noobhaxor wrote:

I speak from experience that hacking at one point was out of control in EQ. I'd say from 2003 to 2007. I don't know what happened in 2008, but they must of had some new management or something. They started reviewing logs and banning hacks frequently. How do I know? I was one of the hackers. I would warp / kill afk macros in instanced zones. I contributed to the distribution of **2warp.cpp source code. The devs at **2 put in anti-warp code to prevent people from using "active" hacks such as warp or zone plugins. I helped remove this code and distribute the said software to people so everyone could use it and not just the "elites".  In 2008 I was banned for good. I am now playing in 2009 and won't touch hacking because they are being reviewed and if you do use hacks you will be banned. In more detail, I was banned while I was in the bazaar afk'd overnight to sell off my loot. I was not hacking at the time and the only explaination was they reviewed the logs and determinded that I hacked.

That being said the title of the topic is "how widespread is hacking now?" and the answer is not a simple yes/no. Active hacking has been reduced dramatically (warping/zoning/ghosting/etc...). However passive hacking is still widespread. Viewing the zone with all NPCs/PCs on the map. Its passive because it is just reading the packets being sent to your client and displaying them. Not changing the mechanics of the game. This can still be detected and banned for doing, but definitally harder to detect than the active hacks.

Now the Histroy of EQ hacks and truths and myths.

-You can see NPC/PC/ and loot the NPCs are have. (FALSE, at no time can you see the loot of NPC chars. Hacking is the manipulation of packets SENT TO YOUR CLIENT. At no point does the loot packets get sent to your client EXCEPT on the time of death and the mob is converted to a corpse. There would be no point to write a sub-routine to pass this info to players while the mob is alive.)

-You can crash an entire zone using hacks and have everything respawn. (TRUE at one time. I belive it was 2004 or 2005 a famous hacker named cronic released code that could do this. It was quickly squashed by SoE because people kept going to PoK and crashing the zone. Funny, but very annoying)

-Ghost hacking (TRUE, people would kill the king of RSS quite frequently in the OOW days and SoE soon started reviewing logs and banning a majority of these people.)

-Items Hacks (True, but never widespead. This was kept within the "elites" circle and never was distributed to the public. The premise of the hack was you could take any item and equip it in any slot on any character. Imagine a monk with a Cleric epic in his foot slot. Again, never got out because it was so easily detected and releasing would draw the ban stick.)

-Speedhacks (True)

-Zone hacks (True, First released in 2002 and was only good for key'd zones like Vex Thal. Revamped in 2004 for flagged zones such as PoP planes.)

-People in High end guilds obviously use hacks. (FALSE, if you worked on a char for 5 years would you risk everything to get to somewhere faster or get that 1 piece of loot. Hell no you wouldn't so let it go. In 1 month period of time a person hacking could level a char to 70 with about 1k AAs in 2004. Now, why would someone risk a char that has been around for years when they could create a dummy new char with very little risk. Answer : They wouldn't)

That is basically the history of hacking in EQ. Many people think I wrote the warp code, but in reality I just modified exsisting code to make it functional in 2003. To set the record strieght there isn't widespread active hacking going on now, but at one time there most definitally was. Today, I am very anti-hacking including passive hacks and will report any offenders I see with detailed explainations on what they are doing.

Depends on the hack... Back when Kunark was barely Month old.. There was a hack that I witnessed that let you see players in zone..including GM's (and there speical hide didnt work) and the enitre zone map...creatures were shown on  the map...direction that they were facing and walking... they were represnted as colored dots.. the color represented the con of the creature to the person using the hack.. and if you clicked on each dot you would see the name and if they had items... and it DID show what it was carrying..... I belive it showed it as something like coin....loot....uncommon loot.....rare loot.... didnt have the name but it showed what it was going to be.. so the person could see if they were going to get common drop or the rare drop.... All of this was done on a sperate computer.. the one I saw was using Linux to run it.... I was very impressed when I saw it at this guys house....he said he months working on it and while I didnt know him personally I did know him through an aquaintence who wanted  me to see it..Kept bragging to me that he could get anything he wanted from this guy.. I knew something was up and agreed to go over to this guys house... when I could  I logged into the game that night..at my home.. never touched his computers.. . and using a petiotion informed the GM's of every character I knew that person had and then my friends characters.. never saw them playing again.... I hate cheaters like that... This game is for fun.... Why the heck does anyone need to cheat.. if you arnt good at the game... go play something else..

I don't mean to go too far off topic but was wondering?

I have been doing a lot of Dains missions lately because there quick, easy and net pretty fast aa's for me atleast.

While LFG, I have notticed 2 players that are allways there waiting for the mission to reset. They never respond to my tells and seem to me right at zone in spot till the timer runs out and they go back into a new mission.

I have been wondering if somehow they have it automated and are cheating. Not only would it be really hard to do dains missions with only 2 players but is it even possible?

Then I witnessed what looked like a third person join them, what was weird was I checked who was in zone and there was me, a lv 85, lv 82 and a lv 1 !!!

What would a lv 1 be doing in Icewell keep? and how would they benifit for this?

That got me thinking about how those 3rd party sites spam me about 100 aa's for $30 something dollars?, maybe there using dains missions for this??

I don't know just wondering?

And that doesn't explain why a lv 1 would be there anyways?

seems fishy to me.

anyways cheating is stupid, why play if your going to cheat? I guess people make real world money cheating but whatever.....

lol