

Are you on bertox?
No?

Then you have no idea what the server is like before, during , or after the suspensions.

My personal observations, as someone who plays on the server ... looking at the bazaar, general chat, my guild population, and moving through the current zones, so as someone who has a clue here are some data points.

Then general chats would regularly be full 400 + 250 in general1 - During the suspension it was down to 300 - 350. This weekend it broke 400.

The bazar regularly had 250-300 traders. It is down to under 200.

Both of those numbers aren't what really hurts though.

The real damage though is to the raiding / grouping. Before the suspensions my guild had a fairly healthy weekend grouping/progression. The last 2-3 weeks there are maybe 5 people total.

If I had to guess base our raid force both in my guild, and the open alliance raids, I think roughly 25% - 33% of the active population was suspended. Of those who were suspending about half of them chose to retire from the game.

The 5-10% of the 'bad actors' of course bounced right back.

I did not say they were not cheating. I clearly said they are people who were using M Q to box their characters.

Boxing their characters does not mean they were AFK XP'ing.

Lumping them all together and calling them 'dirty cheaters' is what I take offense to.

The long term fix for people using M Q to box is to fix the reason people fix.

One of the reason people box using that software is due to the way EQ is built around needing a group of people to do the progression/missions. Just about everything other than TS's so not solo friendly.

Most people are not willing to spend more than 15-20 min LFG before they say F it and log. So its not suppressing that many turn to boxing. At first by hand, then using automation.

Want to fix the problem?

A - Make more content soloable
B - Make the content more rewarding to go back and do for the 5th, 10th, 20th time.
C - Make it easier for people to get connected to do content.

For all the things I dislike about WoW, one of the things they got right was the idea of queuing up for missions across servers.

It has been said by devs that I-s-b is ok so long as you are not afk. It does not provide any automation.It is basically a a key broadcast program. Nothing that i-s-b does cannot be done simply by alt-tabbing between clients.

Correction - they said as long as you don’t modify the client, then it’s fine. You can modify parts of Windows as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with EQ. The only to make sure that’s the case is write the code yourself.

and I-S-B does nothing to any of EQs code.

I think the way forward would be to design content without a cash shop / Krono solution to it.

We don’t know that for sure. I S B use to have automation component to it. That has since been removed, but we don’t no for sure.

So your responses are based on defending M Q?

You know better. You even admit, "I did not say they were not cheating."

Play the game like everyone else.

I hope that the mods won't delete this thread. That way, the cheaters on the other servers will see the warning in time.
Who knows? maybe uninstalling M Q now, might save them from the next ban-wave.
It might not be too late to come clean.

Surely, playing without M Q, is better than not playing at all.

As mentioned above, I would also like to add that botters/exploiters hurt clean, innocent players by taking good camps (Type 5/Type 7 augs). Do you ever see botters at the gnomish pirates in CoV Western Wastes? Heck no.

Darkpaw seems to have also adopted a strict policy against training (the old counter to botting). Do "good people" want to DPS race a botter and get their reputation blasted on their server's General Chat? Good people have no recourse. Hence, Darkpaw being more proactive against M Q.

Players who play by the rules suffer from factors such as time management and fatigue. M Q would be equivalent to allowing extra players or extra reserve players in any sport.

You are defending the wrong people.

What ban.

This is the first I have heard of any mass suspensions.


I have a few accounts and I don't use anything.. Only cheat I use is Maps.


I am sorry OP that you feel the need for symphony due to the lack of population... I feel this is also a blame on in game support when I spend so much time in the past few years reporting, screenshots, petitioning for these type of robot players.

It sucks that population is taken a toll due to this activity you mention OP... aka the reaction of game management on they topic.
For what it is worth ( you didn't get the ban so you must not be that bad ) I trully feel for ya.
I have moved servers because of the server I was on became a plat farm / krono farm dead game play type of server.
A lot of players turned into uber snobs controlling situations on the server with power they worked hard by farming using 3rd party programs.
It ruined the good game EQ was.

So I know how it sucks.

Daybreak never really truely addresses what IS allowed to the forums when threads come up about program players. Daybreak stay clear of answers and the threads get closed eventually from good vs evil comments.

In my personal petitions, I have been told no programs are allowed, yet still these players still play.

From my point of view (not using programs to play), I believe program players AND the in-game support are to blame, because GM's allowed it to continue...

I have several screenshots of my petitions that got nowhere.

I am sorry OP...I feel for ya. I know alt tabbing sucks boxing, I do it and I am not good at it. But I won't use programs to play. No fun in learing from forums on what program to use or how to use it, rather bug friends and people in game on how to play my class well.

My advice, change servers. Be good.

This thread is pure gold. Count me in for the next 20 pages.

Tappin is a registered RG user, watching him call everything else cheats to try and justify his own cheating is cute.

the end of COVideltaSummer™ can't come too soon

I don't box toons, manually or otherwise. I only have one 19 year-old gold account, and play on a single screen. I also play on Bertoxx which has been half dead for about a decade.

The players I know who do run 3rd party boxing programs, started doing so as a work-around to the issues associated with a low population server. I guess they should have just quit the game and gone to another instead. They would have saved a lot of money for sure. There's not much incentive to keep playing EQ, when you log in hoping to progress your toon, and there are limited group opportunities available for the harder things you need. But they found another way, and obviously enjoyed playing that way. Immensely.

Yes, those 3rd party programs are against the ToS, but it's not so black and white as that. These programs have been overlooked--and therefore allowed, for a very long time. The recent crackdown was a bit late, and I feel it was handled badly. It appears to have only happened on the Bertoxx server? Was this just a test to see how bad it will be IF they bring the boxing hammer down server-wide? Well the population of Bertoxx appears to be lower than ever, so now they have their answer.

Things might have been different if instead of sudden 7 day Suspensions, ALL players on ALL servers were given notice to stop using those programs, or else.

And not all players' suspensions were lifted after 7 days. When they petitioned, they had to provide the name of the 3rd party program they were using, before they could log back in. Many did so and logged back in, only to cancel ALL of their accounts and move on.

Those of you chiming in from the lands of milk and honey can gloat all you want, but this is our reality elsewhere, in this game we ALL pay the same premium as you to play.

So the justification of using illegal 3rd party apps was because half of the Bertoxxulous population, or 100s of players, were not able to get groups together?

Half of the server...
100s of players...
Couldn't find a group.

/Edited to remove a redundant sentence.